Real Stories Make Real Websites
Stories may make websites. However, it takes real stories to make real websites. We always wanted Mapsofworld.com to be a real website, not just a job work of armchair journalists. Mapsofworld has hundreds of photographs, which have been specially commissioned. It also has hundreds of photographs taken by our team members while they were away on their private trips to different parts of the world. There are lots of real stories, which have helped Mapsofworld evolve into what it is today, and I have one such behind-the-scenes story to share with you. Yes, the story of the making of Street Food in Istanbul – a photo-blog.
Every year Mapsofworld used to participate in the Frankfurt Book Fair. So, we had lots and lots of photographs of Frankfurt but then there is a lot of world between New Delhi and Frankfurt, which we had never covered. We decided to check that out too.
Istanbul is en-route and it is famed for its street food as much as it is famed for its majestic monuments and living history. Istanbul became my camp destination. I heard myself saying, come cameras, come tripods, come batteries and come lights, we have a job to do and the job was to walk and walk. Over four days, I walked over 30 miles in Istanbul, from street to street, from building to building, from mosque to mosque, from monument to monument and from one street food cart to another. It was a never-ending and a hyper active walk. A walk, which I am going to remember for a very long time to come.
There is an old saying, if you wish to know a city, make sure you see it wake up and make sure you see it go to sleep. I did the same, I know how Istanbul wakes up and how it sleeps and how it fishes on Galata Bridge in between. Four days and three thousand photographs later, I could tell myself that being obese has nothing to do with not being able to walk. Period.
Walking on streets with your cameras all over you makes you look seriously funny, but soon people understand that you are on a job and you are not just some odd tourist. They come forward and form a team for you. During the Istanbul project, many locals volunteered help. They showed me angles to take and they told me places to go. They showed me the local routes to reach my destination quicker and they volunteered to carry my bags on uphill climb and at times without knowing my language.
At the end of the project, Mapsofworld was not just richer by 3,000 photographs, it was richer by ‘being there, done that.’ It was richer by ensuring it captures and shows the real Istanbul, and it talks about what it has seen.
To the whole team of Mapsofworld, it gives a good feeling that what we show to thousands of people is not a rehash, repurposed, reprocessed content. It is something exclusive, our own, and that is how we want to go about. Photograph by photograph, word by word.
If you are keen to know, what these walks produced, here is the article – http://www.mapsofworld.com/travel/blog/tours/istanbul-street-food
In the meanwhile, we are busy as always making a Real Website for Real People like you.