Remember the days when huge Hawaiian families greeted friends arriving at Honolulu's airport from the mainland? Right out on the parking ramp next to the aircraft, they would sing and dance, often bestowing kisses and leis on all who stopped to enjoy the show. It was a fun and wonderful time for travel and photography.

Travel photographers kissed those days goodbye a long time ago.

Today we're greeted in airports by numerous security challenges and crowds of unhappy travelers who seem to be carrying all their worldly possessions with them.

Globetrotting isn't much fun for photographers with heavy bags of delicate equipment. We can't park close to the terminal, and when we finally get to a ticket counter, there are a thousand people ahead...

The Society of American Travel Writers has named Blaine Harrington, of Littleton, Colo., Travel Photographer of the Year for the second year in a row. Harrington's images can be seen at blaineharrington.photoshelter.com.

Travel photographer Blaine Harrington makes an enormous effort to research the many countries he visits, but what he likes best is sharing his experiences.

If you run into Blaine Harrington — maybe in an airport — do him a favor and ask him where he's been lately. He says he comes back from globetrotting photo shoots excited to share his experiences. That exuberance comes through the lens into award-winning photographs that have kept him happily in the business of travel photography for many years. It's a career that's equal parts adventure, good planning and desire to...

We were recently invited to sit in on a friend's travel writing seminar. He began with a warning to the audience: "Stop! Get out while there's still time — that is, unless you already have a good retirement income or you're a trust-fund baby."

Acquaintances tell us what a thrilling career we've chosen, that they, too, love to travel, can write well and have taken some nice shots with their digital cameras. They want to know how to make money by writing about their travels.

As all professional travel writers and photographers know, although our jobs may appear to be glamorous, they're not all fun and games. By now, we've developed a standard response...

One survivor described the wall of water as "a big black cobra" coming toward him from behind. From about a kilometer away, the man said, it looked higher than the minarets at a nearby mosque in Banda Aceh.

After being knocked off his bicycle by the 9.3-magnitude earthquake on the morning of Dec. 26, 2004, the man instinctively started running with his two young kids. He hadn't even imagined that a deadly wave was coming, but he had happened to run away from the coast. The unconscious decision ended up saving their lives; after sprinting inland for about five kilometers, grabbing his childrens' arms the whole way, the water rushed past...

Office: Littleton, Colo.

(agpix.com/bharrington.com)

Gear: Nikon F100 and F4 bodies, Nikkor 20-35, 35-70 and 80-200mm zooms; Nikon flash and Lumedynes; Bogen carbon fiber tripods.

Film: Primarily Fuji slide films, including Velvia, Velvia 100...

He's climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He's been placed under house arrest in Somalia. He's crossed the Sahara Desert, circumnavigated the world and retraced the ancient Silk Road from Istanbul to China, all by motorcycle.

He became the first motorcyclist to ride from South America to North America through Panama's Darien Gap, a notorious 80-mile stretch of almost impenetrable trails throughbug-filled jungle and swamp. After three weeks in the Gap, he arrived in Panama City with broken bones and infected legs.

He has hung out the window of a helicopter over rough Norwegian seas, photographing rescues of crews on sinking ships. "We flew for four to five hours with one guy who broke his back and they couldn't give him medication — it was agonizing," remembers Helge Pedersen, a Seattle photojournalist and traveling...

Karen Huntt and Michele Westmorland have received sponsorship for a new project called "Headhunt Revisited." The project will celebrate the achievements of artist/explorers Caroline Mytinger and Margaret Warner, who chronicled various cultures in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in the 1920s.

Westmoreland and Huntt plan to retrace the steps of the pioneering women and document the changes that have occurred through...

An enormous appetite for learning about other cultures has fueled Lindsay Hebberd's passion for photographing exotic locales, especially in her beloved India and Indonesia.

In a tiny village in the remote Ryukyu Islands of Japan, intrepid travel photographer Lindsay Hebberd is trying to communicate. She is fluent in Spanish and knows several other languages, including a little Japanese. But her attempts to convey through word and gesture that she wants to photograph local culture are met with staid looks from the villagers, who are unaccustomed to such physical expression.

During encounters like these, Hebberd always goes to great lengths to put people at ease and treat them with respect. "It's important to make people comfortable with you and your camera," she says. "You can't steal a good portrait. I always remind myself that I am a guest and, to them, I am a representative...