Who doesn’t want to keep their adventures alive in images? Travel photography is a genre that produces a high volume of images, and travel photographers have large and expansive portfolios to prove it. The best photographers are also editors, able to create a compelling story though curating and sequencing their work.
We rounded up 16 outstanding travel photography portfolios that perfectly curate their work—including just enough to keep viewers wanting to see more while still satisfying their visual curiosity. Simple menu navigation and basic layouts tend to be the preferred choice of travel photographers, who know in an online portfolio simplicity can best showcase images from disparate places.
Documenting landscapes, street scenes, and people everywhere from Iceland to Japan, these travel photographers all have photo galleries that will make you start searching for deals on a flight!
1. Jack Moriarty
Based in California, photographer Jack Moriarty has an eye for landscape composition. Moriarty keeps his portfolio simple by showcasing just one gallery of his best, most recent images. A classic serif font gives his website a polished look.
2. Andreas Küfer
Andreas Küfer’s elegant, moody landscape photography is perfectly displayed in Horizon Left, like surveying a vista after climbing a summit, his work is viewers with a left to right scroll across the captured terrains.
3. Ryan Mitchell Lives
Starting with a stunningly impactful and contemporary splash page, Ryan Mitchell captures the attention of visitors and holds it with images that fill the height of your screen, showing a variation on the Horizon Left template with his customizations to create a portfolio that is immersive, colourful and memorable.
4. Viktoria Braun
Germany-based photographer Viktoria Braun excels at capturing lush, grainy landscapes, especially coastal scenes and mountain ranges. Whether she’s shooting in Iceland or Italy, her travel photography makes you feel like you’re right there admiring the scenery with her.
5. Charnkurt Yaoyuenyong
With a delicate site typography that beautifully compliments the fine topography of lands seen from above, Charnkurt Yaoyuenyong’s refined portfolio blends adventure and abstraction, exciting terrains and scenes observed and recorded in new ways leave viewers with a different perspective of travel photography.
6. Chad Gerber
Beautifully curated selection of stunning images are offset in the Point theme’s grid, allowing images to contrast and play off of one another in this dynamic arrangement that respects the original aspect ratio of his photos, and the compositions of the landscapes captured.
7. Ruairidh McGlynn
With high profile clients like Facebook, Instagram, and Apple, it’s safe to say that Ruairidh McGlynn knows his stuff when it comes to travel photography. The Scottish photographer excels especially at capturing empty, desolate landscapes, like deserts and mountain ranges. He includes very little text on his profile, letting the images speak for themselves.
8. Thibault Charpentier
Based in Paris, photographer Thibault Charpentier uses a neat grid theme with colourfully dynamic overlays to arrange locations into individual galleries. Shots of historic sites, favorite restaurants, and photogenic desserts abound, from Japan to Italy to Brazil. This portfolio is a joyful trip that speaks of all the pleasures of travel.
9. John Cullen
Toronto-based photographer John Cullen specializes in traveling to document food and culture. Often shooting for Air Canada’s En Route magazine, Cullen has captured meals and scenery from Oaxaca to Taiwan. His simple side-scrolling photography website allows his images to take up the entire screen.
10. Greg Annandale
In addition to his day job as a software engineer at Raspberry Pi, Greg Annandale is a seasoned adventure and travel photographer. Bristol-based Annandale has traveled widely, from Egypt to the Arctic, shooting picturesque photos along the way. A crisp black background helps the photos on his travel portfolio pop.
11. Mahnoor Malik
Mahnoor Malik is an internationally-published photographer based between Washington, DC and Montreal. She’s been featured by VSCO and The Wall Street Journal. Malik’s travel photography is sharply focused and color saturated. As interested in landscapes as she is in the people and animals occupying them, as her image shows a distinct awareness of their beautiful interplay.
12. Bart Pawlik
The wide, bold margins of Bart Pawlik’s landscape portfolio gives each image time, to hold a viewer’s gaze, and space for them to image the scenes expanding outward. His stunning, near-monochromatic, compositions do more with less, giving a true sense of scale, and power of nature.
13. Charley Zheng
There is a beautiful calm that carries through Charley Zheng’s documents of his travels. Landscapes are saturated and warm, even those at dusk carry a sense of peace. Zheng’s sequencing of images really elevates his whole portfolio, and the horizontal scroll flows perfectly, moving you through a landscape you truly want to traverse.
14. John Zada
Toronto-based photographer and writer John Zada has travelled widely as a photojournalist, covering the refugee crisis on the Syrian border and exploring remote parts of Jordan and the Yukon. He has worked for CBC News as well as al-Jazeera English. Using the Horizon Left theme, Zada makes the most of the integration of text, telling not only a story in images, but creating a diaristic accompaniment.
15. Colin Rex
Travel, adventure and commercial photography become one and the same in Colin Rex’s portfolio. Working with brands like Arc’teryx, Hoka, and Field Notes, it’s easy to see how Rex can live the dream of travel, while creating incredible images that bring a brand’s ethos to life. Emphasizing textures in this staggered scrolling grid, Rex’s focus on the tactile experience of the landscape brings a heightened feeling to the visitor, leaving us feeling as if we have touched those very surfaces.
16. Hemad Nazari
Iranian photographer Hemad Nazari is currently based in Vietnam. Nazari captures people and places in stunning color and black and white alike, with an ongoing series “Himalayan Life” documenting the mountainous region’s communities and landscapes. Stark against a black background, his images become cinematically foregrounded in this incredible portfolio.
Cover image by Chad Gerber. This article was originally published April 6, 2017, and has been updated.
