While some of us may have lofty hopes of taking pictures on our travels like the ones that appear in glossy publications like this one, most of us would just like to come back with some good shots of our families and traveling companions enjoying the sights. Yet this simple goal often seems elusive. Follow these tips and your photos of family and friends on vacation will look right at home in the pages of a magazine.

1. Strike a Pose
A group of people standing shoulder to shoulder may work fine for team pictures and firing squads, but not for photographers. The trick is to break the group into different levels. Find a park bench, for example, and position one or two people standing, one or two seated and maybe one perched on the back of the bench. The rule of thumb is to make an arrangement where the lines among the subjects’ heads form triangles. Look at any artfully composed group shot, from that of a family wedding to an Annie Leibovitz masterpiece of Oscar winners, and you’ll see this simple concept put to use.

2. Keep Them Close
Any picture that includes people and their surroundings is called an environmental portrait. It’s the staple shot of magazines, and it’s essentially what we’re doing when we take pictures of our family and friends on vacation: we want to show them and the place they’re visiting.

The trick is to give equal importance in the frame to the people and the place. This is where most family travel shots fail: Either you capture the landmark nicely but with tiny people underneath it, or you get a decent image of the people but no good view of the monument or site. Here’s an easy way to get both.

First, you’ll want to keep your family no more than five or 10 feet from the camera. But in order to see the whole of London’s Tower Bridge, say, or Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, you and your group will have to move away from the site, sometimes a block or more. Now, using the widest angle your zoom lens will allow, you can compose a picture where the people and the site occupy roughly the same amount of the frame.

To see what I mean, take a look at the above photos of my wife, Peggy, and our sons taken a few years ago. In the frame on the right, Peggy and the boys appear tiny under the medieval castle at St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, England. But after we walked farther down the causeway, and I stayed close to them, you can clearly see the family and the castle’s distinctive architecture. It’s an elegant solution to this age-old problem.

3. Get Flashy
Put a professional gloss on your environmental travel portraits by turning on your camera’s flash. Nearly every digital camera and most film cameras have a “flash on” or “always flash” setting that tells the camera to add flash regardless of the brightness of the light.
 
Why add flash on a sunny day? Well, film and the digital chip can’t pick up the same range of tones that our eyes can see. That’s why you get so many pictures with harsh shadows and burned-out highlights when you shoot on a bright day. The flash helps lighten those shadows and puts a sparkle in your subjects’ eyes—which makes for more flattering photos.
  
Even if the day is overcast, the flash will spruce up, but not overwhelm, your subjects. It’s especially important to add flash to portraits taken in front of scenic overlooks, where the background is almost always brighter than the foreground, where your family is posing. Without the flash, you’ll probably end up with dark silhouettes instead of smiling travelers.

A final word of warning: When word gets out that you take great group photos, you may find yourself in high demand at the next big family gathering. Just make sure you occasionally sneak in front of the camera.