Check these guys out: The Photo Society. From their site, "We are a group of contributing photographers for National Geographic Magazine, committed to telling the world’s stories through pictures."
Outstanding, quality photography you'd expect, and there's a bit about the "Most Dangerous Countries for Journalists," which includes a link to the Committee to Protect Journalists' creepy "Impunity Index."
A new web site, debuting today, called Our Amazing Planet, starts with a feature about the The First (and Last) Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, in 1960.
Close enough to the same that I'm wondering why I spent multiple hours on a gorgeous morning painstakingly clerking in every trip all the way back to my first drive to Canada in 1980 (Or maybe it was 1979).
But I know why, really. It was in the spirit of competition. See, you'll be ranked among the other site members, stacked up against the competition, sized up and told where you stand. And our results weren't bad:
105 countries visited, ranking 109th overall. Our most-visited countries are the predictable European ones, and many are because they were transit stops on the way elsewhere. The top ten: Germany 11 visits, Finland 9, Austria & France 8, Thailand 7, Italy, Russia, Switzerland & the UK 6, and China 5.
The trouble is the arbitrary rules.
Two really great sites to recommend for avian photography:
Scream Savers has a just unbelievable shot of a short eared owl heard the photographer's shutter going off and took a look, and Jean-Luc Vaillant's Avian Photography site is tremendous.
Our much more modest offering here. The ostrich pictured here lives in Namibia.
Our friend Andy Hayes' interview with Panorama photographer Willie Kaemena has shown me a terrific site called 360Cities.net. It hosts, in its words, "thousands of high-resolution, interactive panorama images from around the world." And there's a tutorial on how to get started with panorama photography. It's worth a look.
Andy, incidentally, has been a guest contributor to CS&W, here. He's a writer and photographer based in Edinburgh. His blog is Sharing Experiences.
My friend Nomadic Matt, who runs the fine Nomadic Matt's Travel Site (listed in the Worth Your Time section here on Common Sense and Whiskey), has some new projects that I commend to you. Check 'em out when you have a chance:
Tropical Islands
Travel the World
How to Teach English Overseas
...You may want to:
- Read Tyler Brule, who's always on the road, and
- check out Dopplr: "You put in your travel schedule and link to your friends. It allows you to see where everyone is."
Photo of the road to Sossusvlei from the Namibia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
The Vendee Globe is a non-stop, solo sailing race around the world. Competitors set sail from France, sailed down the North Atlantic, then the South Atlantic, turned east past the Cape of Good Hope, continued across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and now on day 56, the leaders are well over halfway, approaching Cape Horn, at the bottom of South America.
Follow along at the official web site, which is tremendous.
(Photo is a screen grab from the Vendee Globe website.)
We've been enjoying very much a culinary blog called Eating Asia, which started about the same time as Common Sense and Whiskey, and which appears to be run from Malaysia by a couple named Roybn Eckhardt and David Hagerman, who is also a photographer. Here's Hagerman's photography site.
Ms. Echkardt updates the blog often, and, as you might imagine, the food photography is lovely. Try this recent entry about the traditional Vietnamese dish Pho, as served in Hoi An, a market town midway along the Vietnamese coast, near Da Nang and Hue.
Check out Eating Asia. Positive, upbeat, good-feeling site.
(This photo of the morning fish market in Hoi An from the EarthPhotos.com Vietnam Gallery.)
On the other hand, there's queasier Asian food news below.
Try out the free, downloadable plug-in called CoolIris. It works with your browser to provide a more 3-D viewing experience, or as they put it, "a lightning fast, cinematic way to discover the web."
EarthPhotos.com is compatible with CoolIris. In fact, it works right away, soon as you download the plug-in from the CoolIris site, and it works great. Compare these screen shots. The original, traditional version first, and then the EarthPhotos.com Landscapes Gallery via CoolIris:
There's a discussion of the state of 3-D on the web in 2009 here.
A few lists we've been meaning to post:
The World's Top 10 Ugliest Buildings from VirtualTourist
10 of the Most Unreliable Airlines from ProTraveller
10 Fascinating Last Pictures from ListVerse
The building in this photo may not have started out as one of the ugliest, but you wouldn't much want to hang out there when this photo was taken.
The Bosnian War took place between March 1992 and November, 1995. We visited, and took this photo, in November, 1997. It's the former parliament building in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina.
There are more photos of Sarajevo in the Former Yugoslavia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Alltop, the best of the best, has added Common Sense and Whiskey to a handy compendium of travel websites. Visit travel.alltop.com for a huge range of travel stories from all the best known travel blogs, including CS&W, updated constantly and clickable by headline.
Aloha and thanks to Alltop.
With this Firefox add-on, experience web browsing as it's done in China. Everything works fine in Hong Kong, but as we reported about our last trip to China and as Tim Johnson affirms in China Rises, just the briefest trip to the mainland outside Hong Kong can cause your web browser to blink uncomprehendingly when you ask for, say, the BBC. Now you can try it for yourself from home. Get the China Channel Firefox Add-on.
If you've got the time and inclination to download nearly 300 megs, which will expand to a little over half a gig, The Forbidden City, Beyond Space and Time is, well, imposing. A collaboration between the Beijing Palace Museum and IBM, Beyond Space and Time is a 3-D replica of the square-kilometer palace grounds that they call "The Virtual Forbidden City." I've just gotten it installed and at first glance, it looks like it might be fun. I'll come back with more after I've taken a spin around, talked with the tour guides and so forth.
from The New Yorker.
For the record, the photos Colin Powell referred to during his endorsement of Barack Obama.
from AndamanRising.org
Spend some time with this nicely produced bit of travel journalism, about life by the Andaman Sea post 2004 tsunami, produced by students at the University of North Carolina. Read an interview with the executive producer of the project at UNC here, on DigitalJournalist.org.
Common Sense and Whiskey is the companion to EarthPhotos.com, where you can see and buy professional photo prints from 105 countries and territories around the world, and the blog for Common Sense and Whiskey - the book. It's Intelligent discussion about the world out there.
The Photos:
