2007 Travvies Nominations: Best Photography on a Travel Blog

Some blogs focus more on the visuals than the writing. This award celebrates the best in visual media on a travel blog.

Posted in order of nomination.

Exposed Planet:
Not a photo a day here, rather Harry Kikstra's collection of landscapes, mountains and South America. Starting from the image on the index page, you have to work backwards or click on one of the categories. As Harry is a mountaineer, he gets up to the places that not many people go. Too many close-ups of faces though.

Michael Simon On The Road:
New York City to South America overland. The photographs are too linear for my liking and lacking in descriptions. Some editing and better use of the material would have helped. Since this has been moved from blogger to its own domain, Michael needs to get into his document source and correct the feed URLs in the head tag.

Notes From The Road:
There is some excellent use of compelling photography as background images, blending into introductions to various regions. There's a lot of content around the site in general. Using links in the RSS feed is not so compelling though; especially as some of the different feed headlines linked to the same article.

Fred Miranda:
An overall stylish presentation from Digital Darkroom, presenting their 'weekly assignment' winners together with product reviews. There were over 1,000 'photographers' online when I looked - some 400 of them registered members. Each snippet links to the other entries in the assignment (viewable to guests) but non-members can't access the WA board and there's no RSS feed. Not really devoted to travel but more to photography with some images that could be considered travel-related.

lifevicarious - pixelpost:
I'm afraid a 'daily photograph' with technical camera details and no further comment does little for me; unless the images are outstanding. And these are not.

The DC Traveller:
I'm on cable modem and the loading of this site caused my browser to hang. Nice and clean enough, except for the flashing new message and cheap smiley ads, but nothing special. Use the RSS feed if you want your browser to load faster.

My Travel Backpack:
User-submitted photos of themselves, or friends, standing in a scenic setting. This is followed by details about the 'pack' and a location map of where the photo was taken. Seems like a unique concept and the site is clean. Sadly, someting was wrong with the image paths and they didn't show up in the Feedburner feeds.

Melody's Travel Blog:
Illustrated adventures in Goa and Singapore but it doesn't look like there's enough posts there to make the cut. The place was quiet for almost a year before the nomination; two posts since then.

Let's Visit Asia:
Like the DC Traveller, this is another b5media production and a browser-hanging website waiting for cheap ads to load on the main page, so use the RSS feed for best results.

Select World Travel:
They may have 'won a couple of travel agent awards' but they shouldn't really be in contention for this one. Too many glossy, promotional campaigns (obviously not created by themselves) and not enough real visual stimulation.

Flickr Blog:
Content supplied by the snap-happy community in a major way. Being the 'online photo management and sharing application of choice', for a large cross-section of the blogging world, images are not hard to come by; some of them really very good. But it's what Flickr do with them on their blog that should count, in my opinion.

True Flavour Memories:
'A blog by Donald Woo, co-founder of Trufflers (Thai boutique travel host); about living, travelling and eating' [in Thailand]. May be to your taste, if you like a glaring pink frame around every picture. Their attempt at branding with every image distracts the eye from what it should be looking at.

Flight Level 390:
Sorry if my bleary eyes are getting to me but this is nothing more than a blog with some very average pictures on it. Fly over there at your peril.

Final Verdict

We all know what Flickr is great for and My Travel Backpack is a nice concept.

But in my opinion, Notes From The Road edges slightly ahead

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