[Photography & GIS] - Popular Photo Spots in Hokkaido, Japan - 2019 Summer Special

13 June 2019 - Planning your mid year trip to Hokkaido and not sure where to visit? This post may share some new insights for your itinerary considerations. Welcome to the summer special of the Popular Photo Spots blog series, a spatial data science initiative that we have started some time ago this year. The series explore the concept of data-driven photography through visualizing location-enabled photograph data from the Flickr photographic community in various cities using GIS and spatial mapping techniques, to highlight trendy spots good for photographic activities which photographers, locals or on holidays alike, may consider visiting in the future. If you have missed out the previous posts from our series do check them out at the links belo

Today we are making a special coverage just on Hokkaido, mainly because in July I will be travelling there for a short vacation, and as a photographer visiting there for the first time, I am interested to find out more about the specific spots or hangout places other photographers have been to during their journey. And as a free and easy traveller I sometimes find most online guides or travel articles lacking a spatial perspective that makes route planning a troublesome task. As I will have to plan the trip regardless, so I decided to make this web map as an alternative, especially for itinerary planning as commuting in Hokkaido may be more challenging than in other urbanized parts of Japan. As such this post will be slightly different than others in the series, besides mapping the photo spots, I will also try to include additional information for itinerary planning and cover more useful details from a traveller's perspective, hope these will be relevant to your future trip as well.