Here's how to take travel photos without being a gawking tourist

What are the top three activities that come to mind when you think of traveling?

For me, the answer is exploring, eating local food, and taking photos.

I'd imagine many people have similar associations. But taking photos when visiting another place or culture leads many people to perform a gross caricature of the tourist abroad, treating an unfamiliar culture like a zoo for consumption — the colonist on a global safari, disrespecting the peoples of the places where they visit with overeager lenses and disregard for norms of personal space and respect.

Not only does this kind of behavior make you look like a jerk, but it leads to worse photos than you'd get if you put a little thought in before you snapped.

I'm nowhere near as well-traveled as some photographers, but I've found myself more than once in the position where it was my job to make pictures in a place where I was an outsider. And I've made a fool of myself by not thinking carefully about where I was and what I was doing. You shouldn't do that.

Here's what I've learned about taking tourist photos without being a jerk.

Don't carry any more equipment than you need.

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I own some fancy cameras. I get to play with some even fancier cameras. But these days when I'm going somewhere new and interesting for my own pleasure I tend to leave my fancy cameras behind in favor of an iPhone 6s or Galaxy S7.

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That's because when I'm on an adventure with friends and loved ones I'm not trying to make art with my photos — and you shouldn't either. Instead, I'm there to have experiences in interesting places with people I care about; the photos just serve as a kind of ad-hoc visual journal. And a smartphone camera is plenty effective for those purposes.

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There are also a number of smaller cameras like the Sony RX-100 or even the RX-1 that will do you nicely. Only bring more powerful, heavy, and intrusive equipment if your whole goal is to make pictures.

Try not to shoot the same thing everyone else is shooting.

Probably the most difficult and frustrating gig I've ever done involved following a bunch of Northwestern University students on a tour of Doha, Qatar. I was, in addition to shooting the tour, a tourist myself — trying to make brochure-worthy photos while traipsing around famous, over-photographed Qatari sites with a group of Western kids sticking out like about sixteen sore thumbs.

If you're going somewhere everyone else goes and takes pictures, focus on pictures of your friends and family enjoying the spot. If you invest time and energy in trying to make the perfect picture of the tour ground itself, you'll miss out on the experience.

Don't spend more than a few minutes on architecture.

Anyone who's ever gone to a new place has taken photos of the local public art and architecture. That's fine — it's fun! And utterly inoffensive. But keep in mind that any cool structure you've seen probably gets shot about a million times that day, so get one or two "look what I saw" shots and move along.