The Rock Bar Ayana Resort Hotel Bali

Saat ini Bar yang paling di cari adalah the Rock Bar Ayana Resort Hotel, sampai sampai para tourist rela antre , untuk dapat menikmati nikmatnya cocktail The Rock Bar sambil menyaksikan indahnya sunset di laut lepas samudra Hindia. Betapa tidak , suasana yang lain dari pada yang lain jika anda datang di tmpt ini . Jika Anda ke Bali jgn deh sampe gak kesini.
Let's Go !

We have the most in the Bar is looking for the Rock Bar Ayana Resort Hotel, up until the tourist willing to stand in line, to enjoy the pleasure of the Rock Bar cocktail while watching the beautiful sunset at sea samura Indies. Don't miss it! Let's Go!

The news from
Ade Bali Tour

The Rock Bar Ayana Resort Hotel Bali

Saat ini Bar yang paling di cari adalah the Rock Bar Ayana Resort Hotel, sampai sampai para tourist rela antre , untuk dapat menikmati nikmatnya cocktail The Rock Bar sambil menyaksikan indahnya sunset di laut lepas samudra Hindia. Betapa tidak , suasana yang lain dari pada yang lain jika anda datang di tmpt ini . Jika Anda ke Bali jgn deh sampe gak kesini.
Let's Go !

We have the most in the Bar is looking for the Rock Bar Ayana Resort Hotel, up until the tourist willing to stand in line, to enjoy the pleasure of the Rock Bar cocktail while watching the beautiful sunset at sea samura Indies. Don't miss it! Let's Go!

The news from
Ade Bali Tour

Recent Kudos To The Travel Photographer

I think the British are great...read on and you'll know why I say this.

Adam Westbrook is a freelance multimedia journalist, blogger & lecturer with several years experience in television, radio and online. His blog is one the best multimedia-biased on the internet, and if you haven't bookmarked yet, you should.

He recently published a free e-book titled 6×6, wich is a series of six blog posts giving advice to the budding multimedia journalists. This is a must-read e-book for anyone who's interested in getting started into journalistic multimedia, and one that I shall use in my own teachings of the subject.

In his Best of the Blogs 2009, Adam kindly lists The Travel Photographer in the Photojournalism category saying "Tewfic El- Sawy niftily picks up the best photojournalism from around the world and showcases it. A forward thinking blog, the Travel Photographer also presents new multimedia from photogs." It shares this recognition with Livebooks' RESOLVE and The New York Times' LENS...an august company indeed.

Also from Great Britain is Ian Furniss, a photographer whose website showcases his remarkably luminous landscape work of the United Kingdom and Eastern Europe. Despite having faced sad personal circumstances in 2009, he wrote an uplifting blog post titled The Inspirational World, which lists a number of his favorite photographers. I am one of those, and I'm indebted to him for writing such a generous opinion about my work.

"I should emphasise that there is no particular order to this list but the next photographer i’d like to introduce you to, if you haven’t been already, is Tewfic El-Sawy, otherwise known as The Travel Photographer. I came across his work through his blog which in turn I came to through Gavin’s site. His blog was a revelation for me at the time because I was so wrapped up in learning about photography, that I had no idea it could be anything other than serious work. Tewfic El-Sawy manages to put humanity back into photography in a way that i’ve yet to come across anywhere else. His photography is nothing short of stunning and each image is captured with the same honesty & humanity you feel reading the words of his blogs. I’m sure there are many who could tell you all about the technical skill, but for me what is important is the feel of an image and these are images you feel right through to your bones."

As I said...the Brits are great.

North Sumatera

Medan
First field is the center of the Deli Sultanate of government, now is the capital city of North Sumatra Province, and has hundreds of years old, has many historical tourist attraction and a very potential to attract tourists.

Palace Maimun
It is a palace of Sultan Deli, founded by Sultan Ma'mun al-Rashid in 1908. Have restored palace is still occupied by the Sultan's family.

