98% of my travel snaps have a familiar face in them - either me, or a travelling companion. When I visited the Taj Mahal, I stood right smack in front of it, and got my friend to snap a pic of me with the building in the background. I think photos of people you know, as a general rule, are more interesting to look at then any random building/tree/road/mountain/lake taken at some tourist destination.
Type “Taj Mahal” in to Google Images and you’ll probably get thousands of shots of it. Why would anyone be interested in seeing your particular shot if you’re not in it? Even worse, why would anyone be interested in seeing 20+ such shots of the Taj Mahal? Some up close, some far away, some from different angles… uhm that’s great, but it’s nothing I couldn’t see on Google if I truly felt the urge.
What gives? Please help me understand the mindset of such people who are compelled to share albums worth of this sort of stuff.
The pictures are meaningful to the person who took them. They were seeing something marvelous, like the Taj Mahal, and took a picture so that they could remember that moment, and experience it again whenever they looked at the picture. They want to share that experience so that everyone else can have it too, but don’t realize that the pictures won’t have the same impact on anyone who didn’t take the trip.
I dislike those type of shots as well – in fact when I travel I prefer to take one shot per location of me, as a reminder that I was there, and that’s it. In the old days, I would collect postcards of memorable scenes, but now with the internet I don’t even need to do that. If I want to remember what Michaelangelo’s David looks like, I can use Google.
That is the thing that baffles me about the Louvre. I can’t say if the Mona Lisa is a great painting or not. You can’t really judge for yourself by standing in front of it and looking at it. There are always hoards of people standing in front of it taking flash photos of it like it was a Presidential news conference. It makes no sense. Get your asses to the gift shop and buy a print. It will look better than your crappy picture.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think it goes with the whole “I can say to my friends that I have been there mentality”. I don’t know about you, but the people I know don’t require crappy photographic proof of every detail I share. I don’t even take pictures of most places I go around the world unless it is something unique to me and involves people.
Excessive picture taking is very low-brow activity and the people that engage in it should be judged as crass simpletons.
I think part of the reason is because facebook is/was the first ‘cloud’. I remember a few years ago I was on vacation somewhere and felt bad that all my facebook friends were about to get a weekends worth of pointless (to them) vacation pictures. It was just an easy way to get the good ones off my phone and into a more permanent place.
I remember, at the time, saying to someone that I wish there was a way to put facebook in some sort of vacation mode. That is, tell it that for the next X days, any pictures uploaded just get done so without be broadcasted to all your friends. That way people can still upload 100 pictures in a weekend without their friends hiding/unfriended them and people don’t make OP’s like this.
Now that phones are connected to photobucket/picasa I’ll probably just send them there instead.
Also, what others said. That picture on my facebook page of Chicen Itza…I took it. There’s more memories associated with that crappy cell phone picture then there ever will be from a postcard (whether I’m in it or not).
I think the OP was referring to landmarks rather than places only you have gone to. Leave the landmark photographs to the professionals. They do a better job. If your friends don’t believe you were actually there, find better friends.
For me, the point of travel photos is to take a picture of the thing I traveled to see.
The Taj Mahal (or whatever monument or street scene or landscape I’m taking a picture of) is beautiful or interesting or at least picturesque. The picture shows what it looked like to me at that point in time when I was there.
I tend not to take pictures of me. My last trip, I think I took 500+ photos. I think I’m in 3 of them. I know what I look like, I see that every day in the mirror, and quite frankly, it’s not all that aesthetically pleasing - especially as opposed to what I was standing in front of when the picture was taken. When I see people’s travel photos and they’re right in center of the photo, I tend to think that they’re blocking the shot.
But in general, people certainly seem more interested in photos of people they know, as opposed to pictures of buildings/trees/animals/beaches/skylines..
Why? Few people are likely to have seen Bangladesh at street-level. Bangladesh is much more interesting and photogenic than I am. People are far more likely to want to look at the colors and moods of the country than me gurning in front of some monument or other. I see absolutely no need to include myself in the pictures - they speak for themselves I hope.
On ‘party’ vacations I’ve certainly got a load of pictures of me and my friends messing about, eating or drinking, but this was not that kind of vacation. And nor indeed are my party pictures anywhere near as interesting to people who weren’t there as are the ones of Bangladesh.
I don’t know why people take holiday snaps at all. It’s all a bit odd, if you think about it. My memories are all in my head, and photos don’t really assist them any better than anything else. Sometimes smells or sounds do a better job. Once it was temperature.
My problem is the amazing photos that draw you there in the first place are always better than the reality, and the photos you take yourself aren’t as good as the reality.
I don’t want to see photos of my smirking face in front of every city street view, every monument, every majestic vista. “Lovely photo, pity your head is obscuring half of it.” I also don’t think I’m photogenic. Similarly, sometimes I just want to look at where a friend has been. Once I’ve seen one or two pictures of them there, I’m updated on their current look and established they actually visited there. If you’re going to do an action shot with you in it - riding horses, parasailing, whatever - then hey, go for it, but more often than not I don’t think the wonders of the world are generally improved by a human grinning in front of them.
If people don’t want to look at my photos, they don’t have to. I’m sure they’ll be happier for it.
I also don’t take many photos, and when I do, I’m not in them because I’m holding the phone. My husband may post photos that he’s managed to catch of me, however. He seems to think I’m pretty.
Even though professional photographs of places I’ve been are probably better than mine, I still cherish my own pictures. I usually buy postcards, too, so I do appreciate the professionaly done photographs. I get tired of pictures of the vacationer in every shot, after a while it just seems to be saying “here is proof I was at the Taj Mahal.” OTOH, I enjoy pictures of the vacationer(s) with people they met along the way, especially if they tell me a little about the people they met. Heck, I even enjoy pictures of the food they ate!