If you don’t want your travel tour photos to bore your friends and family to death, make sure you’ve got the right camera.

Touring Yellowstone is an exciting adventure – which is why Yellowstone is one of the most popular travel destinations in the world. Recording your trip with photos helps you relive the pleasure, and share it with your friends and family. But taking the same photos over and over again – tiny faceless moms and dads standing in front of Old Faithful – just doesn’t cut it. Here are a few hot camera tips that will help you record your Yellowstone tour in a way that will make you proud.

It pretty much goes without saying that it’s best to use a digital camera. They’re lightweight and compact, and you don’t have to worry about film. It’s also easy to download the photos onto your computer, group them into albums, share them with friends, print them, and so on.

But to get the best shots, make sure you do the following:

*    Use the optical viewfinder. There are usually two ways to compose a shot on a digital camera: looking at the image screen where you will eventually see the finished product, or looking through the optical viewfinder (the little window near the top of the camera.) The viewfinder shows you the actual physical scene in front of your camera, but the image screen shows you something slightly different. With some cameras, you could wind up with the top of dad’s head cut off. On a Yellowstone tour, that could mean cutting off the top of Old Faithful’s 120-foot geyser shooting into the air. It’s just not the same. So, make sure your digital camera has an optical viewfinder, and use it.

*    Get a camera with a high pixel count. Pixels are tiny dots that make up a digital image. The more little dots there are, the higher quality the picture. This is especially important if you want to print or enlarge them. They may look great on your camera, but when you make them bigger, the quality suffers. Get a camera with 4 or 5 megapixels, minimum.

*    Make sure your camera has high optical zoom: The zoom feature on a camera allows you to take a photo of something far away and have it seem close-up. Some cameras only have ‘digital zoom,’ and some have optical and digital. The problem with digital zoom is that it really doesn’t do much zooming; it just crops the picture. And in the process, it reduces the pixel count. The beautiful images you saw on the image screen of your Yellowstone tour highlights turn into a blurry mess by the time you make them large enough so someone can really appreciate them. When you’re taking snapshots of friends, a 2X or 3X magnification is probably enough, for Mt. Rushmore, the Grand Tetons, Mammoth Hot Springs terraces, or other Yellowstone tour sights, you need 5X or more. If you want to take photos of wildlife and don’t want to get so close you’ll scare them away, you’d be better off with 7X.

Getting home from your Yellowstone tour and excitedly downloading your photos only to find that they don’t really capture the beauty you experienced can be disappointing. Get the right camera, and your travel tours will be something you, your kids, your grandkids and your friends can enjoy forever.