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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Update on the Fujifilm Finepix X100 Rangefinder

WIRED's Gadget Lab has blogged on Fujifilm's new details of its forthcoming X100, which looks like an old-style 35mm rangefinder but is really a hybrid because it sports a mix of an optical and electronic viewfinder.

For those who haven't seen my earlier blog post on this hot baby, it's a camera I want ....and it's a real shame that it's not available in retail stores until March 2011. What's the payback for having been really good all year if Santa can only deliver this in March or later???

In any event, the X100 has a 12.3MP APS-C sensor, and a non-removable 23mm (35mm equivalent) ƒ2 lens.  It has manual focus (contradicting one of my discussions with a fellow photographer a few days ago), and will cost about $1000.

WIRED seems to think that the fixed lens might be a drawback when compared to Micro Four Thirds cameras...I dont know. I have the Panasonic GF1 with the sweet 20mm f1.7mm lens, and I haven't felt the need to have another focal length when I use it.

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Jeroens Toirkens: Nomads

Photo © Jeroens Toirlens-All Rights Reserved

 Jeroen Toirkens is a Dutch freelance photographer who studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague. His work mainly consists documentary photography for various clients like NGO’s and governmental institutions in health care and infrastructure. but he also initiated a project called Nomadslife, in which he documents the life of nomadic peoples on the Northern Hemisphere.

His website features a number of galleries of nomads in Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Finland, Russia, Mongolia, Morocco and Greenland. These small nomadic cultures have unfamiliar names such as the Dukha,  Khalkh, Yoruk, Altai and Nenets while others such as the Inuits, Berbers, Kazakh and Sami are better known.

I liked the photographs of the Dukha, a small culture of reindeer herders living in northern Mongolia. Only 44 Dukha families remain, totaling somewhere between 200 and 400 people. They ride, breed, milk, and live off reindeer. Their way of life is endangered and they survive largely by selling their crafts to tourists and riding their domesticated reindeer.

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Trances At Sufi Shrine (Denver Post's PBlog)

Photo © Manan Vatsyayana (AFP/Getty)

The Denver Post's Photo Blog of the week 12.10.2010 features an interesting photograph by Manan Vatsyayana (AFP/Getty) of an Indian devotee seemingly going into a trance to rid herself of evil spirits. This happened earlier this month at the Hazrat Shah Dana Wali Dargah in Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh. It's north of Lucknow and about 200 miles from Delhi. Thousand of devotees from all religions visit the 650-year old shrine of Sufi saint each Thursday to seek blessings for their family and ward off evil spirits.

This is topical as I shall soon be traveling to Gujarat to lead In Search of the Sufis of Gujarat Photo Expedition™, during which our small group will photograph at various Sufi shrines in the area, and where trances and exorcisms frequently take place.

While I've seen devotees exhibit mild trances especially during qawalli performances at the shrine of Nizzam Uddin in Delhi, I also witnessed extreme displays of religious trances in Varanasi, the quintessential Hindu religious city. I spent a couple of days photographing at the dargah of the Sufi saint Bahadur Shahid, where trances and loss of consciousness by devotees were the norm. Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims mingled and sought blessings from this Muslim saint, and some of them went into intense trances. I got the lead to the venue from a NY Times article.

To see more of these practices, here's an audio slideshow I produced and a stills gallery of my photographs at Bahadur Shahid.

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Next Week on The Travel Photographer

What's on tap for the week starting Monday, December 13? Well, let's see....

1. The work of a Spanish photographer/photojournalist with an affinity for the Silk Road.
2. The diverse portfolio of a travel photographer...large images! I planned that one for last week.
4. The documentary work of a Dutch photographer featuring nomads to include those of  Mongolia.
5. The travel portfolios of a Turkish photographer of East Asia et al.

I'm working on a face-lift to my website (but not the blog)...it's being botoxed, liposucked, pulled, implants done, plucked and waxed...and may be announced at the end of the week....in time for the Xmas parties.

Details of my forthcoming photo~expedition may also be ready at some point this week...we'll see but what I can say is that it'll be in October 2011.

Plus the usual "shooting from the hip" posts and maybe, if the mood strikes, a timely rant.

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Travel Photographer Of The Year 2010

Photo © Larry Louie/Courtesy TPoTY

 The Travel Photographer Of The Year Competition has named its winner for 2010, and it's Larry Louie with his wonderful black & white photographs of Djenne in Mali.

Larry Louie is a Canadian optometrist and a photographer, who is using his photography as a platform to highlight the work of an eye care charity, as well as other issues and challenges in a world facing rapid urbanization and globalization.

I'm glad that black & white photographs have won this contest...as I think color imagery is seen as a "sexier" form for travel photography contests. Readers of this blog will know that I'm going through my own black & white phase, so I'm indeed glad.

