Travel Photography Instagram Accounts Worth Following

You open Instagram at the airport, scrolling for inspiration before a trip to Iceland. Within two minutes you’ve seen seventeen near-identical blue lagoon shots, six puffin photos taken from the same rock, and four golden hour posts processed through the same Lightroom preset. Then one image stops you cold — a wave crashing against black sand cliffs with a silhouetted figure lit by a single shaft of afternoon light. You screenshot it immediately. That’s what a great travel photography account does.

The difference between accounts worth following and ones that clog your feed isn’t follower count. It’s vision. Here are the accounts that actually have one.

Landscape Photographers Who Consistently Produce Striking Work

Three names come up every time serious travel photographers discuss Instagram: Chris Burkard, Alex Strohl, and Paul Zizka. They’ve each been shooting for over a decade, built distinct visual identities, and post images you can genuinely learn from — not just admire.

Chris Burkard (@chrisburkard) — 3.8 million followers

Burkard shoots cold-water surf and Arctic landscapes. His images favor severe, desolate environments — the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Svalbard — with tiny human figures that make the scale feel overwhelming. What makes his feed educational rather than just beautiful: he shoots into difficult light. Overcast skies, fog, flat water. He doesn’t wait for golden hour magic.

His processing is restrained — colors are desaturated, not boosted — so the drama comes from composition, not from a filter. He posts 3–4 times per week, and his Stories include behind-the-scenes expedition content that shows his actual working process, not just the polished result.

Alex Strohl (@alexstrohl) — 2.1 million followers

Where Burkard emphasizes scale, Strohl focuses on atmosphere. His palette runs toward muted greens, blues, and grays — forests in rain, mountain camps at dusk, roads disappearing into overcast sky. He’s particularly good at stillness: someone reading in a tent, a kayak on mirror-flat water.

Strohl releases free Lightroom presets periodically and has run online photography workshops. His feed is explicitly educational in a way most photographers’ accounts aren’t, which makes following him genuinely useful if you’re trying to improve your own work rather than just collect inspiration.

Paul Zizka (@paulzizka) — 270,000 followers

Zizka is the most technically demanding photographer on this list. He specializes in night sky photography from Banff National Park — Milky Way arches over glacier lakes, aurora above mountain ridgelines — with human figures positioned for scale. Getting these shots requires hours of patience, a solid understanding of ISO and aperture tradeoffs in darkness, and often temperatures well below zero. His follower count is lower than Burkard’s or Strohl’s, but his images are harder to execute. Follow him specifically if astrophotography in mountain environments is where you want to develop.

Top Travel Photography Instagram Accounts Compared

Here’s a straight comparison across niches, so you can identify which accounts match what you’re actually trying to learn or shoot:

What the “Follow Me To” Series Still Teaches Us

What did Murad Osmann actually invent?

In 2011, Murad Osmann’s girlfriend grabbed his hand and pulled him forward while he was trying to photograph something else. He snapped the picture anyway — her hand in his, her figure leading him into the scene. That accident became the “Follow Me To” series (@muradosmann, 4.1 million followers), one of the most replicated travel photography concepts in the platform’s history.

The formula: woman from behind, hand extended toward camera, stunning location in the background. Simple, reproducible, visually consistent. Within two years it was being copied by travel couples on every continent.

Has the concept held up?

Honestly, the core series feels dated in 2026. The locations — Maldives, Santorini, Dubai fountains — have been photographed this way tens of thousands of times since. But what Osmann demonstrated still matters: a single repeating visual concept, executed consistently, builds a recognizable brand faster than technical skill alone. Concept coherence outperforms raw craft on social media. That’s the real lesson, and it applies photographing mountain huts or street markets.

The couple travel photography genre it launched

Jack Morris (@doyoutravel, 2.7M followers) and Lauren Bullen (@gypsea_lust, 2.3M followers) expanded couple travel photography through a different approach — lifestyle immersion rather than a single repeating concept. Their feeds show the actual texture of extended travel: markets, bungalows, boat decks, with warm saturated processing that became its own template. Posting has slowed considerably since the early 2020s, but their archives are worth studying specifically for how they handled consistent color grading across wildly different lighting environments.

The One Account to Follow If You Only Pick One

@natgeotravel. Sixty-two million followers, dozens of photographers, every environment on earth. The captions provide context that most accounts skip entirely. Images meet a professional editorial standard that filters out technically weak shots before they reach your feed. It’s the clearest single benchmark for what travel photography looks like when there are no shortcuts allowed.

Wildlife and Underwater: A Completely Different Skill Set

Paul Nicklen (@paulnicklen) is the best wildlife travel photographer on Instagram. It’s not particularly close.

