The best souvenir they ever got on vacation? A professional photo shoot.

Boston Globe

06-06-2025

Even as technology puts photography in everyone's pockets, travelers are increasingly investing in high-end, high-priced images of themselves and their families and friends on vacation.
Companies including
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
'Sometimes when you go on a special trip, the selfie doesn't really capture what you're seeing, what you're feeling, or the magic of the city,' said Nicole Smith, who started Flytographer after hiring a photographer to take pictures of herself and a friend during a vacation to Paris from the job she held at the time at Microsoft.
Advertisement
Companies including Flytographer and Local Lens have popped up to connect consumers with local photographers around the world, who take memorable portraits against backdrops of iconic landmarks. Shown here, Florence.
FLYTOGRAPHER
'People want to be able to remember their special stories forever,' Smith said. 'All I wanted to bring back from that weekend was a memory. I really wanted to capture the Parisian architecture. And that was the only souvenir I wanted to bring back.'
Advertisement
She said one person in a couple or a group is often expected to act as the photographer. 'There's someone always trying to take the photo and usually missing from it,' Smith said.
In Colleen Simms's family, that was typically her.
'As the mother, I feel like I wasn't always in the pictures,' said Simms, of Cohasset. So she and her husband have also gotten into the habit of arranging for professional photographers on their vacations.
'The world is full of such beautiful places, and the backdrops just remind you: 'I was there'' — especially since she's now in the photos, too — Simms said.
It isn't cheap. Photo sessions booked through
Companies including Flytographer and Local Lens have popped up to connect consumers with local photographers around the world, who take memorable portraits against backdrops of iconic landmarks. Shown here, Honolulu.
FLYTOGRAPHER
There are other ways to find professional photographers to shoot vacations.
'You spend a lot of money and time going on vacation, then you come home and sometimes there's a letdown,' Simms said of the cost. 'You see those pictures and they're a reminder.'
Advertisement
Now she has a succession of photos of her children growing up, on vacations they've taken together to Ireland, the Amalfi coast, and other destinations.
'Every time we travel, my kids are, like, 'Oh, what's Mom going to make us do,' she said. But 'childhood is so fleeting, and to capture them each year, and in all these amazing places — the pictures become really special treasures of a moment in time.'
Photos like these are much more than simply decorations on the mantle, agreed Crista Dix, executive director at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester.
'They trigger an emotional response, a sense memory, a moment in time, whether they're digital or printed,' Dix said. 'It's a moment that you have in that image.'
The museum is named for Arthur Griffin, a Lawrence-born photojournalist for Time and Life magazines who often shot travel photos.
Those kinds of pictures in particular 'show what you do, who you are, where you go. And they can be passed on,' Dix said — unlike a T-shirt or another kind of souvenir.
Companies including Flytographer and Local Lens have popped up to connect consumers with local photographers around the world, who take memorable portraits against backdrops of iconic landmarks. Shown here, Bali.
FLYTOGRAPHER
Few people still paste photos and ticket stubs in photo albums, but many now make photo books, she said.
And while many phones take great photos for these purposes, 'there's something to be said for the viewpoint of an artist,' said Haley Price, managing partner of Local Lens. 'They capture the entire landscape of a place.'
Local photographers can also offer restaurant and sightseeing recommendations. 'That's a key value to the service, Price said. Customers 'get to connect to this local. They can tell you about the city, their favorite spots, what to do, what not to do.'
Advertisement
That increasingly includes locations for marriage proposals, bachelor and bachelorette parties, couples on honeymoons, and others.
'The trend has been to commemorate something or celebrate something with travel,' Price said. 'This has been growing and growing. People who are looking to celebrate something, they're going somewhere.' And many want professional photos to commemorate it.
Debbie Tseng and her husband got a Flytographer gift card as a honeymoon gift, and have continued to hire local photographers when they've traveled ever since — to Rome, Paris, Maui. Often they will use one of the resulting photos as their holiday card picture.
The last trip was to Tokyo with Tseng's parents, during cherry blossom season.
'It was such a lovely memory for my family, and our photographer there was really personable and knew all the spots for the late-breaking cherry blossoms,' said Tseng, who lives in Cambridge.
Companies including Flytographer and Local Lens have popped up to connect consumers with local photographers around the world, who take memorable portraits against backdrops of iconic landmarks. Shown here, Cape Town.
FLYTOGRAPHER
'The greatest joys in life are the memories that you make with your loved ones,' she said. 'Material things can come and go, but what you hold in your heart most fondly are the experiences.'
Especially as life becomes more crowded, Price said, 'the experience of the vacation matters so much.' And photos 'just kind of transport you back to that moment.'
Woody Benson thinks so, too. He buys gift cards from the photo companies during Black Friday sales, even before his family has decided where to vacation next.
'We know we'll use it even if we haven't planned our trips yet,' said Benson, of Sharon. The resulting photos 'are sort of like our keepsake for the big trips that we go on.'
For Greg Gray, there's even more to it than that. He and his husband are heading to Paris for their 10th anniversary; they also went there for their fifth, and had professional photos taken then.
Advertisement
'We'll take pictures of each other a lot, but unless we do something like this, we don't have many pictures together,' Gray said. 'Selfies are what they are, but they're not that great. These photos show us how we've changed, and our lives together.'