The best travel photos: 2011 contest winners

We asked you to hit us with your best shot, and that is what you did. About 2,400 amateur shutterbugs answered the call for entries in our annual reader travel photo contest.

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Winner: Lisa Schwerin, San Jose, Calif. It was a lovely summer day when Schwerin and her husband, visiting his home town of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, drove past a spot that he remembered from his childhood, where a lone tree stood in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by grass and cornfields. When she snapped the photo, “the sun was setting, the lighting was perfect, and the colors were gorgeous,” Schwerin said. The 27-year-old auditor was taken with the way the sunset lit up the path through the field and how the image evokes the “beauty and peacefulness” of Iowa. “I knew immediately it was going to be a great photo,” she said.

Lisa Schwerin /

Second place: Katya Gelfand, St. Petersburg, Russia. Standing on a busy corner in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya, and surrounded by curious children begging her to take their picture, our second-place winner noticed one little girl standing apart from the group. She was peering through an iron fence’s gate into the local schoolyard, where some boys were playing soccer.

Katya Gelfand

Third place: Newton More, Washington. The lab scientist, who is “fascinated with architectural detail, especially in stonework aged by time,” was visiting Geneva’s Hotel de Ville, or city hall, when he noticed that a stairwell just off the main courtyard of the elegant old building was softly lit by an early-fall sun.

Newton More

Fourth place: Marc Tkach, Alexandria. Tkach took his haunting photo this past fall in the diamond-mining ghost town of Kolmannskop, Namibia, a place the civil engineer found “both unsettling and very calming” — calming because of the silence, broken only by the wind, but unsettling because the town is slowly being consumed by sand.

Marc Tkach

Alexander C. Kafka, Bethesda. The 47-year-old editor, wrapping up an exhausting work trip to Ann Arbor, Mich., rushed to the Detroit airport to make his flight back to Washington, only to realize that he had about an hour before boarding. “My feeling of simultaneous stress and relief was kind of echoed in this scene before me, with silhouetted business people talking on their phones, reflected in this weirdly incongruent, tranquil fountain, with the nose of a plane in the background, both majestic and slightly threatening.”

Alexander Kafka

Damon Collie, Silver Spring. Touring the ancient city of Fatehpur Sikir on a 10-day trip to India with his wife, Collie watched a young woman pose for her boyfriend at the top of a set of stairs. As she walked carefully down, Collie snapped his own shot, aiming to capture “the contrast of the colorful dress of the woman against the backdrop of the ancient red fort.”

Damon Collie

Ed Christesen, Fairfax Station. Arriving on Bodie Island, N.C., in May to photograph its famous lighthouse, Christesen noticed smoke from a large peat fire billowing in from the west. The IT manager, 54, waited until the smoke had filled the sky before taking the shot.

Ed Christesen

Chris Blackshear, Washington. Blackshear was pedaling around Manhattan during a June visit when he saw the old pilings that rise out of the water near the Chelsea section of the bike path. They struck him as “a bit of calm in the busy city,” and he thought they would make a nice picture “if I could eliminate details from the water, leaving just the pilings and the far buildings.”

Chris Blackshear

Josephine Bingler, New Orleans. Dusk was approaching when Bingler, on a camel ride through Morocco’s Erg Chebbi sand dunes with her mother and sister, pulled out a camera to snap a photo as the light turned the Saharan sands to a rich gold and amber and cast elongated shadows on the dunes.

Josephine Bingler

Blake Congdon, Arlington County. The State Department employee was working on a survey of a camp of internally displaced persons in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in November when an NGO worker came around to distribute antibacterial soap during the cholera epidemic. Congdon, 30, noticed two young girls watching their mother in line, fighting for a bar of soap, and was struck by their listless expressions.

Blake Congdon

Lila Lecuire, Arlington County. Lecuire was on a four-wheel-drive tour with her husband at Dubai’s Al Maha desert resort in September when she spotted this solitary oryx climbing a sand dune. The wind was so strong that nobody wanted to open the windows, but Lecuire got the driver to pause, letting her jump out with her camera.

Lila Lecuire

Mitchell Frye, Brooklyn, N.Y. Frye was traveling and working in Texas when he found Bill's Books in Cleburne. He took this photo of Bill outside his store in August 2010.

Mitchell Frye

Christian DeBaun, Charlottesville. DeBaun took this photo in November at the San Telmo Street fair in Buenos Aires. “This guy was the quintessential archetype,” DeBaun said.

Christian DeBaun

Larry Dean. This photo was taken in August 2010 at Spirit Island, in Jasper National Park in Alberta.

Larry Dean

Judy Bonderman, Washington. This photo was taken on May 24 on Santiago (James) Island in the Galapagos. The endemic marine iguanas are common throughout the Galapagos archipelago. “I was enchanted by their seemingly social nature as they crowded together on lava rocks in the sun, sharing space with brightly colored sally lightfoot crabs,” Bonderman said.

Judy Bonderman

Judy Graham, McLean. This photo was taken on March 4 in the Upper Antelope Canyon Navajo Reservation in Arizona.

Judy Graham

Aliaksandr Rautsenka, Minsk, Belarus. This photo was taken after a spring rain in 2011. The part of town was built while the country was part of the USSR.

Aliaksandr Rautsenka

Thejas Jagannath, Alexandria. "Making of Madonna!!" This photo was taken during Jagannath’s first trip to New York City, in September. The young girl struck a couple of rock-star poses for her mom's camera in front of Times Square.

Thejas Jagannath

Thomas E. Marchessault, Gaithersburg. This photo was taken Oct. 13 in Reed Flute Caves, in Guilin, China.

Thomas E. Marchessault

Anna Razhentsova Borisov, Minsk region, Belarus. This photo was taken in Vicenza, Italy, on Feb. 18.

Anna Razhentsova

Ira Robbins, Bethesda. Giraffes at sunset in Maasai Mara, Kenya, taken Aug. 1, 2010.

Ira Robbins

Bobby Sudekum, Winnetka, Ill. This photo was taken Jan. 4 in Jackson Hole, Wyo., late at night. The pillars of colors are lights from the town.

Bobby Sudekum

Richard Talley, Bethesda. Giacomo Puccini, the opera composer, lived in a villa in Torre del Lago, Italy. It faces this pier on the lake. The photograph was taken on the morning of May 23.

Richard Talley

Katherine Vernot-Jonas, Washington. Uchisar is not only mystical ancient town at the highest point in the region of Cappadocia in Turkey. This photo was taken from a hotel room in Uchisar at 6:30 a.m. June 28 as more than 40 hot-air balloons ascended in unison.

Katherine Vernot-Jonas

Ellen Morrison Yarborough, Rose Valley, Pa. This photo was taken in February in Marrakesh, Morocco. Yarborough and her children flew to Marrakesh for a few days from their then-home in France. In a courtyard market near the Kasbah, they saw an elderly man at his sewing machine. “My 7-year-old was enthralled by him, so I took the photo for her. Turned out to be one of my favorite photos from the trip,” Yarborough said.

Ellen Morrison Yarborough

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