Have you ever wondered how people find so many great places to take photographs or portraits? It’s really easy once you know these top secrets hacks. What makes these locations interesting enough to produce great photos, and how can you use these family photo ideas?

In this guide, you’ll learn the top 3 ways professional and amateur photographer hacks that are used to find these interesting places for family photos and portraits.

First of all, these hack locations aren’t so secret once you know how to find them.  Much like finding a fabulous local hidden restaurant, they don’t get a lot of advertising. You may pass them every day on your way to work, but just weren’t aware. If you knew other people were already taking great portraits at inspiring locations, wouldn’t it make sense to go to the same location?

Rear of Walt Disney Concert Hall has interesting shade and reflections for Portraits

That’s exactly what you can do with a very unusual feature within Flickr. It’s called “Explore-World Map”.

So how does this work to help you find interesting locations to tack your next portrait? Most every picture has built into the meta-data information about where the picture was taken, called a Geo-tags. Flickr can provide you with that information with their World Map feature. Here’s what you do.  Select Flickr’s World Map menu option, and then make sure to click “Search this map” and you can get map results with exact location of the photo down to the street name.  You’ll be surprised how many interesting family photo ideas you can find around the corner from your own house.

You might want less work than searching around Flickr, so now what? Do you remember a time before Flickr and Instagram when people used paper maps and guides to find things?  Yes! That’s right! Maps and guides still exist and are great inspirations to photographers looking for new locations to capture unique settings. The great thing about city and county guides is that you can buy them from Amazon and load them on your phone or Kindle. You can find dozens and sometimes hundreds interesting places in Hiking Guides such as “afoot&afield”, by David and Jennifer Harris.  The guide points out examples like Colonel Washington’s Monument on San Bernardino Peak. In addition to being a wonderful photography location guide with plenty of family photo ideas,  you can easily pick these up  from Amazon. As an added bonus, these guides give tons of safety tips while being out in the “wild wondrous world (www)”

Our final tip takes a little more work from you and should be used cautiously and safely.

Use Your iPhone with these apps to find photography locations

Everyone basically has a way to track great photo locations with their mobile device. Often while driving around doing normal errands, you might see a potentially great location for a portrait.   Trying to remember where that spot is the next day can be challenging and sometimes impossible to remember because it was such a quick moment.  Once I passed a field with railroad tracks and new blooming orange wildflowers.  Eventually I found my way back after turning around and pulling over to take a quick location photo. But how can I find it again with just the picture? This is the part that takes a little more work but is worth it.