Ken Hermann is a photographer based in Copenhagen, Denmark and is a member of the Behance Network. He has a personal website, but I get a no access message when I try to view it.
No matter, his portraits of Sadhus made during the 2010 Kumbh Mela in Haridwar can be seen on here.
Sadhus attend Kumbh Mela festivals and are amongst the many driving forces behind these festivals, and are also a magnet for photographers and photojournalists because of their appearance, and lifestyle.
The normal Kumbh Mela is celebrated every 4 years. The Ardh Kumbh Mella is celebrated every six years at Haridwar and Prayag, as the one earlier this year. The Purna Kumbh takes place every twelve years at four places: Allahabad, Haridwar, Ujjain, and Nashik. The Maha Kumbh Mela occurs after 12 Purna Kumbh Melas, or 144 years, and is always held at Allahabad. This is the one I attended in January 2001 along with 60 million other people.
My list of Google Followers has now grown to just over 900 people. This list is distinct from my Twitter and Facebook followers and/or friends, Feed subscribers or from the subscribers to my newsletters.
To commemorate this milestone, here are the two Followers as they've joined at the same time.
The 900th Google Follower is Debarpita Mohapatra. He's an architect, photographer and biker based in Bhubaneswar and New Delhi. He also authors a blog titled The Indian Expedition.
As for the 901st Google Follower, she's Luisa Puccini from Camogli near Florence. She's a traveler and photographer, and authors a blog titled Fotovagando, or Photo Wanderer. She seems to have been wandering in the right places since her blog has photographs and entries from Bali, Delhi's Nizam Uddin, Burma, and other interesting places.
The Human Rights Watch feature Burma Defenders is timed to coincide with the first elections to be held in the repressed country in more than 20 years. Burma has been run by a junta of army generals who have silenced any opposition to their brutal regime with human rights abuses and by silencing any dissent.
Political observers are awaiting the elections and wondering if civil unrest flare up after what is widely perceived as a sham election on November 7, and whether Burma's pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, be released when her sentence ends on November 13.
Human Rights Watch and photographer Platon have teamed up to photograph opposition members, former political prisoners, and journalists who have sought political refuge in neighboring Thailand.
Platon is a photographer who attended London's St. Martin's School of Art, holds a BA in Graphic Design and a MA in Photography and Fine Art from the Royal College of Art. Now living in New York, he continues to shoot portrait, and documentary work for a range of international publications, including The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, and The Sunday Times Magazine.
Aaaaargh! It seems that engineers love to spoil a good thing. Panasonic has just announced the Lumix GF2, the updated version of its excellent mirrorless, lens-swappable GF1.
According to WIRED's Gadget Lab, the new GF2 comes with an updated image processor for a maximum ISO to 6400, a do-all touch-screen control, and an upgrade to the HD video mode.
The spoilers? Well, the mode selector on the GF1's top plate is gone, as well as the lever that allowed the user to choose between burst, timer and bracketing modes. The AF/MF selector is gone as well as the DOF preview button.
Moreover, the GF2's body is said to be 18% smaller and 7% lighter than its predecessor....which I think won't provide the satisfactory feel of holding a "serious" small camera as in the GF1.
The GF2 will go on sale in early 2011 but no price was announced yet. Thank you very much Panasonic/Lumix engineering staff...but I'll keep my GF1.
For a video comparison between the GF1 and the GF2 with a British perspective, drop by this website.
Ethiopia's government is building a new dam in the Omo river projected to be the largest hydropower project in sub-Saharan Africa. Almost 50% of its electrical output has already been sold to neighboring countries, but it will reduce the water flow to the Omo River and threaten the lives of some 500,000-800,000 nomadic pastoralists.
Evan Abramson's When The Water Ends photo essay examines the impact of such a massive infrastructural on the lives of the Omo Valley tribes.
Evan's photographs were also used in a 16-minute videoWhen the Water Ends produced by Yale Environment 360 in collaboration with MediaStorm. It tells the story of the increasingly dire drought conditions facing parts of East Africa, and the eventuality of conflict.
Evan Abramson is a 32-year-old photographer and videographer based in New York, who spent two months in the region, living among the herding communities. His project focuses on four groups of pastoralists — the Turkana of Kenya and the Dassanech, Nyangatom, and Mursi of Ethiopia — who are among the more than two dozen tribes whose lives and culture depend on the waters of the Omo River and the body of water into which it flows, Lake Turkana.
Quite a number of photographers have photographed the tribal people of the Omo Valley, and I'm certain they, as well as many non-photographers, are lamenting the change that will befell the region.
Generally, Koh Angthong is the name of Natural Park incorporating with many minor island like Koh Wau Ta Lab the biggest island of Koh Angthong where the Nation Park Office situated and many more islands. Today, i'm gonna tell you about one of the most famous island of Mo Koh Angthong known as Mae Koh Island where you can discover the amazing creation of nature. Such creation is called "Talay Nai or Inner Lagoon"
Talay Nai is the gorgeous creation of nature in Bay of Thailand. It situated at Mae Koh island, one of the island of Koh Angthong. Talay Nai or the lagoon inside the mountain surrounded by limestone mountain. As the size of this wonderful place is approximately 250 meters long, 200 meters wide and deep 7 meters. Moreover, this lagoon is connected with the outer sea via the underground cave.
