So I recently spent two weeks hiking and shooting around Banff/Jasper. The most famous place there is Moraine Lake; it's on the back of the Canadian $20 bill. It's famous for good reason, too: it's stunningly beautiful, with striking turquoise glacial water nestled against a series of beautiful peaks. However, you can drive right up to the water, and there's lodge on its shore, so it's basically a tourist hell in the high season. I went there once upon arrival in the park and spent half an hour walking around, the entire time surrounded by throngs of Asian tourists, so I swore it off. Skip to the end of the trip, and I have one sunset and a sunrise left before heading back to Calgary to fly home, and I decided fuck it, I should spend that time at Moraine Lake. So I did, and the shots I got there were among the best of the entire trip, and are some of the best I've seen of the lake, period.

One thing I do in a situation like this is to crawl all around a place like that, looking for vantage points that other people wouldn't think of. For example, in this one, the bottom of the camera lens is less than an inch off of the water, which apparently has the effect of reducing how blue the water looks. I guarantee you won't find another shot of Moraine Lake that looks like that. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people with cameras visit this place every year, I got a shot which is exceptional and unique.

I guess my philosophy regarding things like that is to shoot it anyways. Most tourists are using shitty cameras, and most of the ones who aren't have them on auto and don't know a thing about composition, etc, so I'm not really competing with them. I'd say 99.9% of the total shots of a touristy place are garbage, which means that if I take my time and look for the unusual vantage points, and apply what I know to getting good shots, most of the time, I'll still walk away with something I can be proud of.

There's another way to think about this as well. The position of every molecule in the entire universe is constantly changing, which means that even two sequential shots taken in burst mode are different in some way. You may not be able to see that difference without pixel-peeping, but it is there. Every photo ever taken is unique. Entropy, in this case, is your friend.