Planning and Research for the Trip Ahead – Continued (#4)

This is the fourth article in a series about Planning and Researching for photography on future travels.  I have put links to the previous articles at the bottom of this one.

In the previous post I talked about checking the weather sites to see when the best time is to go on your trip, if it isn’t already planned, but there are other places you might want to check to determine when is the best time to go also.

Perhaps you’re looking for the best dates to get the Tulips in the Pacific Northwest or even in Holland, or the best dates to get the bluebells in Texas.  You could guess, but sometimes the very best dates are just a week or so in length.  For example, if you go to the Pacific Northwest on the very best dates for the Tulips you may have missed the Daffodils and vice versa.  So how do you find out?  Of course if you know someone who lives there you could ask them, but it’s likely that you do not, so what’s the next best option?  You probably guessed that it is the Internet.  Sites like Flickr and 500PX have great search capabilities and there are plenty of photographers that post there that tag their photos so you can find them.  The other nice thing about some of these sites is that they pull the date that the photo was taken right off of the EXIF data and post them with the photo.  Be cautious though, because sometimes that data is not there and you’re looking at the “posted” date instead of the “image creation” date.  If you see a date on one photo that contradicts several others or common sense, then ignore that date and look at others.  You can also search for photos of the places you will be visiting on Facebook and Instagram, but unless the person posting the image is kind enough to put the date in the description, which is very rare, you won’t get the date of the photo off those sites.



But what if the dates are already planned and you can’t alter them.  You can still perform the searches at the sites above and see some of the photos others have taken to give you an idea of some of the places you want to get to.  Just for fun, go to Flickr and go to the search box and type in “Pacific Northwest Spring” or “Yellowstone January” to give you some ideas.  Remember, you still have to use your internal brain filter, but these should give you some great ideas of what is going to be available to you.




  Balloon Fests usually last about three days




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