An Ode to Holiday Snapshots

Wednesday 13 August 2025, 17:17 by Michiel Heijmans | 2,956 views | 6 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

"Yes, but that's just a holiday snapshot." I'd really like to make a case for those holiday snapshots. I think they are the most genuine photos we can take as photographers.

They are less considered, less staged and more spontaneous. Even the obligatory family selfie puts a smile on your face whenever you look at it and unleashes a flood of memories.

The underrated holiday snapshot

I think the strength of a holiday photo lies in that condescending name, "holiday snapshot". If we keep telling ourselves that this is what we are making, it reduces the pressure to perform. It makes no difference whether you are a hobby photographer or also press the shutter professionally.

I know professional photographers who mainly take photos with their phone during holidays. Who finally want to spend a week walking around without a camera. To be honest, I can't imagine that, as it has become a kind of extension of my arm, but each to their own, no judgement.

By calling it a holiday snapshot, the focus, including for me with my camera, suddenly shifts to capturing a moment or place. Capturing a moment, good food or a day trip.

Why holiday snapshots have a bad name

I think it is nonsense to talk about holiday photos using words such as "simple photo", "not artistic" or "only for the scrapbook", but I understand where it comes from. Think back to the past, when analogue was the norm and we were very conscious of every photo we took.

Especially on holiday, because those places we did not visit very often had to go in the scrapbook. As an enthusiastic street photographer, I will also make a case here for capturing everyday moments. Of course.

Today's holiday photos are taken with less attention. 1,200 in a day, with the phone always within reach, dangling from a cord like a handbag. Snap, another photo.

I understand where that bad name comes from, because a large proportion of holiday photos are taken that way. By young people and young parents, who already do that throughout the year, perhaps those are not holiday snapshots at all, but "ordinary" everyday photos.

The power of spontaneity

The specific holiday snapshots I mean are the holiday photos taken deliberately. I visited a flea market (broccante) in Zierikzee and photographed my family as well as the visitors. A quick selfie in La Piazetta in Westkapelle, because that is our regular holiday ritual.

Those photos are often taken without thinking, without extensive planning or the mood board I often use for portrait shoots. A blob of soft ice cream on a cheek, a seagull that stays beside our table just a little too long, waiting for leftovers.

Those are precisely the photos that tell the story of my holiday. A laugh, or a hand in front of a face because my daughter has had enough of the many selfies, with a phone.

Those spontaneously taken photos are more important to me than the considered drone photo of the crumbling pier that seems to disappear in a perfectly straight line into the blue-green sea. Yes, I had thought about that one. Perhaps a more beautiful photo, but much less valuable.

Emotion over perfection

Although I think that, with the modern embrace of analogue, we have gradually gained much more appreciation for blur, grain and light leaks, the imperfection of the holiday snapshot strengthens the raw emotion it captures.

I think of Martin Parr's perfectly shot photos of the English beaches, lit with flash. Fantastic, and certainly not a holiday snapshot. But then again, it is the good man's profession.

Our holiday photos have movement and blur, and the framing is appalling. But that does not matter at all. More than ever, the holiday snapshot represents pressing the pause button on life. Capturing that one moment we do not want to forget.

The memory-anchor effect

During my workshops, I often talk about capturing places by photographing details. I refer to photographing St Mark's Square, and how a photo of the whole square is often really not that interesting. If you capture a detail, you capture that memory too.

I came across the term "memory anchor". The term comes from cognitive psychology, and it essentially comes down to this: when something new logically connects to what you already know, you remember it more easily. That is absolutely about holiday snapshots, of course!

A photo through the transparent floor of the bridge between the Petronas Twin Towers, the town hall in Malacca after I had just proposed to my wife, a tea plant and the large flower in the Cameron Highlands. Our trip to Malaysia in a nutshell, more than 20 years ago. But those snapshots take me back to the most humid country I have ever visited.

The holiday snapshots connect all the pieces in between and trigger a much larger, more extensive memory, including images that were never made.

More than sun, sea and sand

In France, on the way there, my car broke down. While we were waiting for the breakdown service, we took laughing selfies by the side of the road, wearing our hi-vis vests.

The holiday was wonderful, and although the car did not return to the Netherlands with us, I have warm memories of the trip. We met Hans and Ria, our camping neighbours, and Hans drove with me for two hours to the garage to collect a loan car. The waiter took a holiday snapshot when we had dinner with them on the beach.

Those "by the side of the road" photos mark a point in time with a lot of mixed feelings. I was fed up with the car, fed up with the location, two hours from our destination, and fed up with everything that now had to be arranged.

I enjoyed my family's resilience, keeping their spirits up, the loan car, which was more luxurious than my old Renault, and Hans's CDs by Journey, because "Don't Stop Believin' is actually only a mediocre song compared with the rest of the songs they made". But don't stop believin' fitted better with my frustrations about the car, which were still present.

An entire trip in two photos, the guardrail photo and dinner on the beach. From two snapshots to a whole story.

From snapshot to story

The funny thing is that in photography we often talk about series or projects. Niels and I certainly do, on our podcast. A series or project consists of a number of images that tell a story together. Or make a statement. Or, in this case, form a memory.

