This is pretty much how I remember Matt approaching it — while walking around town, he snapped photos of interesting places. If he knew he needed a shot of someplace specific, he went and took it.

I can see where you’re coming from, though. In his case, I think it was as much a leisure activity as anything else.

(Jukka) I ran a game which was set on the mediterranean island of Mallorca. I wrote the game during my vacation there and used familiar places – the hotel I stayed in, some of the places I went to, people I met – and took some photographs of the places as handouts.

That’s an awesome idea! If you visited someplace with, say, Roman ruins or castles, those shots could even be used as handouts for fantasy games — I like it!

I’ve actually used, to some extent, the very same technique you described – probably not exactly the same way, but close to it.

I ran a game which was set on the mediterranean island of Mallorca. I wrote the game during my vacation there and used familiar places – the hotel I stayed in, some of the places I went to, people I met – and took some photographs of the places as handouts. I didn’t have too many photographs (I got the idea of using them quite late on the vacation), but I did have shots from the hotel rooms balcony, some details on a castle which played a major part in the game and so on.

There’s always, I think, a small risk that using an actual photograph as handout takes out some part of the players imagination – gives a lot less room for the player to fill out the gaps in GM’s description by himself. Some people frequently use mugshot photographs for potraying characters and NPC’s – that kind of cements down what the said character looks like. I’m not sure if it’s always a good thing.

– Jukka.

As to the digital photography, I like it… but I’d be afraid of it. It seems like something that could easily take the place of actual “game prep”; it seems like something best done before the game starts, when you’re musing and gathering. Once the game has begun, you probably won’t have the time to invest to continue expanding your photo collection as you’d like.