Having also seen the remaining entrants, I have to say another photographer considerably impressed me (and certainly the competition's judges) with his lovely work...and that is Richard Murai of the United States who won the World In Motion category.

Photo © Richard Murai-Courtesy TPOTY

Richard Murai teaches creative photography in Northern California, and is interested in documenting sacred sites of the world. He traveled to locations within India, Peru, Turkey, Egypt, Russia and across Asia and Western Europe. His sepia-like images of Bhuddist tsechu dancers are just ethereal.

I suggest you drop by the TPOTY website...there's quite a number of excellent work by travel photographers.

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Prantik Mazumder: Mexico

Photo © Prantik Mazumder-All Rights Reserved

 Prantik Mazumder is a self-taught photographer, originally from Calcutta, India, and moved to North America for his graduate studies. Currently settled in Ithaca, New York, he's pursuing a career in scientific research.

He traveled to Mexico in 2006 with his first digital SLR, and has images from New Orleans, Ithaca, Peru and Mexico. I particulalry liked the above picture made in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, because of its colors and composition...and for the graffiti.

The Revolucion signage with the graffiti asking the local police not be brutal while the woman is covering her eyes is a message in itself.

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Female Imams In China

Here's a multimedia feature on Female Imams in China by Sharron Lovell, a freelance photographer currently based between Tel Aviv and Shanghai, and represented by Polaris. She prefers storytelling over single images, and has covered a number of issues in China from HIV/Aids, Islam and internal migration.

Sharron also completed assignments on Afghanistan’s first elections and the commercial sex caste in Pakistan. Her work was featured in National Geographic, The Guardian, Le Monde, Newsweek, Global Post, Politiken and various UNICEF campaigns.

NPR informs us that China has an estimated 21 million Muslims, who have developed their own set of Islamic practices with Chinese characteristics. The biggest difference is the development of independent women's mosques with female imams, something scholars who have researched the issue say is unique to China. In most of the Muslim world, women pray behind a partition or in a separate room, but in the same mosque as men.

It seems the Qur'an does not address this issue, and it's debatable whether the practice in the Arab world is reflective of true Islam, and not the result of patriarchal (misogynist) interpretations of religious texts.

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ROFL: So You Don't Look Like A Bozo?

Photo Courtesy PDN

Photo District News magazine has a section called Objects of Desire, which features photo related gear that photographers ought to drool over....at least, that's what they're supposed to do.

It's not a feature to really take seriously, but I sometimes drop by to marvel at what is being pushed...and occasionally what I see gives me a good laugh. 

But never as much as at the latest product featured which is the Lino Pro Field Jacket (as seen in the above photo)...a gawd-awful concoction of a jacket that's described by the PDN writer as one of the "snazzier" products seen at the Photokina show a few months ago.  Not only that, but he goes on to write that "this jacket is trim and form fitting so you don’t look like a bozo."

Er...no. Wearing this jacket would make me (and anyone else) look like a bozo, and deservedly so.  Not a single self-respecting photographer, photojournalist, serious hobbyist who would be seen dead in a jacket like that.  Whoever dreamed this jacket up hasn't a clue as to what photographers like and need to wear...or doesn't care...whatever they do/will is certainly not a $480 stylish padded shoulders jacket with a "full Italian" design . Moreover, the majority of photographers would spend $480 much more intelligently. So an object of desire? Um...not in the least. Imagine this Italian styled jacket in Helmand Province or in the favelas of Rio or even in the placid Thar Desert of Rajasthan !!!

I found the simplest and least flashy to always be the best option. A $45 safari jacket (with no logos) from a well-known sport outfitter is one of my favorites, as well as a durable black canvas jacket (unfortunately now no longer sold by GAP).  I've seen similar simple jackets worn by photographers in the field, and they certainly don't look like bozos....and they're happy they weren't fleeced out of $480.

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My Book: Darshan

I'm chuffed to announce my new photo book DARSHAN is now available from Blurb. There are two styles of the book (72 pages with black & white photographs) on Blurb's bookstore. It's a large (13x11 inches) landscape hardcover version with either a hard cover dust jacket, or a hard cover with image wrap. I much prefer the latter.

It's a handsome book of selected black & white photographs from my travels to India over a span of no less than 10 years. Street photography in Old Delhi and in the alleys of Kochi, portraits of Sufis at the dargahs, Theyyam rituals of Malabar, Rajasthani nomads, Gujarati tribals, widows in their ashrams of Vrindavan and sadhus on the ghats of Varanasi, as well as pilgrims at the Maha Kumbh Mela.

All the details are available on a page of my website DARSHAN. If you choose to buy, the links will take you to my bookstore on Blurb, which has a preview of the book.

If you don't choose to buy, that's okay...but why don't you leave a nice comment on its Blurb page??? It'll be appreciated.

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