That series, returning to the holiday snapshots, also comes about spontaneously. It develops without us noticing, because the photos are connected by time, place or the main characters. I mentioned the guardrail and the beach earlier, and those photos seemingly have nothing to do with each other. Yes, we are in them. But to me, together they tell a valuable story.

The value of failures

In the past, with that roll of film, I always looked forward anxiously to the moment when Kruidvat or HEMA had my photos ready. Would they have worked? Would they be too dark, blurred or overexposed? Some of those failed photos have made it into now-yellowed photo albums.

Not because the photo is so fantastic, far from it, most of my photos from that time are poorly taken snapshots, but because they are those aforementioned memory anchors of my holidays.

Those photos would not even make it onto Facebook now, let alone Instagram. Embarrassing, such a blurred photo. Our phones calculate artificial depth of field and you have to make an effort to get a blurred photo. That is what we have become used to, and that is why the camera seems frightening and far too complicated to many non-photographers. It can go wrong.

But on holiday, that actually does not matter all that much.

Digital abundance and selection

I don't know about you, but I apply the same strict selection to my holiday snapshots as I do to my professional photos. Do they fit in the sequence, in the story, and am I still missing something? If what I am missing was captured in a spontaneous, poorly taken phone photo, then it absolutely belongs in the series.

The danger of taking too many photos is always there. It is digital, after all, usually, and you can just keep taking photos, afraid that the next moment will be better than the current one. FOMO, but in digital image-making.

Perhaps that is why you come home with 1,200 photos. I think a holiday fits on a roll of 36, at most. And yes, I also send those 1,200 photos to my NAS at home over a slower connection "just in case" and only select afterwards. Of course. Imagine that.

In a time of digital abundance, selecting the right holiday snapshots is a story in itself. But it is certainly recommended.

The boundary between snapshot and art

During an unguarded moment, I point my camera at a woman on a small set of steps. She is washing the windows of her home in Domburg and seems unconcerned by the streams of tourists flooding the village. In summer and long afterwards. I point my camera and press the shutter three times, because a slow burst of 3 frames per second is the default setting on my Fujifilm X100V.

The structure and colour, the Dutch feel, things that make my snapshot worthy of Instagram, and I post it with the location name "Domburg" that same evening. I received a DM ten minutes after posting it. "You photographed my mother, it's her birthday next week and I would love to give her the photo." Of course! Lovely! The snapshot became a story.

The following summer, I submitted the photo for a group exhibition in Paris and it was selected. The year after that it hung in Milan, and last year in the exhibition 800 years of Domburg, around the corner from the house I photographed.

I don't know whether the boundary between snapshot and art can be defined. A snapshot can become art, and I think much of the art from the past was once a snapshot. We often do not know that we have made art, but it came about just as spontaneously as our holiday snapshots. Even worse, someone else often decides whether it is art. So perhaps we should not look for it at all. Another advantage of the holiday snapshot.

Holiday snapshots in the age of social media

The pressure to share beautiful photos is important in this story. It can undermine the charm of a real snapshot, because we even start thinking about our snapshots. Cheers, with champagne or wine, I saw a lot of that pass through my timeline.

Wait, the photo needs to be taken just before the toast, in a staged movement. Make sure the glasses are clearly visible, and you take the photo, you have just had your nails done. It looks best on Insta, Snap or whatever all those other abbreviated social media platforms are called.

But is that actually true? Perhaps we collectively take better photos because we take so many and because social media almost forces us to think about our images. Of course, that does not apply to everyone, because there is a group that clings so authentically to not doing what is considered the norm that other photos do appear as well. Often without much reach, or only among other photographers, because the masses simply want to see a nice photo.

I am in favour of protecting the balance. Your social media reach and chasing lots of likes should never be the ultimate goal of your photo, and certainly not of your holiday snapshot. That ultimate goal is basically to capture that moment, create the memory anchor and, above all, make a lovely addition to the album that you will enjoy looking through again after your holiday and ten years from now.

That social media raises the bar a little, especially for young people who are focused on their surroundings, and makes your holiday snapshot just a little better without losing its spontaneity, is perhaps something we should only applaud. Start them young, as they say.

Keep shooting, keep experiencing

Whether it is a wonky selfie, a blurred photo by the side of the road or that unexpected moment with a stranger on a terrace, holiday snapshots are the anchors of our memory. They take us back not only to what we saw, but above all to what we felt.

The smell of sun cream, the sound of seagulls, your family's laughter in that one little square. These are photos that do not strive for perfection, but for truth.

Those raw, unfiltered moments are precisely what make holiday snapshots so valuable. They were not made for likes, exhibitions or a perfect feed, but for yourself, for the stories you want to tell again later. And yes, sometimes they turn out afterwards to be particularly beautiful or meaningful to others too.

So put that pressure aside. Let technique and composition take a back seat for a moment. Take photos because you want to hold on to this moment now, not because they have to impress people later. Keep photographing, keep collecting, keep experiencing. Because in ten or twenty years, these are exactly the photos that will effortlessly take you back to that one moment, that one day, that one feeling. And believe me, no perfectly planned photo can compete with that.

That is the magic of the holiday snapshot.

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