Photos are a very important part of any traveling adventure. With today’s digital cameras and even many cell phones you can take beautiful pictures. My focus today is to say take lots of pictures! Every time you look at them it will bring back a memory of the places you have been.

I also recommend including you and the people you are traveling with in the pictures. As the “camera” person you are often left out of pictures, so be sure to stop and ask some one to take your picture. No matter what country or place we are, like the Great Wall of China, and even not speaking the language, we have never had a problem finding someone willing to snap a couple of quick pictures. And I mean pictures – plural. If it is an important shot, we always take two.

The picture with this blog has a story that we will remember because of it. Tom and I were eating on the patio of a small hidden away restaurant in Prague, Czech Republic. As we sat there people were constantly coming by and going to this little shop next door. As you can see in the picture there was a full size suit of armor at the entrance that everyone stopped to have his or her picture taken with.

The shop turned out to have a lot of interesting items. We actually went back to it a couple of times. We ended up buying several souvenirs there. I got a small little dragon, that I have at home, that I enjoy looking at every day.

The reason I say include yourself and the person or people you are with is that you can get a picture of just about anywhere now on the Internet, but only you can take pictures of you in that same place. It will have so much more meaning when you get home and you can say, see I was there.

One last piece of advice is to make sure the setting on your camera is for large images. You can always reduce a picture but enlarging does not work very well.

Pictures are important, so don’t be camera shy. And have fun taking them.