Raya Mosque
Sultan Mosque is one of the large and beautiful mosques in Indonesia. Founded in 1906 by Sultan Ma'mun Al-Rashid and located 200 meters from the palace Maimun. This mosque architecture patterned "Moorish" is the largest of its kind.

Post Office
Is a legacy of colonial buildings, currently serves as the Post Office of the field. Ancient building is another interesting:
• City Hall Medan
• Office of the Governor
• The home of the Governor
• Bank Indonesia Building, which is the first bank building "De Javaasche Bank"

Lake Toba
The lake is famous internationally, is a large lake with beautiful scenery. Each year the festival was held a traditional boat "Solu Bolon" regional cultural show was also known by the name "tortor".

Berastagi
Situated 1400 meters above sea level, located in the Karo District. It's cold and cool, can enjoy the mountain scenery and mountain Sinabung Sibayak beautiful. This area is generally visit for rest and recreation. Many sold the vegetables and fruits in this Berastagi.

Lau Debuk-Debuk
Located in Karo regency, a tourist hot spring that contains sulfur. The water is believed by many people to cure various diseases, especially skin diseases.

Taman Bukit Lawang
National Park is Sibahorok, where conservation and breeding Orang Utan. Also a cool berhawa sights.

Poncan Island
Is one of the islands with white sand on the southern coast of North Sumatra province, Sibolga, have the air clean beaches and underwate.

Nias
One of the islands in the southern province of North Sumatra, is a paradise for lovers of surfing and sea sports, famous for its tradition of rock jumping.

source by Bank Indonesia

Book Event: 100 New York Photographers

The 100 New York Photographer book, in which my biography and four of my travel photographs of Ethiopia, Bhutan, and Burma are prominently featured, will be the subject of a book signing event at Rizzoli Bookstore at 57th Street in New York City on January 22, 2010.

The book's author Cynthia Maris Dantzic and special guests (presumably some of the photographers in the book) will be at the event. Unfortunately, I will be in India at that time, so I had to convey my regrets to the publishers.

The book groups the work of 100 New York celebrated photographers to include Vincent Laforet, Jay Maisel, Mary Ellen Mark, Joel Meyerowitz, Annie Leibowitz, Jenny Jozwiak and Pete Turner.

If you are in New York City and have the time, I'm certain that it'll be a worthwhile event. Click the above picture for a larger version.

Freelance Writing Income Plunges to New Lows

It pains my heart, but freelance travel writing has been devastated by the internet. LA Times has the article.

Freelance writing's unfortunate new model

Freelance writing fees -- beginning with the Internet but extending to newspapers and magazines -- have been spiraling downward for a couple of years and reached what appears to be bottom in 2009. (Marc Russell)

James Rainey

With many outlets slashing pay scales, the well-written story is in danger of becoming scarce. The hustle is just beginning for new and seasoned freelancers.
By James Rainey

January 6, 2010
The list of freelance writing gigs on Craigslist goes on and on.

Trails.com will pay $15 for articles about the outdoors. Livestrong.com wants 500-word pieces on health for $30, or less. In this mix, the 16 cents a word offered by Green Business Quarterly ends up sounding almost bounteous, amounting to more than $100 per submission.

Other publishers pitch the grand opportunities they provide to "extend your personal brand" or to "showcase your work, influence others." That means working for nothing, just like the sailing magazine that offers its next editor-writer not a single doubloon but, instead, the opportunity to "participate in regattas all over the country."

What's sailing away, a decade into the 21st century, is the common conception that writing is a profession -- or at least a skilled craft that should come not only with psychic rewards but with something resembling a living wage.

Freelance writing fees -- beginning with the Internet but extending to newspapers and magazines -- have been spiraling downward for a couple of years and reached what appears to be bottom in 2009.

The trend has gotten scant attention outside the trade. Maybe that's because we live in a culture that holds journalists in low esteem. Or it could be because so much focus has been put on the massive cutbacks in full-time journalism jobs. An estimated 31,000 writers, editors and others have been jettisoned by newspapers in just the last two years.

Today's reality is that much of freelancing has become all too free. Seasoned professionals have seen their income drop by 50% or more as publishers fill the Web's seemingly limitless news hole, drawing on the ever-expanding rank of under-employed writers.

