Chong Khao Khad (Hellfire Pass) War Memorial Museum, Kanchanaburi

Hello Everybody,

Nowadays, Kanchanaburi is one of the most favorite destination for travellers as this province has many fantastic places for travellers including famous waterfall, river, mountain and many more. However, during the time of world war 2, Kanchanaburi is the site where the Alliance prisoner of war are captured by the Japanese army for building railway to attack Myanmar.

The most brutally sites for Alliance's POW is called Chong Khao Khad or "Hellfire Pass" where large number of Alliance's POW died at this sites. Currently, Hellfire Pass has been build as War Memorial Museum where you will have a chance to learn the interesting story and real images of POW during world war 2.  Hellfire pass war museum divided in 2 parts.

First, the main museum building where you can discover the merciless of world war 2 through the real images and mini-theater display the old film of word war 2 and you can also ask for the Guide to describe the history of this place and bring you to the real site of Hellfire pass railway where the Alliance's POW builded the railway for Japanese army.

The second site for this museum is the natural pathway to discover the real railway site during world war 2. Even though, the genuine railway has been removed after the end of world war 2, the scenery of the railway still cover all area of this site. The approximate time for visiting this site is around 45 minutes.

How to get there

-Drive from the City Center of Kanchanaburi via highway number 323 (Kanchanaburi to Thongphaphum)

-Chong Khao Khad situated 64-65 Kilometers from Kanchanburi city center

-You will see "the Division of Agriculture and Cooperatives, Office of Development", then, turn left and drive around 1 km.

-You will see the main building of war memorial museum.

A Look At The Zoom H1

I've blogged a couple of times about the H1, the new handheld audio recorder from Samson Audio, and what seemed to be a handy portable stereo recorder at an unheard-of $99 price.

I haven't bought the H1 (as I already have a Marantz PMD 620 which I'm happy with), but a number of my readers have expressed their interest in seeing a review...so the above movie by Shawn Harrel will do just that.

As I expected, the H1 seems to feel a little flimsy, it has a few quirks, but does the job quite well. The price can't be beaten, so I predict I'll see it used by emerging photojournalists on a budget testing multimedia waters.

Speaking of multimedia: I have my new Canon 7D next to me as I'm writing this, but I have yet to really test it. I've ignored the manual as always, fiddled with it and so far it's quite intuitive, especially to a long time Canon user like I am. I'll be putting up some photographs as soon as I can...but one thing for sure: the 8fps is great!

In the meantime, I've added this cheap rig to my 5D Mark II. It's my Marantz audio-recorder attached to a standard mounting plate from Home Depot, which in turn is attached to the camera's tripod socket. From my Mamiya medium-format years, I had an old Hama grip that I also attached to the tripod socket, and it gives me much better control over the camera when I'm filming video.

All I need now is the LCDV.

Khaled Hasan: Death of Dreams

Photo © Khaled Hasan-All Rights Reserved

Khaled Hasan is a Bangladeshi freelance photographer, whose work appeared in several daily newspapers in Bangladesh and international Magazines, such as Sunday Times Magazine, American Photo, National Geographic Society, Better Photography, Saudi Aramco World Magazine, Guardian, Telegraph, The Independent and The New Internationalist.

He was awarded the 2008 All Roads Photography Program of National Geographic Society, as well as the Alexia Foundation Student Award (Award of Excellence). He has been recognized with several awards including the Humanity Photo Documentary Award.

Khaled believes in immersion photography, and listens, observes and talks with his subjects over an extended period of time. In Death of Dreams, he focused on Dhaka's largest old-age home called Boshipuk, and followed the daily lives of the residents for two years.

His photo essay documents the effect of modernization on the traditional structure of Bangla families, and which leads to old ways and values being discarded. Elderly parents are now forced to live out their old age alone, and face living the remaining of their lives in impersonal surroundings.

Via GlobalPost's Full Frame.

A Storyboard Template

Following my earlier post on my handwritten storyboard doodles I used for one of my audio-slideshows, I thought I'd prep one that looked a little more sophisticated, and could serve as a template. The templates I found on the internets were not exactly what I wanted, so I basically created one using an existing Excel template.

So here's The Travel Photographer's exclusive storyboard template (PDF) available as a free download to anyone who needs it. I hope you'll find it useful to plan and set up your slideshows.

Is it better than the doodly one?

