Canon 7D Is Here...Well, Almost.

I've finally decided to replace my trusted and loyal (but ageing) Canon 1D Mark II with a Canon 7D. I hummed and hawed about whether to get the Canon 1D Mark IV, but balked at its price ($4900ish) and its weight....I thought of getting a second Canon 5D Mark II but wanted a much faster fps rate...and seeing a Canon instant rebate of $100 on the 7D, I jumped at it and now have it.

Well, I should say I almost have it, since although it's physically here I can't touch it for another few days. It's technically a birthday gift so it's in the no-touch zone until then.

I think I took the right decision in choosing the 7D. It's light in comparison to the 1D models, and its smaller sensor doesn't really bother me, especially since I have the 5D Mark II's full frame when I need it. The fast fps rate of the 7D will come in handy during festivals, religious rituals, ethnic celebrations...wherever there's action.

Next step? It might be either the Zacuto Optical Viewfinder or the more affordable LCD Viewfinder LCDVF. Santa will decide.

Read more »

Hamid Sardar: Mongolia

Hamid Sardar-Afkhami is a photographer and a scholar of Tibetan and Mongol languages with a Ph.D. from Harvard University. After moving to Nepal in the late 1980’s and exploring Tibet and the Himalayas for more than a decade, he traveled to Outer Mongolia, and determined to document its nomadic culture by setting a mobile studio ger camp in Mongolia. With his arsenal of cameras and different formats, he mounts yearly expeditions into the Mongolian outback to document her nomadic traditions.

Apart from the two movie documentaries (these are not short, and run for almost an hour), take a look at Hamid's photographic gallery titled Dark Heavens, which has color and platinum portfolios.

Photo © Hamid Sardar-All Rights Reserved

Impressive, huh? Especially since Hamid is able to combine the two imagery disciplines so well.

I was introduced to Hamid Sardar's work and website through The Empty Quarter Gallery newsletter.

Read more »

Storyboard Doodles

Planning a multimedia photo essay or audio slideshow needs a sort of bird's eye view of the project as a whole, and that's what storyboards are essentially supposed to do. Storyboards help to pre-visualizing the photo essay's sequencing, and act as blueprints for the project.

The above photo shows my rather elementary storyboard for one my recent Bali audio slideshow Ngaben: Cremation Ceremony, which has the sequencing of images and audio clips, timing, etc.

Naturally, it would have been more professional/efficient to use a proper storyboard template downloaded from the web, but where's the fun in that!?

Read more »

Amira Al-Sharif: Call For Photo Backers

Amira Al-Sharif was born in Saudi Arabia and currently lives in Yemen. Both of these are extremely conservative societies, and being a female photojournalist is practically unheard of. Amira has had to struggle for an education, and is the first person in her family to graduate from university.

She attended The Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Istanbul last June, and was the only representative of her native Yemen to be there. She not only loves photography and photojournalism, but is a talented photographer. She attended Stephanie Sinclair's class...possibly one the toughest of the workshop, and did well.

She has just been accepted at the International Center of Photography in New York City, and will soon begin a photography project there documenting lives of young American women seen from her perspective.

Through Kickstarter, she needs backers to fund her project...will you please be one of them?

It doesn't have to be much...and you'll feel really good when you back her up.

Read more »

Reem Al-Faisal: The Holy Cities

Photo © Reem Al-Faisal-All Rights Reserved

An email newsletter from The Empty Quarter Gallery introduced me to Reem Al-Faisal who's a Saudi photographer. She started her career in 1994, and has exhibited her work in various galleries in Saudi Arabia, showcased at the Opera House in Cairo and at the University of Art and Design in Beijing. She also showed her works in various galleries in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands, and in exhibitions at the Arab World Institute and the Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris.

Her photographs are in various public and corporate collections such as The National Museum of Seoul, Korea, and Sakakin Center in Ram Allah, Palestine.

Interestingly, Al-Faisal is also one of the first women to be granted permission to photograph in the holy cities of Makkah and Al-Medinah. This is certainly an unusual privilege.

Many of us involved in the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop lament the dearth of Arab female photographers, and being introduced to the work of Reem Al-Faisal is very welcome.

Luminous Lint also has many of Al-Faisal's photographs.

Read more »

Cathy Scholl: Tribes of Rajasthan & Gujarat

Photo © Cathy Scholl-All Rights Reserved

Cathy Scholl is a photographer and a participant in my Tribes of Rajasthan & Gujarat Photo~Expedition, which took place earlier this year between January 23 and February 7, 2010. She has traveled to India no less than 13 times, as well as to Nepal, Bhutan, and Burma.