Low compensation

The crumbling pay scales have not only hollowed out household budgets but accompanied a pervasive shift in journalism toward shorter stories, frothier subjects and an increasing emphasis on fast, rather than thorough.

"There are a lot of stories that are being missed, not just at legacy newspapers and TV stations but in the freelance world," said Nick Martin, 27, laid off a year ago by the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz., and now a freelancer. "A lot of publications used to be able to pay freelancers to do really solid investigations. There's just not much of that going on anymore."

Another writer, based in Los Angeles, said she has been troubled by the lighter fare that many websites prefer to drive up traffic. A new take on any youth obsessions ("Put 'Twilight' in the headline, get paid") has much more chance of winning editorial approval than more complex or substantive material.

The rank of stories unwritten -- like most errors of omission -- is hard to conceive. Even those inside journalism can only guess at what stories they might have paid for, if they had more money.

Media analyst and former newspaper editor Alan Mutter worried last month about the ongoing "journicide" -- the loss of much of a generation of professional journalists who turn to other professions.

Writers say they see stories getting shorter and the reporting that goes into some of them getting thinner.

A former staff writer for a national magazine told me that she has been disturbed not only by low fees (one site offered her $100 for an 800-word essay) but by the way some website editors accept "reporting" that really amounts to reworking previously published material. That's known in the trade as a "clip job" and on the Web as a "write around."

"The definition of reportage has become really loose," said the writer, also a book author, who didn't want to be named for fear of alienating employers. "In this economy, everyone is afraid to turn down any work and it has created this march to the bottom."

One Los Angeles woman who also requested anonymity writes frequently for women's magazines and fondly recalls the days when freelance pieces fetched $2, or even $3, a word. Though some publications still pay those rates, many have cut them at least in half. And story lengths have been reduced even more drastically.

The writer, who once could make $70,000 a year or more, said she is now working harder to bring in half that much. "It's just not a living wage anymore," she said.

Los Angeles freelancer Tina Dupuy gained acclaim last year when she posted a YouTube video to shame editors at the Tampa Tribune into paying her $75 for a humor column on the "birthers" -- the political activists who contest President Obama's U.S. citizenship.

Up for a challenge

She said many other papers have stopped paying for opinion columns altogether --narrowing op-ed contributions at some papers to those already in syndication or those with day jobs at chambers of commerce, corporations, think tanks and the like.

"These corporate-sponsored pieces threaten to push people like me out," Dupuy said.

That's not to say that she is getting out of the business. After an earlier career in stand-up comedy, Dupuy has learned to hustle and to be "psychologically very adept at rejection."

It can be challenging, but Dupuy makes a living. "For someone who had to drive for hours to get to a gig -- to get $100 and a beer bottle thrown at them -- this is heaven," she said.

Indeed, relative newcomers like Dupuy or those who have spent their careers as freelancers -- like Matt Villano of Healdsburg, Calif. -- sound much more resilient about the revolutionary changes in publishing than the former staff writers and longtime freelancers.

The 34-year-old Villano -- whose outlets include the San Francisco Chronicle, Fodor's travel guides, Casino Player and Oceanus magazines -- said some writers struggle because they have fuzzy, arty notions about their work. They need to act more like small business people, Villano said, diversifying their skills and the outlets they write for.

Despite the endless hustle, Villano said he would not give up a career that has taken him from whale watching in Maui to the baccarat tables of Las Vegas. "I like the diversity," he said. "I like doing it on my own terms."

Villano strikes me as considerably more resilient, and sunny, than most people who write for a living. To make a go of it, the majority will require not only his flexibility, but a return of a more stable financial base for journalism.

With the advertising-driven income in a state of disarray, the source of future freelance dollars remains in doubt.

Philanthropic, nonprofit sites (ProPublica) will take up some of the slack, while other new models (Spot.Us) ask consumers to make micro-payments to put writers on specific local stories. Other websites (True/Slant) pay bonuses for stories and commentary, with writers getting paid more as they deliver bigger audiences.

