Why you should book a professional photographer in Cuba

It is not vanity to want a good photograph of your trip. It is the opposite — it's the recognition that a vacation is one of the few weeks in any given year where you actually look like you're enjoying yourself, and the next time you'll feel that way is probably twelve months from now.

Most travelers arrive expecting to take their own pictures and end up with three hundred frames of someone else's shoulder. The intent is good; the geometry doesn't cooperate. You can either be in the picture or be the one taking it. You can't, in most cases, be both — at least not in a way you'll want to look at later.

— What a professional changes

A photographer doesn't make you pose. A photographer walks beside you for two hours, knows when the light is about to break over a wall, and waits. The pictures that come out of that waiting don't look like commercials — they look like memories you'll trust later, because they are.

There's also the small matter of equipment and craft. A real lens at the right focal length, properly held, makes a fundamentally different kind of picture than a phone — not just sharper, but warmer, deeper, more like what your eye actually saw. You'd be amazed at the difference between a phone-grade shot of you in front of the Capitolio and a frame from a 35mm prime, taken from across the street, with the right amount of distance.

“We're selling the print you'll hang above the dresser.”

— What you keep, twenty years later

We aren't selling Instagram. We're selling the print you'll hang above the dresser, and the one you'll send to your mother, and the one your kids will find in a drawer in twenty years and ask: "Where are you here? You look so happy."

The technical name for what we do is "vacation photography." The honest name for what we do is "remembering well, on your behalf, while you're busy living the trip." Most of our travelers tell us, six months later, that the pictures became the favorite part of the holiday. The mojitos were nice; the Chevy was fun. The print above the dresser is the one they look at every morning.