Zhou Mi: Where The Ganges Flows...

Here's a black & white photo essay Where The Ganges Flows... by Zhou Mi, documenting his traveling down the Ganges from its source in Gangotri to Kolkata, passing through Rishikesh, Haridwar and Varanasi.

It brought to mind the classic book Slowly Down the Ganges by Eric Newby, which may have been the photographer's inspiration.

Zhou Mi was born in Wuxi, Jiang-Su, China and worked as an engineer in his country before gaining a M.A. Communication Arts from the New York Institute of Technology. He then worked for Young & Rubicam Inc./ K& L Advertising before being a freelance photographer in San Francisco.

An eclectic photographer, Zhou Mi's galleries are mostly black & white and range from documenting lost and found objects on San Francisco's beaches to Burning Man festival in Nevada, passing through a photo essay titled Wu Yong in Kangding, Sichuan.

Tourism stereotypes

Quite often professionals of the tourism sector (for example, tour operators, travel agencies, etc) tend to resort to cultural stereotypes to promote their tourists products but cultural stereotypes can be dangerous because they are too general (they do not distinguish between the different cultures or regions within the same country) and therefore they simplify the cultural richness of any country.

There are many stereotypical images of Spain, the country where I live. I found this postcard in a tourist spot in Seville a couple of weeks ago and it made me reflect upon the cultural image tourism sometimes conveys. This postcard, using the letters of "Spain", summarizes many stereotypes that are associated with Spain: bullfighting, olives, sun, wine, the letter ñ and flamenco dancing.

Is this the way foreigners see Spain? Do you think stereotypes give an accurate portray of a country? Which cultural stereotypes are typically associated with your country? I hope to hear from all of you as I am very interested in your comments. Thanks for your participation.

Picture by Mikel Urmeneta for kukuxumusu

Robert Caplin: Cuban Life

© 2009 Robert Caplin-All Rights Reserved
I came across Robert Caplin's work through a recent interview published in The New York Times' Frugal Traveler. Moving from this interview to his website, I immediately saw that much of his work was typically that of a quintessential travel photographer.

Caplin started out in Athens, Ohio, with a Nikon N50 film camera, but subsequently moved over to Canon, currently crams his expensive gear into a cheap bag and is enamored of one of the least sophisticated cameras on the market today: the iPhone.

He is also a full-time freelance editorial, corporate and portrait photographer based in New York City, and works regularly with The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News, and has also been published in the National Geographic.

It's been a while that this blog hasn't seen work from Cuba, and Caplin's lovely work on Cuban Life fills this gap. Drop by and it will transport you to the streets of Havana. If only there was an audio track of Cuban Son!!!

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Beta

Adobe just announced its Lightroom 3 as a public beta version, which means anyone with an Internet connection can download it and start putting it to the test. You do not need to own (or have tried) a previous version of Lightroom. The version of Lightroom 3 beta software available for download is offered in English only. You can download the beta and use it until the product expires on April 30, 2010.

By the way, those who are on a Mac PowerPC are out of luck. Lightroom 3 Beta will not download on your machines.

Notable new features are:

* Brand new performance architecture.
* State-of-the-art noise reduction.
* Watermarking tool
* Portable sharable slideshows with audio, which allows us to save and export slideshows as videos.
* Film grain simulation tool

I'm interested in two of these features; the grain simulator and the sharable slideshows with audio. However, the latter does not seem to allow any adjustment (or sync'ing) individual frames to the audio....so it has a long way before it can be used for semi-serious multimedia. I'm sure the reviews will start flowing in soon.

Magnum: In Silence: Susan Meiselas

© 2009 Susan Meiselas/Magnum-All Rights Reserved
In Silence is the beautiful and powerful work (a combination of still photography and video) by Susan Meiselas as featured by Magnum In Motion which deals with the tens of thousands of Indian women and girls who die during pregnancy, while in childbirth, and in the weeks after giving birth, despite the Indian government's programs guaranteeing free obstetric health care.

Each year half a million women around the world die in childbirth. Twenty percent of those deaths are in India, and most are preventable with access to proper healthcare. Both photographer Meiselas and reporter Dumeetha Luthra traveled to India for Human Rights Watch to retrace the steps of one woman who dies after giving birth to a son.

I watched this feature a couple of times, saddened by the combination of red tape, ignorance, indifference, by the overwhelmed doctors and staff, and by the undercurrent of corruption at the Indian clinics...all of which indirectly and directly cause this high level of mortality.

My Work: Debate At The Sangha

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Just a short post today to share the above image (still undecided as to the placement of the title) from a project I'm currently working on.

Debate At The Sangha will be a gallery of photographs made during two of the weekly debates at the Kharchhu monastery in Chamkar (Bhutan). I've also recorded the animated debates as they were occurring, along with the traditional hand-clapping and the sound of the prayer beads, so it'll probably end as a multimedia essay.

New! EOS-1D Mark IV

Canon has just announced the EOS-1D Mark IV, a 16.1 megapixel digital single lens reflex camera (DSLR) camera body, and the successor to the Canon EOS-1D Mark III. It is the first Canon APS-H format DSLR to feature HD video recording at 1080p resolution.

