Location, Location, Location

Stephanie Austin - Sicily

A moment of humor for tourists is actually an everyday reality for this Sicilian villager. He explained that, chairs and extraneous front of the house furnishings must find their own resting place when not in use because of limited space. The front garden is nothing more than plants creeping up the wall and the front porch is the size of a doormat. But as is the Sicilian practice, people watching takes precedence over logistics. This chair, removed with a pole, is lowered after dinner when it is cool and raised up afterwards. Clearly, this man knows what's important to him.

Second Place

La Alhambra

Rebecca Smith - Granada, Spain

It is hard to take an original photo in a place so often photographed. The Alhambra and this pool have become the quintessential image of Granada and represent to the world my home of six months. This is not fair. The Alhambra is too beautiful to be marketed so; it is too new and pure every moment to be captured on a postcard and sent with a 79-cent stamp in the mail, so I took this photo for you, kneeling on the cold marble where the sultans of Granada stood, where Isabel and Ferdinand changed the history of Spain forever.

Locks

Maddie Coffman - Florence, Italy

Near the end of May a good friend from home came to visit me in Paris and we took a train down to Florence, Italy for five days. While there we saw locks in souvenir stands and thought it was very odd until we walked along the Arno and found these chains covered in locks. The barriers between the sidewalk and road had become the place for traveling couples to leave their mark and pronounce their love. I found many times while traveling that the fun little details like this make wonderful cities even more memorable.

Spice Seller

Lindsay Kalama-Smith - Urgut, Uzbekistan

I was visiting a massive bazaar in Urgut with some fellow travelers, and as foreigners we stuck out from the crowd. Men, women, and children called "Hello!" and inquired where we were from. Some merchants were very friendly, and struck up conversation in their pseudo-English-Russian-Uzbek, laughing with us at our mutual confusion. We stopped on our way to the roasting shashlik in front of this friendly spice merchant, who begged me to take a photograph of him. Since most Uzbeks are known for their stoic-faced photos, I was surprised and delighted when he smiled at me through the lens. He pulled his neighbor (the vegetable seller behind him with the pink scarf) and made her pose as well, gold teeth and all. His hat is the traditional Uzbek man's hat, worn during prayer but often on the street as well. I was fascinated by these hats and asked everyone I could what they meant, and why they all looked the same. It's the way it's always been, I was told. Ah, typical Uzbek logic. Don't the purple garlic cloves look as if they smell delicious?

Third Place

Betwixt the Black Sands

Lindsay Kalama-Smith - Karakyl Desert, Uzbekistan

I adore this photograph mainly because it was a lucky chance. I was taking a rest in a yurt camp after climbing some stone fortresses in the Karakyl desert, and spied a herd of camels close by. They were grazing peaceably and headed very swiftly toward the nearby lake. I was very hot, a little sun burnt, and brushing the black sand off my face, but when I saw him I froze, gasped, and yanked out my camera. Since I adore camels, but had heard that most of them were found up north toward Karakalpakstan, I considered myself very lucky to chance upon these few. It was pure beauty to photograph this fellow in the gap between two beautiful yurts.

Honorable Mentions

Yin and Yang

Stephanie Austin - France

The water breaker splits this bay into a yin and yang division that immediately caught my eye as I was walking through this French coastal town. The contrast of calm and angry elements separated and also caused by the man made breaker in the middle reminded me of how much humans impact the world. Everything we do has an affect. Sometimes we have a calming effect, and other times our efforts turn out a little rough and cause a bit more agitation than we intended.

The Contemplative Monkey

Leah Congdon - Gibraltar

This picture was taken on the Rock of Gibraltar, the place that is home to the only native primates in Europe (besides humans). The monkeys were everywhere you looked and just seemed to be posing for photos (at least until they tried to steal the food from your bag). This particular monkey struck me as unusually contemplative, staring out into the distance, across the strait, towards the continent of Africa, probably the home of his distant ancestors, and pondering his existence.

Carousel

Maddie Coffman - Rennes, France

Before moving to Paris I visited a friend who had been an exchange student with my family a few years before who lived in Rennes, a city in the province of Bretagne. This picture is of the carousel in the center of town (something I soon learned is common in many French cities) very near her apartment. The photo ended up off kilter and full of motion, very much the way I felt for most of my semester abroad. The emotions changed during my time there but the feeling of constant change never left.

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Molly Lewis - Chefchaouen, Morocco

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Luis Mancheno - Oregon Coast