Travography - Travel Writing and Photography

If you ask me, travel writing is supposed to be informative and entertaining. You either read it for a bit of fun and maybe a giggle, or for serious research into your next holiday that you've scrimped and saved for all year. It doesn't help if every place you read about is described by the same dull and repetitious words. Chances are the place is as equally dull and unremarkable.

If you're a travel writer, copywriter or public relations scribe, then you are forever dipping into the lexicon of adjectives and adverbs trying to find a new twist on an old subject. Trotting out the same old tripe is not going to impress anyone anymore.

Here are some of the most popular and overused cliches in the travel writing business and what they probably really mean. I've included some real life examples for your entertainment. Why change the names? They wrote it.



Luxury - we make the beds and do the cooking.

Luxury and 'luxurious' are constantly changing and relative terms.…

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Holy jumpin' JPEGs Batman!

Anyone who has tried to get or send images has faced this dilemma.

What file type is best?

What's the difference anyway? Tiff, Gif, Biff! who cares?

Truth is, there is a world of difference in the various file types and no quicker way to send an editor into a psychotic fury than give him or her the wrong one on deadline.



Here's a quick-and-dirty rundown of the most common image file types and where it's best to use them.

JPEG

Named after the Joint Photographic Experts Group who created this standard of photographic computer file which first appeared on computers back in the early '90s.

It's really clever because when you create the file (either in the camera or with computer software) you can specify how much compression (quality) you think you need. On a scale of 1-100, 100 being virtually no compression and super quality.

JPEGs (.jpg or .jpeg) files travel really well over email and file transfer. You can have really big images (in p…