It's hard to say if any, or all, will succeed. But the sooner they can take the free out of freelance, the better. Until they do, we can only imagine what we'll be missing.

james.rainey@latimes.com

Peter Turnley: A Life In Photography

Photo © Peter Turnley -All Rights Reserved
Peter Turnley just penned an introspective published on The Online Photographer, which he describes as one of the few times he so exhaustively expresses his connection to the passion of seeing and photographing.

Here's one of the most insightful excerpts:

"People often ask me how I keep my spirit from becoming cynical, jaded, and pessimistic about the human condition after having witnessed so much despair, so much suffering, and so many conflicts. I try to respond honestly and truthfully, that there are many actions of man that sadden me, distress me, and challenge my optimism. But each time I mentally calculate the sum of what I have seen, I am reminded of the many times that I have seen people of all kinds persevering despite tremendous adversity, and their example leaves me with hope."

A couple of months ago, I met Peter Turnley over a tapas dinner hosted by my friends Wink Willett and Neal Jackson in a neighborhood West Village restaurant. The conversation was interesting; mostly about photojournalism and its ethics, spiced with some of Peter's experiences. All I knew about him at the time was that he was a celebrated photojournalist, having published his work in publications that were and still are household names. I also remembered that he had a twin brother; fact that frequently confused foreign authorities when they showed up to cover the same story.

I also had a flashback to a moment after September 11, 2001 when, finding that I couldn't bring myself to photograph at Ground Zero, walked back through Tribeca and saw Peter (or perhaps it was his twin David...or perhaps even someone else with some resemblance to the Turnleys) on his way to photograph the site. Having a bunch of cameras dangling from our shoulders betrayed us as photographers, and we looked at each other for a second or two, perhaps with a flicker of recognition...but we each went our separate ways. I forgot to mention it to Peter.

Stephen Alvarez: Maya Underworld

Photo © Stephen Alvarez -All Rights Reserved
As readers of this blog know, I'm a proselytizer of large photographs for websites portfolios, and have made this preference very obvious through various postings and with my own photographic galleries. I cannot understand photographers who still exhibit dinky small photographs on their websites...in my view, they're not taking proper advantage of the medium.

So it's with pleasure that I feature Stephen Alvarez's Maya Underworld, a gallery of 22 large photographs for a story originally published by the National Geographic Magazine, and which showcases the religious rituals and ceremonies of today’s Mayan peoples in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. This is but one of Alvarez's of sensational galleries, so take a tour of his website as well.

Stephen Alvarez is a photojournalist who produces global stories about exploration, culture, religion, and the aftermath of conflict. He has been a National Geographic photographer since 1995. His work won awards in Pictures of the Year International, Communications Arts and was exhibited at Visa Pour L’Image International Photojournalism Festival.

Gulf Photo Plus Responds

Mohamed Somji of Dubai's Gulf Photo Plus (GPP) has responded to my criticisms which I raised in my earlier post. Here's his response:

Hi Tewfic,

Thanks for your blog post about our annual event. We had a quick email exchange last year and believe me, I would like nothing more than to have more local/regional Arab and Asian photographers but please understand a couple of things:

(i) The event caters mainly to commercial photography interests: lighting, fashion, photoshop, landscape, etc. - we have always struggled to fill in the documentary workshops.

(ii) The tutors we bring in have international acclaim in their respective genres. I would be very happy to invite Arab/Asian photographers for these particular type of workshops

But, I'm afraid in those genres, I have yet to come across photographers who I would have considered inviting and as someone who teaches workshops, you will appreciate that a good photographer does not necessarily make a good tutor.

I know Munem Wasif well and I had invited him to come to Dubai but I guess he was/is busy with his projects and the same with Farah Nosh so please understand that we are always open to the idea of bringing regional photographers and we do our best to promote local talent. I have reached out many times to Arab photographers to teach/present and we started a Slidefest evening which we aim to repeat again in Feb/March where we promote Dubai based photographers.