Xiaomei Chen: Puzhu

Photo © Xiaomei Chen-All Rights Reserved

Hands in Chinese Hakka culture are often a metaphor for the ability to work and survive; a symbol for diligence. "If you have hands, you never beg" the Hakka say.

And so reads a caption under one of Xiaomei Chen's photographs in her Puzhu gallery.

Xiaomei Chen had to choose between a Phd and a camera, and the camera won. Since 2006, she has been documenting human lives with it, using her background in anthropology. She's currently living in the US, and works as a contractor at The Washington Post. Having been a teacher in south China, she's fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka.

She embarked on a visual project documenting Puzhu, an obscure and shrinking village of 45 people in south China which mirrors what China has been going through in the past century. Farmers are leaving their land to earn better pay in the big cities such as Shanghai, leaving their centuries-old houses and way of life.

Puzhu In Transition was produced in partial fulfillment of a Masters of Art degree requirement for the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University. It consist of stills, video and a book.

The book is available for sale on Blurb.

POV: Passport Renewal

Here's a statement which could irk all the Libertarians and Tea-Party grumblers: I had an excellent experience with the US State Department's Passport renewal process! Yes, a government office!

I had to renew my soon-to-expire passport, and I decided to jump the gun a month or two earlier than necessary.

I wanted my old one back as it still has a number of valid visas....and as I suffer from acute separation anxiety if I don't have my passport within reach (no, I'm not making this up nor is it hyperbole),  I chose the expedited route to speed up the process, and downloaded/filled the necessary application, and included a note saying that I needed the old passport back.

As I also wanted  extra pages, I spoke to a State Department employee to clarify whether I needed to pay extra. She checked and responded affirmatively.  I enclosed the fees required, and sent it off by Priority mail.

A few days later, I get a call from the State Department informing me that I had overpaid. We resolved the snafu in a couple of minutes, and within a few days, the new passport arrived along with the old one.

Easy, simple and very efficient.

Of course, my passport photograph looks like a mug shot...but that's a different matter.

POV: Apple MacBook Air

Well, Apple's announcement that it added two MacBook Air laptops is immensely welcome as it provides an embarrassment of choices to its ever expanding fan base.

I am especially excited by the 11-inch MacBook Air, which measures 11.8 inches by 7.56 inches, and weighs only 2.3 lbs. The 64gb flash memory model starts at $999 and would be ideal as a travel laptop for photographers. Couple it with an external hard drive of whatever storage capacity works for you, and you've got a winner.

And it's $300 more expensive than the iPad (the one sans WiFi)....that's really intelligent pricing.

I guess it isn't really a netbook..or is it? Although Steve Jobs assertion they wouldn't do netbooks, I do think this is a posh netbook...and what I do know for sure is that I'll have to hide my credit cards before Xmas.

Damn!!!

Robert van Koesveld: Bhutan

Robert van Koesveld is a retired psychotherapist living in Perth, Australia. His biography tells us that he delights in meeting with people from all walks of life, and describes as travel's best moments as those in which he encounters these people.

Robert is also about to publish his book Bhutan Heartland, (Fremantle Press, October 2010) which he produced with his wife, Libby Lloyd.

You can also watch the Bhutan Circumambulation video in large QT format here. Some nice bokeh in the movie.

Circumambulation of temples is an important Hindu ritual, and is similarly performed in most religious traditions; from Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I like how circumambulation sounds when it's uttered...but it's a word I can never spell it correctly.

Andrea Johnson: Burma

Andrea Johnson is a photojournalist specializing in documenting the wine and spirits, food, and travel industries. Her photographs regularly appear in related publications such as Wine Spectator, Food and Wine, VIA, Northwest Palate, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Additionally, Andrea has photographed three books: Passion for Pinot (Ten Speed Press, 2008), Essential Wines and Wineries of the Pacific Northwest, (Workman Press, 2010), and Luscious – 100 recipes and Insider Stories from Oregon Fruit Growers, Artisans, and Chefs (Arnica, 2011).

Take a look at her photographs of Burma in the above movie, which she made in February 2010. The fabulous Shwedagon Pagoda, the famed fishermen of Inle Lake, the monasteries with the Buddhist novices and nunneries with the pink-clad nuns, the Shin Laung initiates having their heads shaved, and the ageless U-Bein bridge are all captured by Andrea's lenses....and naturally, the Burmese smiling faces with thanaka paste.

I would have used a different transition between the photographs...I found the zoom-in too distractingly repetitive. The simple (and most common) cut transition is always the best, as it's the way we "see".

