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Gary Arndt, travel blogger at “The Everywhere Trip” presented a session at Tbex ‘10 that he entitled “Travel P*rn”.

I immediately knew it was a reference to Gary’s plentiful and amazing travel photographs on his site, http://everything-everywhere.com/, but Gary said in the talk that he came up with the title of his presentation before he knew what the theme would be.

Here are the main points from Gary’s sweet talk:

Gary wrote his travel blog for 9 months with less than 100 subscribers (* he has been going for about 3 years now and has over 6,000 feed subscribers). He went to a magazine store and bought one of each, to think about what people want.

He counted the number of countries and states that were mentioned in each issue. Average per issue: 39.2 countries, 21.3 states.

Conclusion: Average human will never visit even a fraction of the destinations in a single travel mag.

Hiram Bingham “discovered” Machu Pichu in 1911. He made a return trip and brought National Geographic Magazine along. They photographed him and printed it. The crowd goes wild.

Articles should include visual imagery. (Think National Geographic magazine).

Conclusion: photography consists of at least half of the content by area of an average travel mag (esp. feature articles and advertising).

Definition of p*rn:: “Watching people do things you’ll never do to people you’ll never do.”

Travel p*rn: “Watching people do things you’ll never do in places you’ll never go.”

“People fantasize about travel and bloggers are real people who provided unfiltered access to the public, of places, people and experiences which most people will never see. The visual element is a vital part of sharing that experience.”

1. The best camera is the one you have with you.

2. Your photos are part of your story. (don’t use flikr to get images).

3. Pay attention to where light and shadows are.

4. Bigger is better (use as many pixels as you can).

5. Don’t host images on your blog. (Instead use picasa, smug mug)

6. Be careful using Creative Commons images.

7. Practice makes perfect.

8. Take some time to learn post processing (brighten, darken. crop, etc.)

People read travel media because they want to travel. Imagery is a vital part of travel media, since the time of Hiram Bingham.

…

Follow Gary on twitter @EverywhereTrip

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