Nicklen has a biology background and spent decades working for National Geographic before building an Instagram following of 6.5 million. His images are technically extraordinary — polar bears underwater, narwhals in Arctic pack ice, leopard seals in Antarctica — but what separates them is intimacy. He gets close in situations that require both technical diving skill and a genuine understanding of animal behavior. The animals in his images aren’t alarmed or fleeing. They’re interacting with him.

He co-founded SeaLegacy, a conservation media organization, which means his photography has a stated purpose beyond aesthetics. His captions explain what’s threatened and why it matters. That makes his account genuinely educational in a way most travel photography accounts aren’t. If you’re planning trips to wildlife-rich destinations — whether coastal environments in the Gulf region or Arctic expeditions — his feed will recalibrate what you think “wildlife photography” means. For anyone visiting Oman’s coastline, which offers remarkable marine and desert encounters, Nicklen’s approach to patience and proximity is directly applicable.

For underwater photography at a different scale, @kristiansekulic (330K followers) documents Mediterranean marine life with a focus on color accuracy rather than dramatic wide-angle shots. Less famous, more technically specific — useful if you’re learning underwater technique rather than just browsing.

What Actually Makes a Travel Photography Account Worth Your Time

Most people follow travel accounts passively — scroll, double-tap, move on. If you want to actually improve your own shooting by following these accounts, you need a more deliberate approach.

Study what’s in the frame, not just what it’s of

The difference between a mediocre travel shot and a memorable one usually isn’t location. It’s what else is in frame. Burkard’s Arctic images work because there’s almost never a perfectly level horizon — a slight tilt creates tension. Nicklen’s wildlife shots work because the animal fills more frame than you’d expect, forcing a kind of uncomfortable closeness. Strohl’s forest shots work because there’s always a human element, even if it’s just a boot visible at the edge of a hammock.

Study the negative space as much as the subject.

Notice what they don’t post

The curated feed is as much about omission as inclusion. Burkard doesn’t post mediocre days. Strohl doesn’t shoot the same location twice from similar angles. Brandon Stanton (@humansofny, 12M followers) doesn’t post posed portraits — every image catches someone mid-sentence or mid-expression, never stiff. That discipline of leaving things out is half the craft. If you’re planning travel around seasons when light conditions are genuinely interesting, building around destinations where September creates photogenic conditions is one way to make that curation easier before you even pick up a camera.

Track their format mix across posts

The accounts that have stayed relevant through multiple algorithm shifts share one pattern: they vary their format. Static images, Reels, carousels, Stories with technical context. Strohl uses carousel posts to show the sequence of frames leading to a final image — raw conditions, test shots, final edit. That kind of process documentation is rare on Instagram and genuinely instructive. It shows that strong travel shots come from twenty minutes of repositioning and testing, not from walking up and pressing the shutter once.

How Storytelling Accounts Approach Travel Differently

Landscape accounts optimize for visual impact. Storytelling accounts optimize for connection. They’re fundamentally different disciplines, and following only one type will limit what you understand about travel photography.

Humans of New York (@humansofny) is technically a street photography account, but it’s one of the most instructive accounts on Instagram for understanding how photography and text work in combination. Each post pairs a portrait with a brief quote or biography. The photography is deliberately simple — direct flash, eye contact, plain backgrounds. The image exists to show a face. The words exist to make you care about that face. Stanton has since expanded to international subjects in countries like Pakistan, Iran, and Uganda, making it a legitimate travel photography account with a storytelling methodology worth studying closely.

Mitch Kanashkevich (@mitchkanak, 190K followers) works in a different register — long-form visual essays from Myanmar, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea, and similar locations, with images that prioritize cultural texture over scenic grandeur. His compositions are complex, the light is often difficult and flat, and the moments are rarely staged. Following him alongside a pure landscape account gives a more complete picture of what travel photography can actually do when it’s not just chasing beautiful backdrops.

For anyone building their own travel photography practice around specific destinations, doing location research before you arrive pays off significantly. Knowing when fog rolls through mountain environments — the kind of atmospheric conditions that make places like Huangshan so visually distinctive — means you can plan around the conditions rather than hoping for luck.

The accounts above aren’t a ranked list with a single winner. They’re different answers to the same question: what can travel photography be for? Burkard says it can show human scale against wilderness. Nicklen says it can serve conservation. Stanton says it can reveal the interior lives of strangers. The accounts worth following long-term are the ones whose answer matches yours — or challenges it in ways that make you think differently about your own work.

Start with @paulnicklen. Study the images for proximity and patience. Read the captions for why the subjects matter. Six months of that, and you’ll have a clearer sense of what kind of travel photographer you actually want to be.