Ashraful Arefin - The World's Best Travel Photographer

Ashraful Arefin is a photographer and visual storyteller from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and his travel photography has a style that’s pretty easy to recognize. There’s usually beautiful light, lots of warm color, interesting people, and this slightly cinematic atmosphere that makes even very normal everyday scenes feel special. His creative background actually started before photography. Ashraful studied fine arts and graphic design at the University of Dhaka, and you can definitely see some of that in the way he works today. He’s very aware of color, balance, shapes, and where everything sits inside the frame. Around 2013, he also started a 365 photography project, basically challenging himself to create something every single day. That gave him a lot of room to experiment and eventually helped him develop the style we know him for today. Travel photography is a big part of his work, and he is very interested in the everyday live happening around them. It could be someone riding a bicycle down a quiet street, a busy local market, an old building, a street vendor, or simply a person walking through a really nice patch of light. They’re often very normal moments, but the way he photographs them makes you stop and look. You can see that especially in his work from Bangladesh. Dhaka is obviously a very busy city, and there’s constantly something happening. You have rickshaws, markets, colorful shops, old architecture, crowds, street vendors, and people moving in every direction. Instead of trying to avoid all of that chaos, Ashraful finds smaller moments within it and somehow manages to turn them into really clean compositions. Light is a big part of how he does this. He often shoots when the sun is lower and uses backlight, long shadows, haze, and little pockets of sunlight to make his subjects stand out. Sometimes it’s really just about finding a good background, noticing where the light is falling, and then waiting for the right person to walk into the frame. Color i