Travel photography gets much more interesting once you stop looking for the perfectly empty beach. The images that stay with me are usually the ones that reveal something less obvious: how people actually live, what a landscape is asking us to protect, or why an overlooked corner deserves our attention.
That is also good news for anyone hoping to build photography into paid creative work. You do not necessarily need to photograph more destinations than everyone else; you need a point of view people can recognize, trust, and eventually hire. These four photographers offer very different—and very useful—examples of how that can work.
1. Lola Akinmade Åkerström
Lola Akinmade Åkerström photographs travel through culture, tradition, food, and everyday life rather than treating local people as scenery. The Nigerian-born, Sweden-based photographer and author has worked across more than 70 countries, and her images have appeared in outlets including National Geographic, the BBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Travel + Leisure.
What makes her work especially relevant now is the intention behind it. Åkerström has described her travel portraits as a way of telling people “I see you,” and Hasselblad notes that part of her mission has been increasing the visibility of Black women in travel photography.
For emerging photographers, that is a valuable creative exercise: before photographing someone, ask what your image is saying about them. A technically beautiful portrait can still feel shallow if the subject exists only to make a destination look exotic.
Åkerström is also a genuine creative entrepreneur. She runs Geotraveler Media, co-founded the NordicTB travel marketing collective and Local Purse, and operates an online academy—proof that photography expertise can become the foundation for several complementary income streams rather than a single type of assignment.
2. Ami Vitale
Ami Vitale's career shows what happens when a photographer stops treating place, people, and nature as separate subjects. The National Geographic Explorer at Large has worked in more than 100 countries, beginning in conflict zones before increasingly focusing on the links between environmental pressure, wildlife, communities, and conservation.
Her work is a useful reminder that a strong travel photograph does not always need to say, “Come here.” Sometimes it can ask, “What is happening here—and why should you care?”
Vitale has received six World Press Photo awards and founded Vital Impacts, a nonprofit using visual storytelling to support conservation and emerging environmental storytellers. According to her official biography, the organization has raised more than $5 million for conservation projects.
The practical lesson is to build stories rather than collect isolated hero shots. If you are documenting a coastal town, for example, photograph the beautiful harbor—but also the fishing economy, residents, wildlife, changing shoreline, and small details that explain how that place functions.
3. Nori Jemil
UK-based photographer Nori Jemil works across travel, landscape, and location photography, with published work spanning magazines, books, and guides. She has also built another valuable layer into her career: teaching photography, including leading trips and presenting seminars for travel and media organizations.
That combination deserves more attention from anyone imagining photography as a side business. Knowing how to make a strong image is one skill; being able to explain why it works can create opportunities in workshops, tours, education, writing, talks, and digital products.
I find this especially useful for newer photographers who think they need an enormous social audience before their knowledge has value. You may be able to start much smaller: teach smartphone composition locally, lead a beginner photo walk, create a destination shooting guide, or help a small business build a more useful image library.
The smart move is to teach only what you genuinely know well. Credibility grows faster when your offer is specific—“better travel portraits in natural light” is much stronger than positioning yourself as an expert in every kind of photography after six months with a camera.
4. Chris Burkard
Chris Burkard is known for travel, surf, outdoor, and adventure photography that places people inside vast, often rugged landscapes. His official biography describes a focus on remote and offbeat environments, with the human figure frequently appearing small against nature rather than dominating it.
That visual decision does more than create dramatic scale. It gives the destination a personality of its own—and offers a useful alternative to the familiar travel formula where the creator is always the largest, brightest object in the picture.
Burkard's career also shows how a recognizable visual identity can support a wider business. His California-based operation includes a full-service production studio, while his work has expanded into commercial campaigns, books, education, speaking, licensing, product collaborations, and photography workshops.
The lesson is not to copy his cold-water adventures. It is to notice the business architecture: one strong creative point of view, several ways for that expertise to earn.
What These Careers Reveal About the Future of Travel Photography
The common thread is not equipment. Each photographer has developed a recognizable reason for making images: cultural dignity, conservation, education, or the relationship between people and wild landscapes.
That matters commercially because “I take beautiful travel photos” is becoming an increasingly difficult position to differentiate. A sharper proposition could be far more useful: perhaps you document accessible travel, disappearing crafts, women-led hospitality businesses, train journeys, overlooked neighborhoods, regenerative tourism, or family life across cultures.
Try building your portfolio around a sentence rather than a destination list. If you can complete “I photograph travel to help people see…” in a way that feels specific to you, you are already closer to a distinctive body of work.
Build the Opportunity Around the Photograph
A photography career may involve client assignments, but those assignments do not have to be the entire financial model. The photographers above demonstrate how visual expertise can connect naturally with adjacent work such as writing, licensing, workshops, books, speaking, consulting, conservation projects, branded production, and education.
That is a smarter way to evaluate the opportunity. Instead of asking, “Can I make money selling travel photographs?” ask, “What valuable problems can my photography skills help people, publications, destinations, organizations, or brands solve?”
A tourism business may need a content library. A traveler may want a workshop. A publisher needs a visual story. A conservation organization needs imagery that makes an issue understandable. The camera may be the starting tool; the value is what you know how to communicate with it.
Wealth Tips
Build one tightly focused portfolio page. Create 12–20 images around a specific subject or point of view instead of displaying every good photograph you have ever taken.
Create one adjacent income offer. Test a photo walk, mini workshop, print collection, licensing package, or small-business content session before investing in a complicated creative business.
Track what clients can actually license. Keep filenames, captions, locations, dates, releases, and high-resolution originals organized from day one; an unfindable photograph is difficult to monetize.
Pitch stories, not free vacations. Approach publications and tourism businesses with a clear visual concept, deliverables, audience value, and usage terms rather than simply asking to visit a destination.
Invest in access before unnecessary gear. A local guide, interpreter, research day, workshop, or extra time in one place could improve your work more than another piece of equipment.
A Better View Can Become Your Competitive Advantage
The most exciting shift in travel photography is not another editing style or camera upgrade. It is the growing realization that the person behind the lens has something valuable to contribute: judgment, curiosity, cultural awareness, research, relationships, and an individual way of interpreting place.
Åkerström, Vitale, Jemil, and Burkard built distinctly different careers because they did not all try to make the same photograph. For anyone hoping to turn travel photography into serious creative work, that may be the most financially useful lesson of all: your point of view is not decoration around the skill—it can become the reason someone chooses you.
Joseph is a labor economist turned financial journalist who specializes in the gig economy, platform work, and the future of employment. He translates complex market data into actionable insights—tracking which sectors are hiring, what skills are in demand, how policy changes affect independent workers, and where opportunities are expanding.