The New York Times : Peshawar

Image © The New York Times-All Rights Reserved
The New York Times brings us a slideshow feature on Peshawar, the frontier town in Pakistan, legendary for its gun markets and home to a community of gunsmiths proud of their ability to make exact copies of weaponry. Peshawar literally means 'High Fort' in Persian, and is known as Pekhawar in Pashto. It's a major Pashtun city.

Interestingly, the photographs are not credited to a photographer, but the newspaper has confirmed that the photographer's name was withheld for safety reasons.

The accompanying article describes how the Taliban and its cohorts are now concentrating efforts to take the city and extend their militant influence in the area, and have selected the Pakistani police and its army as particular targets.

The black & white photographs suit the gritty subject matter very well.

PS: Call me a skeptic and a cynic if you like, but something's unusual here. The feature doesn't name its producer as well...so it's a totally anonymous production. I'm not clear as to the reason for this total anonymity. Aren't there any photojournalists working in Peshawar...was that photojournalist disguised in a burka? It doesn't look it. I have no answers...just skepticism vis-a-vis something that isn't clear.



Have a look: Peshawar Under Siege

1 on 1: Candace Feit

The Travel Photographer blog will occasionally post interviews with both travel and editorial working photographers. This interview is with Candace Feit, a full-time freelance working photographer currently based in Dakar, Senegal and working throughout Africa. Candace worked for numerous publications—including the New York Times, Time magazine, Le Monde, and the Christian Science Monitor, among others.

1) TTP: When did you decide to become a photographer? Who or what influenced your decision?

CF: I had always been interested in photography, but in a pretty general way. I had a job working in marketing for LEGO in NY. After a few years they decided to close the office and move people to the United Kingdom. I realized I did not want to keep doing what I was doing and took it as a chance to leave that behind and really do what I wanted to do. I am lucky enough to have a few good friends who are also great photographers - Mike Kamber and Ruth Fremson are two who helped a lot with feedback and advice – so I have been very lucky as far as encouraging influences.

2) TTP: Do you have any formal training regarding photography?

CF: No formal training – besides a couple of classes at ICP- just lots of shooting, looking at work, revising, and going back out shooting. After about a year of doing that, I finally felt like I could make a semi-adequate picture.

3) TTP : if you had the choice, where is your favorite place to live and work as a photographer in the world and why?

CF: I have loved living and working in Africa. It’s been a great few years. I’ve become more excited and interested in photographing in the US. I’ve been interested in small town America since taking a road trip around the US in 1994. I’ve also never been to Asia or South East Asia, and would love to live/work in either India or Japan at some point.

4) TTP: Describe your own favorite image, and describe how you went about creating it.

Image © Candace Feit-All Rights Reserved
CF: This is one of my favorite images which I made during a trip to Goree Island in Senegal. I had a friend visiting me in Dakar and so we went to Goree. The sun was going down and I found these kids out on a jetty playing around with this Halloween mask, which just seemed surreal. So I shot a few images of them and it was one of those instances where I felt very connected and as if I was seeing something strange and surreal. I shot it in film and so had to wait to see it, but was really excited by the result.

5) TTP: Describe a day in your professional life.

CF: On assignment: Get up, wait, go shoot, edit, shoot some more, wait for good light, shoot more, edit. Working in West Africa can be very slow, be it waiting for permissions, trying to get from point A to B once on assignment, or waiting around for cars and planes. It feels like most of my time is spent waiting around for something.

At home: invoice, research, pitching new stories, archiving. Trying to figure out the ebb and flow of freelance life has been tough – I feel like I have finally realized the importance of staying motivated and getting all of the administrative stuff out of the way during the downtime.

6) TTP: Tell your funniest, scariest, most bizarre, most touching story from a photoshoot!

CF: The funniest and most bizarre happened in the same place. I was in Noadibou, Mauritania in June 2007 photographing a story about over-fishing in West Africa. I went out toward dusk, hoping to make some nice pictures, and we ran into these men from Western Sahara who had a bunch of camels and were selling camel milk by the side of the road. We pulled off so I could make some pictures when we saw them tending to a baby camel. I guess the baby was sick and not taking milk so they were “bottle feeding” it with a small tea pot. The guys asked if I had any medicine for stomach aches, because I guess this baby camel was sick with diarrhea and was in dire shape. So I went back to my hotel and sent some Pepto and Immodium for the baby camel… apparently it fixed him up because the next day when we checked up on him he was taking milk again and seemed on the road to recovery.

7) TTP: What types of assignments are you most attracted to?

CF: Ones that are assigned by good editors! A good editor makes a huge difference to me as far as how I feel taking more risks or bringing back something that I am excited by, instead of being desperate to please. I just worked with a photo editor at the Chicago Tribune Magazine who is such a person. He communicated very well before the assignment, gave me a good amount of freedom and once I filed all the pix gave me some detailed feedback as to why they used what they ultimately used.

8) TTP: How would you describe your photographic style?

CF: Evolving. I’m shooting a lot of medium format film these days so I think that is definitely influencing my composition when I switch over to 35mm. Working mostly in Africa, I find myself photographing in a lot of challenging situations, so I work to slow down and try to find the beauty in whatever I am photographing. Easier said than done, but it is something I am conscious of and always working on.