We are a young organisation and slowly making a foothold in the photography scene and I'm fully committed to nurturing photography in the region and promoting the work of Asian, Arab and African photographers.

Thanks and look forward to hearing from you.

Mohamed Somji

Asian Geo: Photo Contest 2009 Results

This is a belated post on the results of the Asian Geo magazine Photo Contest 2009 results. Some exceptional photographs have been compiled by the magazine in a flash-based flip viewer which is mildly irritating to use, but the quality of the photographs more than compensate for this. Sometimes simplicity is best, but the desire for innovative presentation techniques trumps reason.

Graham Crouch has won the Grand Prize in the Faces of Asia Category with his photograph of a malnourished infant being weighed in Mahdya Pradesh, India. However, don't stop at his compelling photograph...and continue to the remaining submissions, which are all of very high quality.

The main Asian Geographic magazine website is here.

New Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II

Canon has quietly released the new EF 70-200mm F2.8 L IS II USM. It claims that while its physically similar to it's predecessor, the new lens features a revised optical design, incorporating a fluorite element and no fewer than 5 UD elements for the correction of chromatic aberrations.

According to Canon's press release, photographers can now stand nearly 8 inches closer to their subject and achieve sharp focus and tight crops. The Image Stabilization is enhanced allowing it to compensate for shutter speeds up to four steps slower than 1/focal length, a one step improvement over the previous lens model.

The minimum focus distance has also been reduced to 1.2m, with a corresponding increase in maximum magnification to 0.21x, along with a modification resulting in a wider focusing ring.

There are no price indications yet, and the availability is in April.

The 70-200mm lens is one of my favorite lens, which I use often while photographing festivals and religious rituals. Actually, I have two. An older model (non-IS) which I've had for a decade now, and that has been dropped so many times that it sounds like a baby's rattle. It was the source of much hilarity from the participants in my Bhutan Photo-Expedition. The new one is the predecessor to the just announced model.

There's also a rumor floating around that Canon will soon announce a new version of the 24-70mm f2.8 with Image Stabilization. The IS feature will certainly add a hefty mark-up in its price.

Bonfire in Sagada 2009

December 28, 2009

The Bonfire!!!!

@left: the "talupak" @right: chow!

food for the night in a "talupak"

Lights and Fire illuminated the Peak at Kiltepan,
Gongs and Music dominated the night.
A crowd of people A people of joy
Happily meeting friends
Sitting with the clouds
Chilling by the fire
And experiencing our culture
Thank you for spending the night with our group.
Success of future bonfires depends on what we experienced with you our guests.


We would like to take the opportunity to recognize the men and women who sacrificed their time and efforts for the success of the event, considering the tiresome work that the massive influx of tourists has brought to the people of Sagada.

Thank you to the following
Salt and Pepper Diner – for cooking our main dish
Lemon Pie House – for letting us use their facility for the food preparation
Mr. Wilson Capuyan – owner of the venue
Gabay Wines – for selling us their wines without gain
Rock Inn – for their assistance and orange for snacks
Mr. Manuel Likigan – for lending his Scout vehicle used for utility
Mrs. Florence Likigan – for lending us her dining equipment
Mr. Jundy Baldo – our cook in charge
Mr. Apiit Paycowan – our second cook and Marketer
Ms. Sharon Pilapil, Ms. Moneth, Ms. Genevieve Tirazon for helping us with food preparation
Mr. Perry Dizon and Bolin Kollin for the Sound System
Mr. Daryl Bolares, John Bomowey Jr., John Magwilang – for their time and participation

Our Event organizers:
Mr. Ian Killi – our registration officer
Mr. Jeff Baniaga – Our Meal preparation Head
Mr. Gareth Likigan – Project Head

We dedicate this event to all our guides who shared their time and efforts
And to our supporters who tirelessly believe in our organizations vision.
We hope to see you again this December.
28th of December will be the official Night for Annual Bonfire Fest of the organization.

For complete photos, you can view em at SAGADAGENUINEGUIDES.MULTIPLY.COM
or
check them out at our facebook account.
sagadagenuineguides@gmail.com