Travel Photography Tip - Avoiding Tourist Hotspots

If you're heading out on the road to get some great shots, or if you're just hoping to do a bit of shooting on vacation, you want to make sure you come home with something cool.  The one thing you definitely don't want is the same shot as everyone else.  The Eiffel Tower is great and all, but it's not easy to find a new approach to shooting the famous landmark.

Photographer Eric Fisher put together an incredibly helpful gallery using geotagged photographs.  Each picture is an overlay of a city, with red dots representing photographs taken by tourists (anyone in the city for less than a month) and red dots representing shots by locals.

The result is a nice map that gives away some favorite local spots and helps you avoid getting the same old shot.  When visiting Detroit, for example, you could stop in at Comerica Park or the old Tiger Stadium like everyone else does, or you could visit the strange and unique site of The Heidelberg Project for some photo opportunities you won't find anywhere else.

You can find the entire set, named "Locals and Tourists" on Fisher's Flickr page.