9) TTP: Who or what would you love to shoot that you haven't already?

CF: I’d like to work on some longer stories in 2008. After a couple of years running around spending a week or 10 days someplace and trying to capture a few stories, I’d like to get a bit more immersed in something. I look at something like Larry Towell’s Mennonites which he worked on for over a decade – and that kind of dedication and resolve is something I admire greatly. That’s a kind of depth I’d love to aspire to.

10) TTP: Describe the photo gear, as well as (if digital) your computer hardware and software you use.

CF: For assignments I generally use 2 Nikon D200 bodies, with a variety of lenses depending on what I’m shooting and how much gear I can bring along. Usually some combination of a 12-24, 17-35, 28-70, 20mm. I recently bought a 18-200 so I keep that packed in case I need a long lens, though I don’t use it much, but I always feel like I should bring it along. I also almost always bring my Hasselblad 501c (80mm) with a bunch of Kodak 160VC, 400VC, velvia 120. I’ve been using the Hassleblad more and more for personal work and it’s become my default bring around town camera. I use a Macbook, usually just with Adobe Lightroom and sometimes Photoshop. Filezilla for FTP (I think I read about it on thetravelphotographer, actually) – which is great, and free.

What The Duck

What The Duck

Canon Digital Photo Professional

Canon is offering a new tutorial to teach us how to use its latest version of Digital Photo Professional (DPP) with which to edit and process RAW files. Elizabeth Pratt shows Canon users how to use Canon's RAW workflow solutions.

I've tried DPP a couple of times, and while it needs getting used to (as everything else), I found it to be well equipped to do the job. It's a tad on the clunky side but it's free for EOS Canon users!

Thanks for Imaging Insider for the heads up to this tutorial:

Digital Photo Professional

NY Times: Panama

Image © Tara Todras-Whitehall/NY Times-All Rights Reserved
The New York Times featured a short slideshow of photographs of the Kuna Indians. It appears that the San Blas islands have remained little-known by tourists for many years, but that it may not remain that way for long.

New York Times' The Kuna Indians of the San Blas Islands on Panama’s Caribbean coast still believe that each person has a good and a bad spirit, and that after death the good spirit needs help to get to heaven. They number about 35,000 and the majority live in the San Blas Islands, and on the mainland in the Madungandi reservation, while a small percentage live in the capital city, Panama.

The Kuna women wear wrap around skirts and hand-made blouses known as "molas", while the men wear traditional Kuna shirts. The women also paint their faces with a homemade rouge made from achiote seeds, and usually wear a nose ring and paint a line down their nose.

They grow plantains, bananas, and avocados, and other fruits, as well as corn, and tubers.

New York Times' San Blas Islands

More (and better) photographs of the Kuna Indians: Global Photographic

Shahidul Alam: Brahmaputra

Layout © Zone Zero-All Rights Reserved
Here's one of my favorites multimedia presentations by Shahidul Alam, one of the most prominent photographers and educator in South Asia. He became the president of the Bangladesh Photographic Society, and founded the Drik Picture Library and "Pathshala" - South Asian Institute of Photography. He is also a director of Chobi Mela, the festival of photography in Asia, and has been awarded the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2001, for his contribution to photography. He is on the advisory board for the Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and the National Geographic Society.

Brahmaputra may seem outdated now, but it's still a marvelous multimedia project featuring a journey from Mt Kailash to Lhasa, through Assam down to Bangladesh. The photographs are small and the multimedia add-ons are not as impressive by today's standards, however there's no question that Brahmaputra is one of the multimedia projects that led the way.

Via Zone Zero: Brahmaputra

MacBook Air

As rumored, Apple launched an ultra-thin notebook called the
MacBook Air. The 3 lbs Air has a wedge-like shape that tapers down to 0.16" thick at the front base. Its 13.3-inch screen is LED backlit, and a backlit keyboard. It multi-touch trackpad which, like the iPhone, allows the user to rotate photographs, pinch and widen the windows, etc.

Its technical specifications are 1.6 or 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, and 80GB hard drive. No optical drive and just one USB port. The price is $1799 and shipments start in 2 weeks.

I can exhale now.

Update: The battery can only be replaced by Apple...this is a huge drawback.

Adobe Elements 6 Podcast

Adobe Creative Suite's website provides us with Terry White's videowalk-through of the newly announced Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Macintosh. It's a thorough introductory tutorial which is useful if you contemplate buying or upgrading the product.

As mentioned in my earlier post, Adobe announced that Adobe Elements 6 is available for pre-order for an estimated street price of US$89.99. The software will later be available at retailers. The actual availability is expected to be in March 2008.

The reason for the "pre-order" announcement is easy to figure out: Adobe had originally announced that the software (for the Mac) would be available in early January, so -by pre-announcing it in this fashion- it doesn't have to admit to delays. I never pre-order anything, so all this PR verbiage is wasted on consumers like me.

At a suggested retail price of $90 for Elements 6, why would anyone buy CS3 which costs 4-5 times as much?

