Photo: Gaile Martinenaite - Life-Framer-World-Traveler With festivities taking place below idyllic hand-painted village scenes and a perfect sky, it provides an interesting comment on the real and the artificial, community and capitalism, while offering fun diversion exploring all of the people and details that the photographer captures in crisp focus.Ī stop along Route 66, the highway slicing the United States in half from Los Angeles to Chicago. This busy, pastel-toned aerial shot in a packed beer hall, is a visual feast, offering an insight into the curious ways we celebrate tradition and spend our leisure time. The record was established in 2014 when 7.7 million liters were served. Large quantities of Oktoberfest Beer are consumed during the celebration. Other cities across the world also hold Oktoberfest celebrations that modeled after the original Munich event. Locally, it’s called d'Wiesn and its an important part of Bavarian culture, having been held since the year 1810. The Oktoberfest, an annual 16-to-18 day folk festival running from mid-September to around the first Sunday in October in Munich, Germany, is the world's largest festival, featuring a beer fest and a traveling fun fair that attracts more than six million international and national visitors. Finalist Photo: Veronika K Ko - Life-Framer-World-Traveler With the drawn out shadows and lone silhouetted figure, it’s truly hypnotic, on first glance as if the staircase is jutting above low clouds. Taken from a raised viewpoint by drone against a setting sun, it maximizes the sense of scale and the tire-marked texture of the salt flats. This photo elevates the stairway beyond a simple tourist snapshot. Travel affords us the opportunity to see spectacular architecture, art work and monuments, and so travel photographers have to be aware of a certain truth: that an image of a spectacular thing isn’t always a spectacular image. This stairs to nowhere, a sculpture by artist Gastón Ugalde, purely made of salt, is supposed to represent 'the passage to the sky.' “During wet season, the whole salar is a huge mirror and you can't tell the difference between the ground and the sky,” the photographer explains. It was taken in the Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia,the world’s largest salt flat, a legacy from a prehistoric lake that went dry, leaving behind a nearly 11,000-square-kilometer landscape of bright-white salt, rock formations and cacti-studded islands.

Finalist Photo: Philip Marshall - Life-Framer-World-Traveler Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia, the world’s largest salt flat.

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