There're 2 separate ways to see this lagoon. First on is to discover the surface of the inner lagoon and the second one is walking to the viewpoint to experience beautiful scenery of this wonderful site as you see from the right image.
I think the inner lagoon is wonderful place as i've never seen this kind of natural creation in my life. At the surface of lagoon, you will discover fantastic scenery of light blue color of lagoon water. Then, walking around 150 meters from the beach of Mae Koh Island, you will reach to the viewpoint of Mae Koh Island where you can discover outstanding viewpoint of this island seeing Talay Nai from the summit point of the mountain.
After walking from this viewpoint to the beach where you vessel waiting for you, i recommended that if you have time left, you may choose to continue you snorkeling at this island.
I couldn't find much in the way of background on Jimmy Williams except the brief biography on his website which tells us that he's a narrative storyteller. That is true, but to me he also captured the essence of the remarkably talented southern music makers.
The series began with an assignment and led to an organization named the Music Makers Relief Foundation which supports musicians who are the true representations of southern music, whether blues, bluegrass, gospel and so forth.
A wonderful section of Jimmy's website groups all the musical genres, and is narrated by him. It will thrill all of us who love authentic blues and its derivatives.
I've promised myself that I would fly down one day to Clarksdale, Mississippi and spend time with blues musicians, and document their music making...yes, an item on my bucket list, if you will.
I've been working on my book for a few days now, and I've just sent it to Blurb for publishing. I've chosen for it to be in large format landscape 13x11 inches, and with 82 pages of black & white photographs, it'll be a large coffee-table style book.
I fixed the variations in tone, sharpened the "soft" photographs and those that seemed "muddy" to me. So I'm crossing my fingers. Its shipping date by Blurb is November 9 so I ought to actually get the final product a few days later.
As I was setting up the book, I erred while saving it and Blurb's software just gobbled it up, and it promptly vanished! So I had to start almost from scratch...I say almost because all the photographs had been saved on my laptop's hard drive....so perhaps not a total heart-stopping event, but annoying all the same.
I think that Blurb ought to provide the option for book publishers (especially for photographs and other visual arts) to order a one-time 2-3 pages mock-up for $10 or so. Perhaps it's not commercially viable to do this in a printing business, but it would certainly go a long way to reassure people that their eventual book will look the way they expect. Just a thought.
I just saw lovely photographs by Maya Joseph-Goteiner on PDN Photo of The Day, and thought I'd feature her work from Oaxaca and elsewhere relating to the Dia de los Muertos festivities, which was featured on PDN here as well. You can also see more of Maya's work on her blog.
The Dia de los Muertos is a Catholic celebration of the memory of deceased ancestors celebrated on November 1 (All Saints) and November 2 (All Souls). Its origins can be traced back to the indigenous peoples of the Americas, such as the Zapotec, Aztec, Maya, Purepecha, Nahual and Totonac. Rituals celebrating the lives of dead ancestors has been observed by Mesoamerican civilizations for at least 3,000 years.
Foreign Policy Magazine has featured an interesting photo/graphical essay on the war in Afghanistan. It's titled Inside Talibanistan, and effectively makes the point that our "enemies" are not a monolithic entity, but a combination of disjointed groups with different agendas and ideologies.
According to our media and politicians, who have the talent of diminishing everything down to simplistic terms in the hope of further dumbing down its viewers, listeners, constituents and readers, we are fighting against the "Taliban"...the problem is that the Taliban (as defined by our talking heads, politicians and their cronies) doesn't exist as such.
In FP's feature, I've counted 10 groups ranging from Al-Qaeda to some group called Haqqani Network, and added up the estimated members of these groups. Most of them are obviously estimates, but a total of 100,000 seems to be a reasonable one. Possibly included in these numbers are insurgents fighting against an occupying foreign force propping up a deeply unpopular corrupt government....and others who want nothing but power.
To put this in perspective, here's Cost of War which runs a counter for how much the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing us. It's an estimated $1.1 trillion to date.
We would have been so much better off by creating jobs, building modern infrastructure, state of the art trains and airports, new schools, invest in medical research, in alternative energy sources...and taking on China's growing economic power. My politics are diametrically opposed to the Republican Party and its legitimate and illegitimate spawns, but this ad by one of its affiliated group did strike a chord with me....yes, it's obviously over the top but there's still a kernel of truth in it. We are losing ground very quickly to China. (The video is via FP).
For the week starting Monday November 1, the following posts are in the pipeline:
1. A photographer's lovely portraits of Sadhus attending the Kumbh Mela earlier this year. 2. A interesting web documentary (multimedia) on the drought conditions facing East Africa. 3. The work of a photographer documenting musicians of the Mississippi Delta...with my kind of music...really hard core Blues. It was promised for the past week. 4. Another interesting web documentary (multimedia) on Women.
