Being a professional photographer who has shot for all from National Geographic Adventure to Modern Bride, I take the same care and planning in photographing personal trips as I do work assignments. It could be my South Pacific honeymoon in a bungalow at the Orient Express Bora Bora Lagoon Resort or a weekend car escape with the family in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park.

Whatever your travel plans, listed here are a few pro tips to assist you to capture memories of a lifetime.

Pack Smart

Whenever I hit the road, I take both my professional digital camera and my smaller digital point-and-shoot (perfect when I wish to be less obtrusive, such as in Scottish pubs). Make full use of your lenses-wide-angle lenses which are ideal for photographing family picnics and museums, wherever you want to include as much foreground as possible. Telephoto lenses are not just for photographing wildlife and sports- they also make the best portrait lenses, too.

Power Up

Bypass alkaline batteries in the field and stick to long-lasting Energizer e2 Lithium AA batteries for your digital camera. You’ll not just save money with lithium batteries (they last up to seven times longer) but weight as well (they’re a third lighter). It might not be critical at the family reunion, however it made a difference for me when I covered the recent Explorers Club Expedition up Africa’s highest peak-Mount Kilimanjaro. Since they also perform well in extreme temperatures, I did not need to worry about environmental failure. Energizer e2 Lithium batteries have another advantage- they were specifically designed to meet the energy demands of high-tech devices from MP3 players to wireless headsets.

Similarly, shop smart for memory cards, and always have a few extra. If all of your vacation is stored on a single memory card or stick and it fails (which it’ll sometimes), you’ve lost everything. Spread the risk across several cards and invest in high-quality 512MG and 1G cards by a reputable company such as SanDisk.

Click Away

If you want your pictures to improve considerably, the easiest way is to get closer, much closer. Put on the wide-angle or zoom all the way out and then move into the scene. Children roughhousing on the lawn? If you are not getting bumped, you are not close enough. Stunning columbines in a mountain meadow? If you cannot smell them…

Another easy way to get unforgettable images is to use new angles. How about climbing on top of your pickup to get that picture of the family barbecue? How about taking a picture while you are on that roller coaster? Sure it’ll be blurry, but isn’t that the point?

Be creative. Photography is among the few artistic outlets open to everyone, and in the age of digital cameras and lithium batteries, if you can imagine it, you can shoot it. On a typical assignment, I will shoot over 1,000 photographs in a day. On a typical family trip, I take the same amount. Why? Because it doesn’t cost me a penny more, and the more pictures you take, the better photographer you’ll become. So go ahead, click away.