Theodore Kaye: Theyyam Dancers

Photo © Theodore Kaye-All Rights Reserved

Theodore Kaye grew up in China, India and Indonesia. While majoring in Film, he studied also Uzbek and Farsi and worked as a newspaper editor and mountain guide in Central Asia.

Subsequently he was a staff photographer at Rhythms Monthly, a Chinese-language geographic magazine, and covered stories in India, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Taiwan, Japan, Ireland and Great Britain. His work has been featured by the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Asahi Shimbun and the National Film Board of Canada.

I was particularly attracted to his Theyyam Dancers of North Kerala for the vibrancy of his photographs. Interestingly, it seems that Theodore was guided to these performances by a contact who lives in Dubai, and organized his Keralite relatives and neighbors to provide him with all the support he needed to document these dances.

Theyyam is a unique ritual which is performed only in Northern Kerala. After a complex preparatory ritual involving elaborate make-up and meditation, the performers are incarnated as deities, and dispense advice and counseling to the throngs of devotees who attend these rituals. It's a living cult of several thousand-year-old traditions, rituals and customs, and is observed by all the castes and classes in this region.

My own gallery of Theyyam Incarnate Deities is here.

The Travel Photographer's Channel on Vimeo

I've converted a number of my audio slideshows to mp4 movies, which are also iPad-compatible, and grouped them in a Vimeo channel. The channel is (obviously) called The Travel Photographer Channel....so this is a heads-up for TTP's readers to drop by and comment or "like" or whatever.

I prefer Vimeo to YouTube...I think its quality is better, and it seems to be more "serious" in its inventory of movies.

Angkor Photo Festival 2010

The 2010 Angkor Photo Festival is to be held between November 20 to November 27 in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The event is a unique photo festival in South East Asia,  and it's now in its 6th iteration, having had its inaugural gathering in 2005.

In 2010, 110 photographers including 50 Asian photographers are showcasing their work, in keeping with festival’s mission of highlighting emerging Southeast Asian photographers. These works are curated by  well-known figures in photography, Yumi Goto, Antoine d’Agata, and Françoise Callier .

This promises to be a real cornucopia of established and emerging photographic talent, with the participation of Olivia Arthur, Munem Wasif, Paolo Pellegrin, Shiho Fukada, Sohrab Hura, Rony Zakaria, Palani Mohan, Agnes Dherbeys and John Stanmeyer, amongst many others.

To keep up with developments, you can also drop by Angkor Photo Festival's Facebook Page

Next Week on The Travel Photographer

Phew! I got Walter Astrada's Undesired in after all! I'm glad I did...what a compelling piece of multimedia!!!

For the week starting Monday October 18, I have posts on:

1. A movie by a travel photographer on religious circumbulation in Bhutan.
2. The work of a Mexican photographer featuring photo essays on Women Warriors and La Santa Muerte.
3. A short movie by a travel photographer on her travel in Burma.
4. A photo essay on the Tibetans living in India, that was supposed to be on last week.
5. A photo gallery by a travel photographer  on Theyyam, the South Indian Deity worship.

Walter Astrada: Undesired

"Fear is contagious, but courage is also contagious" - Ruchira Gupta

Here's an extremely well done production (click the image) by MediaStorm of the remarkable work by photojournalist Walter Astrada. It deals with the issue of Indian women having to face immense cultural pressures to bear a son. This arises from the belief that males earn money while females do not, and are financial burdens on their families due to the tradition of dowry payment.

The multimedia reportage informs us that "The numbers are staggering. Since 1980, an estimated 40 million women are 'missing,' by way of abortion, neglect or murder. 7,000 female fetuses are aborted every day according to the U.N., aborted solely because they are girls. One dowry death is reported every 77 minutes. Countless others are never known."

Although the Indian government has declared dowry and sex selective abortions illegal, these practices are still followed because of cultural prejudices, and traditions.

I've noticed that Walter Astrada photographed in Vrindavan, the so-called City of Widows where I photographed as well a couple of years back. In that particular segment, it seems to me that there's somewhat of an inaccuracy. One of the text panels suggests that widows in traditional families are not allowed to remarry, and are abandoned by their husbands' family. Since the following photographs are of a widows' ashram in Vrinadavan, it could be construed that all widows of traditional families in India are sent to live the rest of their lives in these refuges.

That's not the case.

Only those women of extreme poverty with no other means of personal or extended support will come to Vrindavan and other places like it.