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...

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...

An ambitious program encourages children from around the world to share their cultural heritage with one another.

The work of photographer Phil Borges is instantly recognizable: selectively toned, medium-format portraits of people in indigenous and tribal cultures set against sweeping black-and-white landscapes. These photographs are remarkable because they clearly are collaborative works; his subjects engage the viewer with gazes so direct that the images appear to be authored just as much by...

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...

The Internet has always held the promise of bridging the gap between diverse cultures, but so far most of the information seems to have flowed in one direction: from developed nations in the West, and particularly North America, to the rest of the world. "The validity of information that flows from indigenous cultures towards us is as strong as the other way around," says Chris Rainier, a photojournalist for National Geographic Traveler magazine and cofounder of Cultures on the Edge (cultureontheedge.com), a web site designed to share information between disparate cultures around the world...

With much of the world still preoccupied with terrorism, the exotic travel industry in the post-9/11 world has taken its lumpos of late. Are we due for a resurgence in popularity?

No question about it - the U.S. travel industry has taken major hits in the last year and a half. The economy was already heading south in 2001 when the events of Sept. 11 transformed attitudes about the safety of air travel in the space of a single morning.

In 2002 we saw increased violence in the Middle East, terrorist bombings in....