Holiday Pictures - An Exercise in Patience

I was looking through some material on the internet - NY Times has this amazing article series - 36 Hours in ______; so the latest installment was on Cork, Ireland...but more on this later...
Going through the slideshow of pictures, I realized something...Travel pictures need to be treated with patience...I think when we are out of the house and on a holiday, we feel this insatiable urge to capture each and every waking (and sometimes sleeping!) moment of the holiday...so we start to click from the moment we board the taxi to go to the airport/train station (suddenly the most hideous traffic becomes a picture subject!), boarding the mode of transport...right to the hotel's bathrooms, the drink that you just ordered...I could just go on and on....Of course one of the most important pictures are the landmarks that one sees...again the rush to remember them seems to be filled through photographs...and not through the most natural of lenses - our eyes - DUH!
How many times have we come back after a day's tour, and revisit the day through the pictures...do we actually remember what we really saw...I know how many times I lament about not having seen the Big Ben clearly...rather I was just keen to capture it all through my camera (not that the Big Ben is not a photogenic monument or even the Tiger that we spotted at Ranthambore) but I miss the actual view...

I think it has also got to do a lot with how we view vacations now - they are something to be raved about back home, normally pushed for VACATION TIME, so we try and crunch our itinerary, a check against numerous boxes that we go around our life with...though it may not be everybody's perspective but I figure there is some truth in it...

So anyway my point is that all this hurry also often does not lead to good, memorable pictures all the time... and though most of us cannot say our claim to fame is that of an ace photographer, given modern technology we can still get marvelous pictures (if we still insist on doing it thru photographs!) if we are just patient...take the time to look around where you are, absorb the surroundings and when you feel 'one' with the place, take a picture or two and you will realise that the view just looked even better :)