Get Jealous Hate-Likes on Your Instagram Travel Pics: How to Enjoy All the Delicious Loathing You Deserve!


Are you getting enough jealousy and loathing on your travel ‘Gram? Probably not as much as me! And that’s because you don’t have the right equipment!

Hot Instagram travel shots show that you’re having a blast, and that you don’t need Reginald anymore anyway.

Or Joe-Danny.

Or Samuel.

Or whichever slippery little man-prop dumped you, how am I supposed to know, you FREAK? But I hope you’re as depressed as me and so you’ll buy all the muck below. I get a commission when you use my links and keep it all for myself, so at least I’ll be happy someday.

You Have to Buy All This Stuff to Take an Instagram Travel Photo

1. Weird Sunglasses Show You're Too Hot to Care
Make sure your sunglasses don’t match your face at all to show that you don’t give a snort, you’re on vacation baby! Ugly sunglasses don’t make you look nasty, just inaccessible. They also hide your bloated, soppy eyes, for example, if that man-crab is now backing into the shots and shorts of the Instagrammer the next resort over.

2. Instagram Plate with Built-In Backdrop and Phone-Tripod

When it’s time to ‘Gram your grub, you need The Limbo, as shown in this video.

It is designed so that everyone at the dinner table can photograph their food without the distraction of other diners or eating.

3. Camera (Weird and Big, Doesn't Make Phone Calls!)
If your photographer-lover-travel companion-sherpa has left you, all you have to do is get this and push the round button on the top. This camera looks big and professional enough that you could even put it in the shot with you like an artsy mirror selfie.
4. Selfie Lighting System
Very few hotels properly light the floor-length selfie mirror in front of the closet area, and so it’s hella-smart to bring your own portable indoor lighting gear for your #impromptu shots.
5. Fashion Shoot Full Travel Lighting Kit
Lightweight enough that you could even pick it up yourself if you had to, this kit is necessary at any mountain, monument, or Parisian street café so that your face and body stand out instead of the stupid backdrop; proper lighting also helps you identify the blemishes and wrinkles you’ll need to Photoshop out later.
6. VIP Rope Line to Keep Losers Out of Your Shots
This is essential for making sure your followers and other losers don’t creep into the background of your shots. (Sometimes there are even tourists milling about in front of the Eiffel Tower, so ugly!) Plus, you can actually have the rope line in-frame to suggest VIP-ness for a nightclub shot, should you be in the kind of place that fails to stratify out the locals on its own.
7. American Trunk to Have People Carry in Background
This trunk shows the country you are — or should pretend to be — from. Plus it doesn’t have wheels so your porters will have to team up to carry it, which looks classier when you’re entering your hotel.
8. Ride a Prop Sexily in the Pool!
I can’t frolic on my ex-lover’s slimy backside because he’s my ex, duh. But I have a great THING to frolic on—do you?
9. Selfie Watch Underwater Button Thingy
Selfie sticks were fine for ancients like Mona Lisa, but she didn’t have modern tech back then. Like this selfie watch button, you can even chuck the camera in the ocean and get actiony shots as it sinks away.

10. Hire a Photographer Who Won't Screw You as Much

If your greasy ex/photographer slithers onto another Instagrammer (whose followers are mostly fake anyway!), and you’re in the middle of whatever dumb destination, you might hire a local. AirBnB Experiences lets you hire camera dorks who can press your button thingy, and they’re almost definitely better at it than your ex, who has dexterity of a manatee.

11. Let's break for a pro food photography tip!

If your food is too shiny and getting a glare, apply talcum powder. If it is not shiny enough, apply motor oil.

Apply likewise onto the extra you hire to play the part of your new lover. No more glare, just the right healthy, scrumptious shine!

12. Book Prop
It can be good to have a book on your trip for intellectual shots or blocking out your face in morning shots if you’ve been sobbing all night as you hate-search nearby Instagrammers for your ex’s man-slut rump in the hotel #morning #snooze background shots. This book prop is about Instagram, so it might actually be fun to look inside of it, but on the other hand it mostly contains #words.
13. Full Green Screen Studio
Most countries are disgusting and far away, and full of other Instagrammers trying to wreck your love life. You can avoid all of that by green-screening your Instagram travel photos; in some cases it’s actually less work than the #nofilter-ing you’d be doing anyway in PhotoShop. This all-in-one studio costs much less than plane tickets, so it pays for itself in just one vacation. And you can set up your studio far from other Schemagrammers trying to get their claws into your hunky #slimeball.

That’s all I’ve got for now you, you boobies. Add more ideas in the comments and if they’re actually any good I’ll add them to the article and delete your comment.

This is a guest post I was invited to do for this dumb site about people who travel with less stuff, you can read about their minimalist blabber-jabber and obnoxiously meaningful travel on the rest of the site, if you must.

Photo at top by Nicole de Khors.