Her photographs were exhibited in galleries throughout Southern California. In addition to winning awards, her work was selected to hang in juried exhibitions curated by leading experts in the field of photography, such as Arthur Ollman, founding director of the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego.Cathy is also an active member in the Burn magazine community, which is curated by David Alan Harvey

Photo © Cathy Scholl -All Rights Reserved

Following her participation in my photo~expedition, Cathy continued to Haridwar where she also photographed at the Kumbh Mela. I chose these photographs made during the photo~expedition from her blog More Than Just A Pretty Picture...an appropriate title as Cathy's style is more inclined towards documentary travel photography, and she eschews cookie-cutter travel photographs.

Photo © Cathy Scholl -All Rights Reserved

The top photograph is of a Gujarati villager and her child, made in one of the countless villages we visited during the photo~expedition. The middle photograph was made in Baneshwar, during a pind daan ceremony which extends for about a week, and during which the tribal people of Rajasthan and Gujarat come to remember their dead....notice how Cathy framed the characters in this photograph.

The third photograph was made in a grain distribution room in the village of Poshina, where tribals and villagers receive their subsidized rations. 

Read more »

Next Week on The Travel Photographer

I had to rejig my posts this past week to diversify the posts a bit, so I omitted some I had originally planned to feature.

For the week starting Monday October 11, I have posts on:

1. A poignant multimedia project involving the treatment of Women In India, which I planned to post last week.
2. The work of a documentary photographer featuring daily life along the Ganges, that I also wanted to post last week.
3. The work of a Saudi Arabian female photographer, whose work (and herself) shatters all stereotypes.
4. The very interesting work of a photographer and a scholar of Tibetan and Mongol languages on Mongolian cultures.
5. A photo essay on the Tibetans living in India.

Read more »

Alixandra Fazzina: UNCHR Interview

This interview is really worth watching and reflecting on.

In July 2010, British photo-journalist Alixandra Fazzina was awarded the annual UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award as a recognition of her work documenting the often overlooked consequences of war. In this video by UNCHR, she speaks about the plight of the uprooted.  She traveled to some of the worst hit areas in Pakistan where she saw first hand the devastation caused by the floods, and reminds us that refugees are human beings too.

UNHCR cares for more than 40 million uprooted people.

Alixandra Fazzina, who's based in Pakistan, is a member of the NOOR foundation and photo agency.

Read more »

Western Digital iPad App

Hmmmm.....that's interesting.

Western Digital announced a free photo viewing application called WD Photos for the iPad that works with its line of external storage products like the My Book World Edition, My Book Live, and WD ShareSpace.  The app is said to allow the user to access up to 285,000 images placed in a shared folder.

The advantage in this is that saved images can be accessed using the app from anywhere through a web connection. The benefits to photographers are obvious...for instance, while traveling I could show my portfolio to anyone in the world on my iPad using this app. The app has pinch and zoom functionality,  and the images can be viewed in 1024 x 768 resolution on the iPad.

However,  wouldn't it be phenomenal if the iPad could connect to a portable external drive, on which I could download my travel photographs as I made them in the field? Once the photographs were saved on the portable drive, I could then use this app to access them (at least the jpegs) through a web connection.

Read more »

NPR: Tibet 100 Years Ago

Photo Courtesy Bonhams

NPR's The Picture Show recently reported that a part of Tibet's history recorded through old photographs was auctioned in London. The photographs (consisting of 70 platinum prints and 2 folding panoramas) were taken by British political officer John Claude White during a 1903 British mission to Tibet, and were sold for £38,400 (or about $60,000).

I love news like that because it fuses history (military), Asia, adventurism and photography. John Claude White was part of the British expedition led by Francis Younghusband who, under orders from George Curzon, was to settle disputes over the Sikkim-Tibet border. In reality, the expedition was to establish British hegemony in Tibet, and morphed into an invasion and occupation of Tibet. This was one of the many chess pieces in The Great Game between Great Britain and Russia to control Central Asia.

Younghusband is subject of a well-documented biography by Patrick French, titled The Last Imperial Adventurer. A fascinating man (comparable in my view to Sir Richard Francis Burton...another incredible adventurer), Younghusband is said to have experienced revelatory visions in the mountains of Tibet, toyed with telepathy in Kashmir, and eventually espoused a sort of atheism, even though he was brought up as an Evangelical Christian.

I always think photojournalists (especially those who work in Iraq and Afghanistan) to read up on history instead of believing the crap we see on television...they'll have a better grasp of what's still going on. The Last Imperial Adventurer is one of those books.

I know...I may be wasting my breath.

Read more »