Creating a Photo Storyboard for Your Adventure Tour Business

The Importance of a Storyboard

If you’re unsure what a storyboard is, let’s start at the beginning. In short, a storyboard is a collection of photos that tell a story. In the case of owning a tour, activity, or adventure business, your storyboard will highlight the timeline of your tour. It should showcase the fun your guests are having and the emotion they’re experiencing.

Creating a storyboard means that your finished product will flow, your shots will all come together to tell the story of your tour, activity or experience. Your storyboard’s outcome should convey precisely how you see your business and how you want potential guests and those interested in adventure tourism to see it as well. It’s a key tool in photo marketing and photo sales.

Your storyboard will provide you with insight as to whether your finished product will work before you finalize it. Putting a storyboard together will help both you, your team, and your photographer(s) map out future photo projects.

You’ll provide your team with direction when it comes to the photos they should be taking while working your tour. By following a storyboard, they’ll be able to take the right pictures at the right time, thereby increasing photo marketing and sales!

Creating a Storyboard

Here’s what you need to create your storyboard for photo marketing and photo sales. Start by choosing a template for your storyboard, we created one for you on Canva. Access your Storyboard template and make a copy. Click Here.

Use a set of rectangles, similar to the outline of a comic strip. The rectangles will act as your empty photo boxes, and you’ll fill them with photos that tell your adventure’s story from the guest’s perspective.

You can sketch your storyboard, but for these purposes, we are using it for your staff to follow when taking adventure tourism photos. This will help them recognize a great photo op, and hone their skills on when to snap a photo.

Once you’ve chosen your photos that tell your adventure’s story, you’ll put them in, provide lines, notes, or directions for your team to adhere to. When equipped with your instruction in the field, it will be easier and faster to train your staff regarding how you want the pictures to look and feel.

Your storyboard is your outline of the guest experience and the photos to capture to tell that story. It’ll help you when capturing the best photos and ensure your guests get the best product. It’ll also ensure the best photos are being used when marketing your tourism business.

With the creation of a storyboard, your staff will be able to snap pictures of consistent quality, and photos your guests will be sure to love!

Best Performing Photo Types

Certain types of photos pull together a storyboard in a way that others cannot. For your adventure tourism storyboard, you want your guests, both current and potential, to see how much your tour can offer them mentally, emotionally, and physically.

The goal is for emotion to pop out of the photos, designing an experience so palpable your tour patrons will have to have their shots at the end of their participation. Here’s a peek into how you might want your storyboard to look.

Capture Group Photos

Ensure your team knows that group photos are essential to creating memories for your guests that last a lifetime.

They want to see the people they experienced their tour with, even if they only met them upon arrival. Group photos bring about a sense of nostalgia that is hard to match.

Candid Photos

Nothing captures emotion quite like a candid photo! The best expressions and interactions come from those who have no idea they’re having their picture taken.

Encourage your team members to take as many candid photos as possible because the results will be stunning and challenging for your clients to pass up.

Action Shots

There is no doubt about it, your guests are on an adventure tour, and they’re going to want pictures of themselves in action.

Ziplining, rafting, and skydiving are exhilarating, and so often, it’s hard to remember what we’ve seen when the adrenaline fades. Taking fantastic action shots helps your visitors to remember every bit of what they saw while they were soaring through the sky!

Scenic Photos

Scenic photos make a great souvenir and help to fill in the story of your experience. Your guests will love to take them home and hang them, forever reminding them of their amazing experience and the joy of living with the feeling a photo can evoke.

Identify Where Photo Opportunities Arise

On your storyboard, you’ll want to let your team members know where you captured each shot and give them at least four options of when and where to do so. In the storyboard notes, reiterate the emotions that guests are feeling in each photo you’ve chosen.

When your team knows the emotion surrounding a photo, they can feel for it when it comes. Ensure they understand what emotions are running high in your photo samples. It can be anything from joy and accomplishment to peace and excitement, but they must grasp which feelings go with which photos.

You’ve likely created your storyboard around the best photos taken on your zipline adventure, and you want your staff to do the same. Put the location of each photo front and center, so you can ensure that pictures capture similar emotion to that of those featured in your storyboard. No photo will be the same, and that’s what makes them perfect and tool for photo marketing!

Use Your Storyboard (and Instagram) as a Training Aid

Your storyboard will serve as a training aid for your team. If executed correctly, they’ll be able to follow without issue, providing amazing photos your guests will love! Using your business Instagram account as a storyboard is a little known hack that will help your team.

Post incredible photos that you’ve taken of your tours that express what your guests feel in the moment. It’s a fantastic place to keep reference photos, not only for the team but for your followers. The internet is incredibly interested in adventure tours and the beauty that it all has to offer. Show them what you’ve got!