How to Take Photos of Yourself When You're Travelling Alone

If you are on holiday alone, you do not need a tripod and you do not need a stranger you have to trust with your phone. You can use whatever surfaces you already have around you: a restaurant table, a wall, a ledge. Two things make it work. Frame the photo wide, so you can crop it later if you need to, and shoot one long burst instead of walking back and forth to the timer on your phone.

Use the surfaces you already have

Look around before you start wishing you had brought a tripod. A restaurant table works if you lean the phone against a water glass, a menu holder or the salt shaker. So does a wall, a ledge at a viewpoint, the back of a bench, a windowsill in your hotel room, or your own bag propped up so the phone can rest against it. There is a longer list in our guide to tripod alternatives you already own.

What you are looking for is a surface that is stable, that is at chest height or higher, and that already points at the place where you are going to be. Height matters more than people expect. A phone lying flat on a low table gives you an up angle at your chin, and no amount of cropping afterwards will fix that. Half a metre higher and the same photo looks like somebody took it for you.

Keep your phone at arm’s reach

Wherever you put it, keep your phone at arm’s reach and never out of your sight. The risky places are the obvious ones: busy tourist spots, streets, terraces that open straight onto the pavement. A quiet cafe is a different story.

Two things make this safe in practice. Your phone is facing you, so you are looking at it the whole time you are shooting, and that on its own deters anyone from picking it up, because you would reach it first. And you can simply ask the staff at the coffee shop or the restaurant to keep an eye on it for half a minute while you take your photos. Most of them will not mind at all.

Neither of these takes any effort, and doing them is the difference between coming home with a holiday’s worth of photos to choose from and coming home with none of yourself.

Why the timer on your phone is so annoying

The most annoying way to do this is the way most people default to. You put your phone down somewhere, you set the timer for ten seconds, you walk over to your position, you think about how to stand, you get one photo, you walk back, you check it, you probably delete it, and then you do the whole thing again.

Four round trips and ten minutes later you have one usable frame. And honestly, it gets awkward. When you are on your own you are very aware of everybody watching you walk back and forth to your phone for one picture for your Instagram feed.

Place the phone once and shoot a long burst

The good news is that there are apps made for exactly this. You place your phone once, you start the shoot, and instead of one photo it takes ten, fifteen, a hundred. You do not have to get it right on the first try, because somewhere in those frames there is one where you are not blinking and nobody has walked in front of you.

It also makes the shots you would never bother setting up worth doing. Looking out of a window, eating something at a restaurant, sitting still for thirty seconds while the app runs. You are in the frame the whole time, so you are not worrying about your phone either.

One thing worth saying: alternative camera apps used to have a reputation for mediocre quality. That is not really true anymore. The technology has stepped up, and you can get photos at the same quality as your main camera app.

The other thing that makes a real difference is what happens afterwards. You get an album with just that shoot in it, and you save only the ones you actually want to your camera roll. Hundreds of near identical photos landing in your camera roll is annoying for everyone. You end up sorting through them a second time when you want to post one, and they eat your storage in the meantime. QuickBurst does both halves of this: the burst and the album you pick from.

The mistakes that ruin the whole shoot

Putting your phone too close to you. I know I just told you to keep it at arm’s reach, and that is still right. The fix is to use the back camera and set the zoom to 1x or 0.5x, so you get much more in the frame than you need. You can always crop a photo down to the dimensions you want. You cannot uncrop it.

Locking focus in the wrong place. Focus on the spot where you are going to be standing or sitting, not on the background behind it. If you focus on the background and then step in front of it, you are the blurry part of your own photo. Our guide on focus lock for hands-free photos has the exact steps.

Sort them the same evening

A hundred frames at one spot, three or four spots in a day, and by the second day of your holiday you have several hundred photos you have not looked at once. Do it the same evening instead: over dinner, on the train, waiting at the airport. Going through one shoot and keeping the three you like takes a couple of minutes. Going through a whole week of them takes an entire evening, which is an evening nobody ever spends, and that is exactly how holiday photos end up sitting on a phone forever.

Quick recap

Find a surface at chest height, keep it at arm’s reach where you can see it, frame wider than you think you need, and shoot one long burst instead of running back and forth to a ten second timer. That is the whole method. If you want the longer version, we have a full guide on taking photos of yourself alone.

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