Tourist First

Travel notes and advice from around the world. Above, the daily flight from Managua at the San Carlos, Nicaragua, airstrip.

Friday, June 3, 2011

A Few Travel Snapshots



Before your next trip, you can search the Internet for images of any location. By the time you go to that obscure Italian village, you can have a pretty good idea of what it looks like.  And, oddly enough, the photos that you take there are likely to be much like the ones you saw online.

Scientists at Cornell University analyzed data from 35 million Flickr photos and made some surprising discoveries: Not only did the world's most photographed cities (and the most captured landmark in each) emerge, but also so did the most common angles for shooting each place. The study, released in 2009,  suggests that through their cameras, tourists "vote" for favorite places, things, and the best representation of them—and, by and large, they agree. Everyone takes photos of the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and palm trees at sunset. 

Here are some of my favorite photos from trips taken before I started this blog. If you've been to the same places, the odds are your photos are very similar to mine. 


The lighthouse at Isle Au Haut, Maine. Acadia National Park
 shares this beautiful island with a small lobstering and fishing
 community (along with a number of vacation homes).


Is anyplace else on earth as wonderful at sunset as
the Southern Caribbean? This is a cove on the
 west side of St. Vincent.

Bartolomé Island is a volcanic islet in the Galápagos.
Pinnacle Rock is one of the most-photographed
 features of the island chain.

Cameras are a must for hikers atop Perito
Moreno Glacier in southern Argentina.

This is what you see from the London Eye, the gigantic
 Ferris wheel that's England's newest landmark. The building
 below houses an aquarium; the water is the River Thames.


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