A desert camel standing before a setting sun is one of the oldest travel clichés – dating back to the National Geographic magazines of the 1930s. What separates this image from a cliché is the turned head and open mouth. The camel seems animated, crying out for family or food. The sunset adds a poignant context -- the long night beckons, and this camel is letting us know of its needs.

We stopped at a large weekly market just outside of Essaouira, and noticed a young child cautiously watching me photograph. She was very shy, and avoided direct eye contact. When I saw her back away and press her head against a scarred wall, I made this photograph. It is the opposite of the clichés we usually associate with child portraiture. There are no smiles here, no acknowledgement of the camera. She seems to be away in her own world. An image such as this has a greater potential to express human values than the conventional smiling pose. I continued to photograph her and her family for a few more minutes, and she finally turned to the camera, but still remained a bit anxious. (You can see another image I made of her at that moment in my digital travel archive at http://www.worldisround.com/edit/new/389245/photo5.html ) When I showed her the pictures I had made of her, her apprehension turned to delight.

Pictures of vistas, made from high hills or tall buildings, are a staple of travel photography. They are made so often, they have become travel clichés. Most are literal descriptions, and are not able to replicate the experience of being there. I usually avoid making such pictures, and hesitated making this one – until I saw the three monks on the rooftop in the foreground. The monks add expressive meaning to the picture, because of their scale incongruity and symbolic presence. Sagaing is a center of Burmese Buddhism, the temples that fill the picture are Buddhist temples, and what better way to humanize the image and make it speak than including three Buddhist monks on the temple roof in the foreground? A few moments later, they were gone. The opportunity to turn a cliché into a fresh vision was fleeting, and I was fortunate to have been there when those monks were walking on that roof.

I visited Mingun’s most striking pagoda in the heat of a Burmese noon, which ruled out using morning or evening light to help express my feelings about this temple. I decided to frame the pagoda within an archway to give a sense of depth and perspective to the image. Yet I did so with misgivings. Framing subjects through archways is a time-honored technique that, while not bad or wrong, has become a cliché. So I did what I usually do. I waited for a person to move into my foreground. A Burmese woman soon stopped for a moment in the shade of the arch to adjust her sun turban. As she reached out to wrap the turban around her head, I made this image. Now it tells a story. Because I have abstracted her by turning her into a silhouette, she becomes a symbol for every visitor. We can now imagine what it must feel like to walk out of the shade into the blistering heat to visit this almost 200-year-old Buddhist pagoda rising on its seven concentric terraces in the distance. Instead of making a cliché, I have made a photo that invites you to join this vicarious experience.

When shooting sunsets, I usually try to capture their effect on other things, rather just than shoot a sunset itself, which is one of the most common clichés in photography. I can even tolerate a cliché sunset if it incorporates a context such as an impressive ship or mountain range in the distance, or a powerful, abstract anchor in the foreground. I’ll also exempt lovely landscapes enhanced by the afterglow of a setting sun from my list of clichés – because such images are not about the sun itself, but rather the colorful effect of the setting sun.

Just shooting a setting sun because it is “pretty” is a tired excuse for an expressive image. We’ve seen those sunsets over and over again. Must we make still another one? So why did I even bother picking up my camera to shoot this sunset from the balcony of a cruise ship at sea somewhere off Lands End, England? What makes this particular sunset picture a non-cliché? Because I think it tells a story that appeals to the imagination. A tale about a wispy cloud that just wouldn’t give up. It kept clinging to this setting sun all the way down to the sea, reluctant to let it go and watch it finally slip below the horizon. That little cloud, which resembled an artist’s casual brush stroke, is good enough to make this into a story telling image and avoid the cliché. Yet just as this sunset was about to touch the horizon, something else happened. The round sun suddenly became an oval sun – with the little cloud splitting it into yellow and orange halves. It’s obviously a trick of nature, an illusion – since I’ve never noticed an oval sun before. The only thing I could do was to hold my shot until there was maximum tension -- created by the smallest possible amount of space – between the sun and the water. I exposed on the sun with my spot meter to turn the water black and give the sun and sky gain maximum color intensity. And I made sure that I did not split the picture exactly in half with the horizon. There is more water here than sky, which avoids that static, balanced look that plagues so many sunset shots. Adding the sun-warping illusion, the little cloud that wouldn’t give up, and my own photographic decisions together, I feel was able to lift this sunset out of the cliché department and put it into my keeper file. Do you agree? Is this a story-telling picture or just another sunset cliché? Please comment. Thanks.

The animals we see most frequently on our travels are usually dogs and cats. I choose not to use these sleeping dogs as subject matter in this picture, and instead go beyond the cliché by using them instead as context. I think this scene conveys the tranquility of a quiet neighborhood in this small Mexican town. These slumbering dogs are free to block the sidewalk, unmindful of the oncoming footsteps.