Justin Mott: HCM City (Saigon)

Photo © Justin Mott/NYT-All Rights Reserved
Here's a slideshow of photographs by Justin Mott as featured in the Travel section of The New York Times' website under the caption of A Weekend in Ho Chi Minh City.

I haven't been to Vietnam for a couple of years, and these photographs show the immense strides that Vietnam's main cities have taken towards modernization. Sure, there were already quite a few phenomenally good restaurants in HCM City when I was there, but it seems the number has grown exponentially since.

The first image of the slideshow is of the famed Rex Hotel whose rooftop terrace is not only where the international correspondents were covering the Vietnam war, but where I had the best grilled seafood in Asia.

Justin Mott was featured on TTP a number of times. An interview is here, a post here, and here

The Big Picture's Photographs of the Year 2

Image © Sigit Pamungkas-Reuters
Image © Reinhard Krause-Reuters
Here's the second installment of the Photographs of the Year as featured by "The Big Picture", the large image blog launched by the Boston Globe, and compiled by Alan Taylor. I'm told by knowledgeable sources that The Big Picture records about 750,000 to 1,000,000 hits a day.

Deciding that I had enough of gory pictures for a few days, I looked for travel-related imagery, and here are the two photograph in this second part which in my view are just lovely.

The first is of Muslim women attend prayers on the eve of the first day of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan at a mosque in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia on August 31, 2008, by the photographer Sigit Pamungkas.

The second is of ethnic Tibetan worshipers entering a monastery to celebrate Monlam, or Great Prayer Festival, during a sandstorm in Aba, Sichuan province, February 17, 2008. Thousands of Tibetan pilgrims gathered to celebrate Monlam, one of the most important festivals in Tibetan Buddhism. The photographer is Reinhard Krause.

Lunatic Magazine #3

Here's issue #3 of Lunatic Magazine, a bi-annual online photo magazine which seeks to give photographers the opportunity to promote original stories and images. It also aims to provide space for creative work within photojournalism. The magazine presents new work from known and unknown talented photographers from all around the world. The magazine is very nicely presented, and very well edited by Karl Blanchet and Eric Hilaire.

One of the eye-catching features is Take Me Home by the talented and award winning GMB Akash of Bangladeshi free-riders on the trains that criss-cross this vast and impoverished nation.

My Work: The Buddha's Apprentices

Here's an audio slideshow based on the Soundslides flash platform featuring photographs of novices (and nuns) in various monasteries in Bhutan titled The Buddha's Apprentices.

The photographs of slideshow were made during my Land of the Druk Yul photo expedition this past October.

The ambient audio was recorded in monasteries during prayer ceremonies, using a M-Audio Micro-Track, while the images were processed in Lightroom 2.2

The Big Picture's Photographs of the Year

Photograph © REUTERS/Kareem Raheem
One of the better photo blogs is "The Big Picture" launched by the Boston Globe, and compiled by Alan Taylor, who credits the old Life magazine, National Geographic, Mediastorm and MSNBC for his inspiration. The Big Picture joins the fray with its Photographs of the Year Part 1 using its high-quality large images.

One of the photographs chosen by the Boston Globe is the one above of a man carrying the body of a child recovered from the rubble of a destroyed house after an air strike in Baghdad's Sadr City in Iraq on April 29, 2008.

When talking about the motive of the Iraqi journalist in throwing a pair of shoes at him during a press conference in Baghdad; a gesture of utmost contempt in the Middle East, George W. Bush said that he didn't know what the journalist's "beef" was. Well, he should be shown this photograph...perhaps it'll jog his faulty memory.

Airports: home sweet home?

We have heard a lot of stories about passengers stranded in airports due to bad weather (specially in winter and due to snow). Also we may have seen the film The Terminal starring Tom Hanks, in which a passenger is forced to live in the terminal of an airport due to political reasons. However, it is not frequent to hear about someone who doesn´t want to leave an airport and prefers to stay there till his visa runs out. This is the story of a Japanese man who refuses to leave a Mexican airport. Click on the video to listen to this story:


This story can lead to interesting conversations with your students if you raise questions like:

What would you do in an airport for a whole day?

How would you spend your time there?

Can you think of any reason why he doesn´t want to go back to his country?
Are there similar cases to this one in your own countries?
Please feel free to write any comments about similar stories to this in your countries.

Time Pictures of the Year 2008

Photograph © Livia Corona/Time-All Rights Reserved
Yes, 'tis the season for the "photos of the year" fever. Time magazine has just published it's Pictures of the Year feature, which showcases 47 photographs its editors believe are reflective of 2008.

Incidentally, Barack Obama has made it as Time's Person of the Year. Not a great surprise...if not him, who?

As for the Pictures of the Year feature, I'm glad to see that one of the images chosen is that of the Afghan mother nursing her child photographed by Alixandra Fazzina. It was chosen as TTP's Photo of the Year just yesterday!

The above photograph is made by Livia Corona, and is of Gregory Gochtovtt of Philadelphia who, laid off from his job at Wachovia Bank in March, decided to enlist in the National Guard. He shipped out to Iraq in December. His Homer Simpson's slippers complete the story, don't they?

Travel Photographer of the Year 2008

Photograph © Charlie Mahoney-All Rights Reserved
TOPTY has just published its winners of its annual competition to crown the travel photographer of the year. Entries were received from photographers in 61 countries, and shortlisted entrants from 33 countries went through to the final judging round. Category winners for 2008 come from Australia, Italy, the UK and USA, with photographers from Kenya, India, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland among the other prizewinners.