Thanks to Imaging Insider for the link to the podcast: Adobe Elements 6 Podcast

Felice Willat: Burma

Image Copyright © Felice Willat-All Rights Reserved
Having co-founded Day Runner Inc, Felice Willat is now founder and president of Tools With Heart, a company that develops products to enhance personal discovery and well being. A successful entrepreneur, and with a strong background in network television production, Felice is also an accomplished photographer, and recently returned from Burma.

Felice's lovely photographs of Burma and its resilient people can be seen on her new website...she's generous with her work, and her gallery features over 90 photographs. I found her photographs of the fishermen of Inle Lake to be especially striking for their color, composition and luminosity...and although her remaining photographs are equally beautiful, I chose the one above for this post. The colors and the perfectly diagonal alignment of the fisherman's stance, arm and oar make it my favorite.

The Intha fishmen of Inle Lake use a leg-rowing technique, and fish the waters of the lake with a conical netted trap.

She hopes her photographs capture the poetic nature of its people and places...I'm sure you'll agree that she succeeded.

Felice Willat's Burma

TTP Recap of the Week

For your convenience, here's the past week's (January 6-January 13, 2008) most read posts on TTP:

Ganga Sagar Mela
Apple New Sub Notebook?
1on 1: Gavin Gough

Ganga Sagar Mela

Image Copyright © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Although the above photograph is of the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, another similar Hindu religious festival is underway. The period from January 12-15, 2008 is the auspicious date for the annual gathering of Hindu pilgrims during Makar Sankranti at Sagar Island, south of Kolkata.

Pilgrims arrive in their thousands from across India in the first week of January to bathe in the waters of the Ganges before it merges in the Bay of Bengal. The pilgrims offer prayers to Lord Surya, and subsequent to immersing themselves in the cold waters of the river, they ritualistically offer water to Lord Surya; a ritual which washes off their sins.

It is expected that the number of pilgrims will reach at least 500,000 on the most auspicious day of Makar Sankranti. It is also rumored that non-Hindus have to obtain special permits to attend, and photographers have to apply in Kolkata. There are few options for accommodations on the island.

Sunday Rant VI

This Sunday's rant is all about photography...so the purists can rejoice this week. On a professional photography forum, I've recently seen venomous replies in response to a post from an editor of a Northern European magazine requesting photographers of South Asian images to contact him. The rather inept editor added the incendiary statement that his magazine had a limited budget, and I'm paraphrasing here...couldn't pay market rates for the photographs.

Hell broke loose, and photographers crucified the hapless editor for trying to exploit them...for trying to get their photographs for next to nothing while being handsomely paid by the advertisers of the magazine...and worse.

So here's the core of my rant: firstly, this sort of knee-jerk behavior from photographers alienates magazine editors, who may decide to shop elsewhere for their photo requirements. Secondly, this particular editor didn't ask for free submissions. That would certainly warrant the poisonous reaction he got from photographers. No, he was reasonably clear that he'd pay for the photographs, but due to budgetary constraints, the payments would be lower than prevailing market rates.

Let's examine this rationally, shall we? Corporations outsource everything...everything gets outsourced these days...from customer services to surrogate motherhoods. If I was a magazine editor responsible for its bottom line and to its shareholders, I would certainly look very seriously into outsourcing my photography needs. Globalization forces are at work in every industry...and photography is an industry like any other. If a magazine editor can satisfy his/her magazine's needs from photographers in India, Pakistan and the Middle East, at a fraction of what photographers in the West will charge... at comparable quality and delivered in a timely fashion, of course he/she would.

Globalization (and the internet/tech advances) has upended the status-quo...the South Asian photographers, the Middle Eastern photographers, the Asian photographers have all emerged as worthwhile competitors, and have proven many times over that their work is as good, frequently better, and as professional as any other. However, because their local costs of living are generally lower, they are willing to accept below market rates...rates that are or were determined by entities in the West.

There will always be magazines that only publish the best of the best...there will always be ample opportunities for the so-called 'legendary photographers'...but the rest of us will have to compete heads-on with photographers from all over the world, and must accept that ground rules have changed, and we must adapt. So let's not blame magazine editors for exercising financial acumen and waste our energy on silly arguments...let's be honest and agree that if we were offered a service (say digital printing as an example) from India or China at a cheaper cost to us than one we use in Manhattan, and provided the quality and delivery time were the same, most of us would give our business to these offshore service providers.

My suggestion to photographers who get all exercised about "lower than market" rates is simple...if you don't like what's offered, ignore it and move on....you'll live longer. The reality is that some photographers who don't have your cost of living standards will send in their work and accept lower rates. The culprits are not the magazine editors', nor the photographers who do...but market forces. Are there nasty magazine editors who will always try to nail photographers? Of course, but this is not about the bad apples...it's about the straightforward ones, who try to do the best for their magazines.

So we need to learn new skills and invent new ways of publishing our work instead of wasting our energy and credibility by piling on others who are only doing what we would do.

Let me be very clear: not paying for photographs on the pretext that 'it will enhance the photographer's career' is a scam and rip-off. I don't care whether the photographer is a beginner or a seasoned professional...it's still a rip-off. There are some exceptions to that, but very few.