I've been waiting for a worthy successor to my beloved Canon 1D-Mark II and this may just be the one, effectively doubling the megapixel count but more significantly for my style of photographing, the 10 frames per second makes my heart sing.

Some of its features are:

* 27.9mm x 18.6mm; 16.1 effective megapixels APS-H CMOS sensor
* Dual DIGIC 4 image processors
* New autofocus module (45 AF points with 39 cross-type AF points)
* Integrated sensor cleaning system
* 1.3x crop factor
* 100–12800 ISO speed equivalent (expandable to 50, and to 102400)
* Magnesium Alloy weather sealed body
* Live preview mode
* 10 frames per second continuous shooting
* Dimensions (WxHxD): 156 × 156.6 × 89.9 mm

The suggested retail price is estimated to be $4,999.

For fuller details, go to DPReview.com.

The question is whether the new Canon 1D-Mark IV is worth the $3,300 price premium over the recently released Canon 7D, whose specifications are nothing to sneeze at.

As a reminder, the 7D has a new 18-megapixel APS-C sensor with a 1.6x crop factor, and is equipped with dual DIGIC 4 chips to speed processing of large 14-bit files, as well as to handle the shutter's 8-frame-per-second top speed. It retails for $1,699.

The proof will be in the pudding as they say, and the quality of the images will determine that issue. Rob Galbraith DPI refers to the 7D and the new Mark IV as such:

The EOS-1D Mark IV is meant to be a better-specified camera than the 7D in most respects, and ought to be, given the much higher price tag on the camera being unveiled today. That said, the 7D incorporates several features that didn't make it into the EOS-1D Mark IV, features that would be equally useful in Canon's latest news and sports camera.

These include the 7D's combo mode switch and start/button, Q button for quick access to key camera settings, unparalleled control customization options, an electronic level and revised 63-zone meter.

POV: WTF! This Is My Photo Shoot!

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
I don't know if it's the bottled water in Bhutan, the crisp Himalayan air, the scent of the pine trees or the excitement of the festivals...but some tourists lose their sense of civility when faced with opportunities to photograph. And I mean tourists, not serious and experienced photographers.

Having arrived at the Chimi Lakhang monastery in Bumthang, I was glad to find two young novices lighting candle lamps, and asked them to pose in a certain way to take advantage of the light coming through the rather grimy window. It took quite a while to have them just right where I wanted, but as I was giving hand signals for minor adjustments in the novices' stance, a bunch of European tourists had entered the room. Without a glance at my direction, or asking for permission, or even a smile of acknowledgment, out came a motley collection of cameras, ranging from DSLRs to compacts, and a paparazzi frenzy ensued with hundreds of flashes bathing the room in an ethereal light.

Naturally, there was nothing for me to do but to hold my breath and wait for them to leave, which they did taking their own sweet time. Seeing there were more tourists about to enter the room, I rushed to the door and locked it...ignoring their loud protestations. Although I managed to photograph the novices as I intended, the mood had evaporated, and the light had changed.

During the festival preparations at the Thangbi Mani Lakhang, the courtyard was suddenly filled with a group of elderly Japanese tourists with heavy DSLRs hanging from their necks, who eagerly photographed everything in sight. They were so excited that they intruded on many of my friends' photography. You lifted your camera to photograph a smiling Bhutanese youngster, and one of the Japanese tourists would be literally shoving you to take his or her turn at photographing the same subject. It got so bad that one of them shoved his lens hard unto the back of Carlos Amores' head.

It was then that I had a "conversation" with the guide working for the Japanese tourists, and carefully explained what would happen if that rowdy and thuggish behavior didn't stop. He tried to make light of the situation, so I had to repeat my 'advice', using shorter and better chosen words. Within 10 minutes, the Japanese were nowhere to be seen.

We had many more instances of rude and uncivil behavior, but these were generally from tourists who were not serious photographers. Photographers realize how difficult it is to photograph in similar circumstances, and are usually very sensitive to each others' space. In my experience, the worst offenders are the French and German tourists, and the Japanese (but only when in the safety of a group).

Alia Refaat: Vedic School

Photo © Alia Refaat-All Rights Reserved
I'm pleased to feature an audio slideshow by photographer Alia Refaat showcasing her work at a Vedic school in Thrissur, Kerala. The photographs and audio were made during my Theyyams of Malabar Photo Expedition at an ancient Vedic 'gurukul' (or training/boarding school (very similar to the Buddhist monasteries for novitiates), where we were treated to a demonstration of this way of teaching the sacred Vedic scriptures.

Alia's Soundslides audio slideshow Vedic School is here, and you'll see she successfully applied the various multimedia techniques such as the flipbook to convey the sense of movement to her stills. A nicely done photo essay....lovely and atmospheric photography by a talented photographer.

As mentioned in earlier posts on this blog, Alia (aka "Coucla") Refaat is a commercial photographer from Cairo, Egypt.She studied Mass Communications, and trained at Spéos Paris in commercial, portrait and studio photography. It was Alia's inaugural travel photography expedition, and her resulting photographs were featured in a series of solo exhibitions in Cairo, where she also appeared a number of times on televised interviews.

Alia's main website is here, and previous posts on her work are here.