A few months ago you may have noticed something on Facebook or Google+ called the Black and White Challenge . It was a challenge started by photographers to post a black and white photo every day for five days. Typically someone would nominate you and you could then nominate someone else. Challenges like this can...

Traveling slowly with my husband across Southeast Asia has been a great way to leave our jobs and lives in Canada behind to explore the world on a small budget. It also means we spend a lot of time together. Every meal, every walk, every bus ride to a new city, is together. Where once...

"Because most tourists rarely penetrate beyond the boundaries of "tourist space," they have few opportunities to experience and photograph that which is really "unspoiled." Their limited knowledge of the culture and life of the indigenous people tends to narrow down their conception of the "typical" to the stereotypical. …Locals often stage themselves in response to...

"To lament that the packaged tour, like the photograph, cheapens and degrades by making all places easy of access, is to miss most of the game. It is to make value judgments with fixed reference to the fragmentary perspective of literary culture. It is the same position that considers a literary landscape as superior to...

"Strangers entering a new environment as temporary visitors find themselves, whatever their specific motives and purposes, in an ambiguous predicament. They are typically marked by a heightened awareness and attention to life, coupled with considerable cognitive and emotional disorientation. This predicament necessarily has an impact on their motivation and conduct. It induces them to seek...

Cost/day: FREE (airfare not included - ha!) What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen lately? As I write this, it is now 3:40am and I'm bunking in the San Francisco Airport after 16 hours of flight changes, delays and one emergency turn-around. Some of the things I've seen tonight include: Watching the pilots pack their bags...

"Taking someone's picture doesn't cost them anything, not in any Western commercial sense, yet the picture has value. The picture has no value for the 'primitive', yet the tourist pays for the right to take pictures. The primitive receives something for nothing, and benefits beyond this. Doesn't the fame of certain primitives, and even respect...

Bethlehem, Palestine On Sunday, CBS's 60 Minutes aired film footage of San Francisco in 1906 . The footage, taken by a camera attached to a cable car going down Market Street, is less than 12 minutes long, and it is mesmerizing in a way a still photo cannot be. We see bodies moving, faces moving,...

Can seeing new places, meeting new people, and living new lifestyles spark your imagination? SpyreStudios, an online magazine for web designers, thinks so: 5 reasons travel can improve your design work . Here's an excerpt: " Traveling rocks. Practically everyone likes to travel, whether by land, sea or air. And why not? You get excited...

These days it seems like everyone is doing one of those 365 photo projects. There are loads of communities online where participants can post their daily photos and view those of others. Flickr has grown to be one of the largest and most popular photo hosting and sharing sights. A simply search for 365 photos...

In her book, A Camera, Two Kids, and a Camel , Annie Griffiths Belt shares with us the rise of her career as one of National Geographic ’s first female photographers. At a time before National Geographic was the greatly respected publication it has grown into today, Belt was one of the first to get...

I uploaded a bunch of recent travel photos to Flickr yesterday, but didn't have the time to type in titles. And until I do, the effect will remain horrible: "DSC_0528" adds nothing to what the photo is trying to convey. Giving titles or captions to your photos allows you to add another layer of interpretation...

For many of us, travel isn't so much about the destination as it is about the journey. In that spirit, take a look at these 35 breathtaking examples of road photography . Nature is a recurring theme in the photos, with paths snaking away into splendid isolation. "It's great you're traveling by yourself," an American...

Selecting 250+ pictures to represent the expanse and wonder of the planet is a daunting task, but it is one that Earth Bound: A Rough Guide to the World in Pictures has done very well. Best known for its guidebook series, Rough Guides has pulled from a collection of more than 100,000 images to create...

Headphones are often criticized as one of the fastest ways to close yourself off to a culture. The bell of the rickshaw about to run you over is no match for speakers in your ear blasting, well, anything. However, if you're going to trade local sounds for an MP3, why not expand your knowledge of...

The New York Times has a great photo slideshow called Why We Travel 2008 . It's a collection of stunning photos with fun-to-read anecdotes. A perfect antidote for those who are currently not on the road (but long to get back on it!). The stories range from the touching, like a woman who taught impoverished...

A recent study asked professional photographers if they were still using film, and 45% said they had never stopped, even though they also used digital. Although digital cameras have improved now to the point where a digital photo and a film photo are pretty much comparable in dpi (you know, if you have a good...