Advance Your Travel Photography by Spotting These Cognitive Biases

by Jonathan Lee Martin

“He just keeps trying the same thing expecting different results.” 🧠 Irrational behavior can make for a good laugh, but it’s no laughing matter when it prevents you from improving at your craft — and you don’t even realize it. On Fstoppers.com, I break down cognitive biases that commonly affect travel photographers and how to outwit them.

You probably think you’re exceptionally rational. In fact, you might say you’re more rational than average. Ironically, that perception itself is a cognitive flaw: the bias blind spot.

So why care about cognitive biases if everyone is affected by them? By identifying them in your own reasoning, you can advance in your craft faster. This isn’t fuzzy mumbo jumbo: cognitive biases have a measurable impact on your mood, productivity and decision making, so countering them leads to intentional, measurable progress in your field.

  • Sunk Cost Fallacy, “I’ll just make the best of it.”
  • Planning Fallacy, “I’ll improve with time.”
  • Impostor Syndrome, “I’m a total fraud.”
  • Observational Selection Bias, “Everyone has my camera!”
  • Anchoring Effect, “But the price is reasonable?”

I’ve personally struggled with most of these cognitive biases during the last few years of becoming a digital nomad. At first they mostly related to decluttering, but when I began working remotely full-time, I discovered just how much they affected my work productivity. With some introspection and practice, I boosted my longterm productivity enough that my coworkers and family noticed. Nowadays, I get 50% more work done in the same amount of time.

“Well, I’ll just become a better travel photographer with time and practice." True, but you might fall prey to the Planning Fallacy, which leads us to repeat mistakes and disregard prior experience that would otherwise yield actionable insights.

You deserve to get the most out of the time and money you invest in your craft, so check out the entire post on Fstoppers to learn how to spot these biases in your day-to-day thinking and advance your travel photography.