Sub Domains vs. Multiple Domains

I am going to be building a series of sites, all with the same theme. The only difference will be the country or geographical area that will be different. The sites are related to my photography site: www.photographycorner.com

Anyways, I was wondering if it would be better for me to buy a domain and use sub domains (like canada.mydomainhere.com & uk.mydomainhere.com) or would it be better for me to set it up like this:
mydomainhome.com
canadamydomain.com
ukmydomain.com
japanmydomain.com


Which way is better, and why?

 

Why not use subdomains of your current domain? i.e. canada.photographycorner dot com?

While google treats subdomains as separate domains, I have heard they are not subject to the sandbox (as long as the root domain isn't sandboxed). This makes sense as a sub-domain won't have a new creation date in whois or show an ownership change.

In any event, I would still go with a sub-domain as I haven't seen any negative effect (DP does this...i.e. forums.digitalpoint.com).

 

I don't want to use my current domain, as, even though the sites will be photography-related, I do want them to exist, more or less, as seperate projects. My only thought with not going with subdomains and going with several dozen full URLs, is that branding will be easier with the full URLs... I would have one main URL that would point to the list, but I think country.14letterdomain.com might not be as easy to remember as countrydomainhere.com - kwim?

 

make the subdomains and register the the [country]domain.com

that way your covered, and in the event you site receives a decent amount of traffic, you will be protected from people registering typos of your subdomains.