Sam Chadwick: Cuba & More

Photo © Sam Chadwick-All Rights Reserved

Sam Chadwick is a travel photographer and a Hell's Kitchen (NYC) resident where he works on a variety of photographic projects and planning his next photographic travels.

He started photography as a main means of documenting his 5-day ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro. Since then, he traveled to over 50 countries, creating a large collection of images of people, cultures and environments. In 2007, he reached the semi-finals of the Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and his images have appeared on Reuters.

You can see his many galleries on his website, from Guatemala, Belize, Nepal, Costa Rica, East Africa and my favorite Cuba.

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Jan Sochor: The Palo In Cuba

Photo © Jan Sochor -All Rights Reserved
Jan Sochor is a freelance photographer, working between South America and Europe. He lived and worked in Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Spain and the Czech Republic during the past five years. His photographs and stories have appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers and websites, including Sunday Times, National Geographic, Reuters, Burn magazine, Foto8, 100Eyes, UNESCO, Boston Review, PDN online,and others.

In this 3 minutes audio-slideshow, Jan has now focused his lenses on the adherents of the Palo religion, also known as Las Reglas de Congo. Palo is a syncretic religion which developed in Cuba amongst Central African slaves. Due to forced evangelicalism, Palo adherents gave their deities names from the Christian faith to continue their spiritual tradition.

Palo's main tenets are the veneration of ancestors' spirits, and belief in natural powers. The Palo pantheon starts at the creator god, Nzambi.

Highly recommended viewing for those of us who document, and are interested in, global spiritual traditions.

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Robert Caplin: Cuban Life

© 2009 Robert Caplin-All Rights Reserved
I came across Robert Caplin's work through a recent interview published in The New York Times' Frugal Traveler. Moving from this interview to his website, I immediately saw that much of his work was typically that of a quintessential travel photographer.

Caplin started out in Athens, Ohio, with a Nikon N50 film camera, but subsequently moved over to Canon, currently crams his expensive gear into a cheap bag and is enamored of one of the least sophisticated cameras on the market today: the iPhone.

He is also a full-time freelance editorial, corporate and portrait photographer based in New York City, and works regularly with The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News, and has also been published in the National Geographic.

It's been a while that this blog hasn't seen work from Cuba, and Caplin's lovely work on Cuban Life fills this gap. Drop by and it will transport you to the streets of Havana. If only there was an audio track of Cuban Son!!!

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Landon Nordeman: The Sugar Train (Cuba)

The Atlantic magazine recently featured this slideshow (they call it video) of photographs by Landon Nordeman during a train journey in Cuba.

It's accompanied by an evocatively written article by Michael Scott Moore titled The 12:39 To Matanzas, which I enjoyed. However, I can't say the same of the slideshow. Clearly cobbled together by someone with an inordinate affection for panning and camera movements, I don't think I've seen a single frame in the slideshow (or video) that doesn't have the annoying pan from one side to the other, or going from one direction to the other, without a real reason for the movement.

I always start off my multimedia classes and workshops by telling participants to keep their projects simple, and to use effects sparingly, and only when it's absolutely required to underscore a visual point. In fact, I'll use this slideshow to demonstrate to my future classes what not to do. As to the use of a sound track from a Buena Vista Club album, ambient sound recorded in the train, peoples' voices, perhaps an impromptu song by a passenger...would have helped turn this feature around. Heck, what about the guy with the accordion in the train?

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