The Young Travel Photographer of the Year category was won by Daniel Rooney of the UK, while Charlie Mahoney, the American photojournalist who won the TPOTY New Talent category in 2007 has returned this year to win the Life portfolio category.

Congratulations to Canadian landscape photographer Darwin Wiggett for deservedly winning the TOPTY crown, but well deserved kudos to Charlie Mahoney for his beautifully evocative series involving two Irish brothers and an intimate insight into their lives as farmers. His photo essay, Ancestral Calling, was featured on this blog in September, and the post is here.

In the post, I wrote : "The photographs in this gallery are just superbly composed, and the Irish light is perfect." I'm glad the contest judges agreed with me.

MSNBC's Year In Pictures 2008

MSNBC has just published its Year In Pictures slideshow, which is in two parts; News and Sports, and allows viewers to cast their vote. Many of the bylines under the News photographs are of well-known photojournalists.

Lightroom 2.2 Available

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.2 is available immediately as a free upgrade for existing Lightroom 2 users. According to the company, its Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2.2 update includes these enhancements:

• Additional camera support for the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon PowerShot G10, Panasonic DMC-LX3 and other.

• Includes several corrections for issues introduced by the Lightroom 2.0 release

Mac users can get it from here.

Windows users from here.

TTP's Photo of the Year

Photograph © Alixandra Fazzina-All Rights Reserved
I'm very pleased to announce that the second annual The Travel Photographer's Photo of the Year is the above wonderful photograph by Alixandra Fazzina. It's of an Afghan woman named Siamoy, who's breast feeding her baby boy as she goes to visit her sisters at their home in Khourdakon village, in the remote mountainous province of Badakshan.

Alixandra traveled to Afghanistan with Oxfam as part of its work on maternal mortality, which involves providing help and assistance in Badakhshan from this worthy organization.

Alixandra Fazzina has spent a decade chronicling war, violence, misery and distress, mainly in Africa and the Middle East. She photographed the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army and their victims in Uganda, the Miya-Miya rebels in Congo, and is currently working on a story about people-smuggling from Ethiopia and Somalia to the Yemen and Saudi Arabia. In addition to her work for British newspapers such as The Sunday Times, Guardian, Telegraph and The Independent, her reportage features were published in Newsweek, The New York Times, Stern and Corriere.

TTP's previous post on Alixandra's photo essay Childbirth Perils

Canon 5D Mark II: Availability?

US-based photographers who can't find a Canon 5D Mark II at their favorite (or any) retailer, can always fly to Paris and buy it there. I'm told by a visitor to Paris that she'll be buying one at the retail price of Euros 2400 or 2000 (the latter when clawing back one's "detaxe" or VAT at the airport). Euros 2000 is equivalent to $2740 at today's rate of exchange.

An alternative is to fly to Shanghai where, according to Ryan Pyle, every camera store is flush with Canon 5D Mark II's at same price as here.

Just a thought.

Ryan Pyle: Gongga Shan

Photographs © Ryan Pyle-All Rights Reserved
Born in Canada, Ryan Pyle obtained a degree in International Politics from the University of Toronto and subsequently fled to China on an exploratory mission. In 2002 he settled in China permanently (currently in Shanghai, China), and began taking freelance assignments in 2004. He then became a regular contributor to the New York Times covering China, Time, Newsweek, Outside Magazine, Sunday Times Magazine, Fortune and Der Spiegel.

Ryan recently produced a photo essay on Gongga Shan or Gongga Mountain, which was included as an Honorable Mention in the awards at the Banff Mountain Culture Awards.

The photo essay was produced during an arduous journey through China's remote Sichuan province; departing from the Chinese town of Kangding, Ryan and his writing partner walked 4 days (at an average altitude of 4000m) to reach the remote Tibetan Gongga Mountain Monastery. It was very much a journey from Han China to Tibetan China at a time when relations between the two have been severely strained.

Here's an excerpt: "I had first learned about Minya Konka, or Gongga Shan, from naturalist Joseph Rock. His work in eastern Tibet, now western Sichuan, was pioneering and when he first laid eyes on Minya Konka he believed he had found the largest mountain in the world. He wasn't far off. Minya Konka stands an impressive 7556m and towers above the rest of the range. It's a sight beyond words. The Minya Konka Tibetan Monastery rests at the base of the mountain. My journey to the monastery began on foot in the town of Laoyulin, just outside of Kangding. From there the four-day, 120-km trek to the monastery had taken its toll, walking at an average altitude of about 4000 m. But this is the way many of the pilgrims make the journey to this remote monastery, and it was important to follow in their footsteps to understand the significance of the temple and its role in the community. Each morning at the monastery one monk prays alone in the main prayer hall. It was a damp and cold morning and there was a lovely light coming in from the single window; my only concern was to do justice to the moment."

Condition Critical

Here's Condition Critical, a feature produced by MediaStorm for Medecins Sans Frontieres on the war in the eastern Congo; a horrific war virtually ignored by the US mainstream media, which is consumed by far more serious matters such as whether the Governor of Illinois is corrupt, if Sarah Palin will be running in 2012...and of course, that Barack Obama will use his middle name when he's inaugurated.

Here's an excerpt: "Hundreds of thousands of people are on the run, fleeing a war raging in eastern Congo in the provinces of North and South Kivu. They are frightened. Many are sick or wounded. Others have been harassed or raped, or have had everything they own stolen. For more than a decade, several armed groups and the army have been fighting each other in the Kivus. The violence has made it impossible for people to lead normal lives. Life isn’t just hard in the Kivus: this region is in critical condition. And things aren’t getting any better. The destiny of everyone in this region of Congo is shaped by the war. The story of their struggle to survive needs to be told."