Photography and Memory

I designed my service around incentive travel because I believe the power of photography to capture memories and draw interest is especially impactful in the incentive industry. A photo shouldn’t merely tell an audience what, say, the Eiffel Tower looks like. If that’s all anyone cared about we’d just look at Google Image all day. We want our photos of the Eiffel Tower to remind us of a life experience - a story about a time spent in Paris. And when we see a great photo of the Eiffel Tower, we become especially motivated to go see it.

Great photos communicate stories, and they help us reconstruct our own memories of our own stories in a frozen moment in time - the time, the place, the emotions. Incentive travel programs are once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and documenting them requires a skillset tuned to capturing people and places with the empathy for how the memory will be revisited over a lifetime. And not only will a good photographer capture participants' experiences, the best photos will motivate employees to compete for an incentive program, too. 

For more than 15 years, I have traveled extensively and used photography to document my experiences and those of my clients. I have photographed landscapes and cities, weddings and families, and I use different styles to render the world in imagery that provokes memory and desire among incentive travel participants and contenders. Make sure your travel programs capitalize on the value great photography brings to remembering and promoting incredible experiences. 

Read below about my own experience winning a travel incentive...

Wanderlust, Incentives and Photos

During my freshman year of undergrad I was invited to a retreat sponsored by my school's alumni association. The generous organizers held a contest to motivate new students to meet each other: learn the most names (i.e. meet everyone) by the end of the retreat and win a luxury trip for two to London. Over three days I memorized all one hundred student and faculty names and won.

I was introduced to the travel planning industry through this effective incentive campaign. I felt the sudden compulsion to compete and win a valuable travel reward. The trip - my first experience outside the U.S. - had a major impact on my life. I immediately fell in love with the travel experience and foreign culture, and was inspired to live abroad for a year in Italy where photography became my means of documentation and self-expression. I was an aspiring film and photography student, poised to merge my passion for art and travel into a service for others embarking on such enlightening adventures. 

As a professional photographer, I have traveled to over 80 cities across 20 countries, serving clients around the world from the U.S., France, and Jamaica, to Colombia, Israel and beyond. Traveling has been the single most enriching experience of my life, and I know others feel these sensations too even if they don't know how to capture it. My goal is always to preserve these feelings for my clients as they explore new parts of our Earth.