Category Archives: photography

Thai cooking school

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Day one in Thailand continued as I photographed a cooking class at the Four Seasons in Chiang Mai. Beware the Bird Eye peppers in the bowl above. They are small but they are mighty.

I have to say that the food that came out of this cooking class was some of the best I had while in Thailand, and I had some incredibly good food! Hopefully I’ll be able to recreate some of the dishes at home from the recipes provided by the Four Seasons but I’m afraid my attention was more on photography than the preparation instructions. I may come to regret that later.

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The top photo of this grouping is the Gaeng Kiew Warn Kai, or Green Curry with Chicken in Coconut Milk (that may have been my favorite). Bottom left shows the open-air “classroom” and bottom right is a Som Tam, or Green Papaya Salad. If you want to learn to cook Thai food, I can’t think of a better place than this. If you want to photograph people cooking Thai food, I only suggest that you step back when the Bird Eye peppers hit the hot wok.

Bo Sang, Thailand: Umbrella Village

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Post-processing images from a trip is like replaying the experience in slow motion. A heavy day’s worth of images can easily take more time to process than to shoot. I don’t tend to review my shots on the road that much. I’ll chimp a bit to make sure everything is working properly but I’m a bit of a battery miser and — given the pace that I’m often traveling — just don’t have the time to review thoroughly on the road. That said, I always have a reasonable idea of what’s on the hard drives at the end of the day and I wonder how I ever managed, back in the days of film, to travel for weeks and not have any idea of what my take looked like until slides arrived back from the lab. Digital — how’d I ever live without you?

So this post is the first of several that I’ll write as I relive my recent trip to Thailand. Day one has now been processed and it began with a trip to Bo Sang, otherwise known as “umbrella village”, near Chiang Mai. Everywhere you turn in this town, there are umbrellas. They are not just sold here, but manufactured here. From raw materials to brightly decorated umbrellas and fans, you can observe the entire process. And it’s humbling to watch. This is not a high-tech factory situation but many skilled workers turning bamboo, wood and paper into functional objects, mostly with the simplest of hand tools. And they work incredibly fast with the assuredness that comes with years of experience.

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Much of the manufacturing happens in small, open-air spaces behind homes around the village but the decoration and painting can be seen taking place near the town gate, behind a shop that sells — you guessed it — umbrellas. Freshly papered umbrellas dry on the grass in a central courtyard while painters work in the shade of the surrounding awning. As I photographed these people working, some would offer to paint dragons on my camera bag in just 10 minutes (an offer I now regret not taking them up on). In fact, they’ll paint just about anything for you and I witnessed many people getting their shirts painted right on their backs.

Each January, Bo Sang holds an umbrella festival complete with parades and beauty contests. That, I can imagine, would be a true photo opportunity.

A note on the warmth of these shots: I tend to shoot with my white balance set to “cloudy” to add a little extra warmth much as one would do by adding a warming filter when shooting with film. The warmth in these images is largely natural, however, due to the air quality. Controlled burning of agricultural fields in the area was creating a fair amount of smoke and haze, not unlike what I often experience back home in the Great Plains of the U.S. in the spring. While it doesn’t do much for landscape photography where you want good visibility and blue skies, it does extend those golden hours as the sun filters through the smoke. As with many situations in photography, you can view it as a problem or an opportunity. Here, I think it worked in my favor and has added a cohesive tone element to everything I shot that morning.

Floating market

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One of the shots I wanted to be sure to get while in Thailand was a floating market. They still exist but many have become so popular among tourists that they products sold are more often souvenirs than food. You also need an early start in order to get more locals in your shots than tourists.

I arrived just as the first boats were setting up. There were plenty of t-shirt and trinket vendors already, but there were also locals — like this man — buying their breakfasts. I liked the moment in this shot where the plate was just being exchanged.

I shot a lot that morning and have a few that I think are successful. Did I get that iconic shot? Probably not. But you can’t expect to get that in one morning.

Thai puppet show

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I shot this with special permission at the Thai Puppet Show in The Aksra Theater in Bangkok last night. It was a fantastic performance and capped an amazing day of photographing temples in the ruins of Ayutthaya. So many images to share and so little time at the moment.

More to come…

Spring

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Since I’ll be on the road for the next couple of weeks, and my ability to post may be hindered, I hated to leave you staring at a photo of my feet. Instead, I’ll leave you with the first sign of Spring in our backyard — the Witch Hazels that we planted last summer are blooming.

See you all soon!

Copying a Daguerreotype

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I had thought about a catchy title for this post like “shooting dead relatives” but decided that it might get me some strange Google hits.

Winter grinds on in these parts and I haven’t had any travel for the last few months. Instead I’ve been getting caught up on indoor work that includes updating my files with stock agencies, organizing the chaos that developed over the course of the last year in my office and doing lots of tabletop studio shoots. I don’t do a lot of studio work but I do have a few clients that need the occasional product shot. This past couple of weeks I’ve been shooting a lot of architectural glass and mirror samples. While I had the small studio area set up for this, I decided to copy some old family photos.

Some of these photos appear to be daguerrotypes. These images are tricky to photograph because they have a mirror-like surface and at most viewing angles they actually appear as a negative — almost like an etched piece of silver.

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To see the image properly, you have to look straight-on so that something dark is reflected on the surface. Reflections of any other kind would be a big problem when re-photographing these portraits so I built a box out of foam core. The bottom was a piece of black foam core so that it doesn’t reflect onto the lower portion of the daguerrotype. The sides and back were white to bounce as much light around as possible and I draped a piece of thin foam packing material over the top to soften and distribute the light that came into the box. That light came from two hot lights that I had shooting up at the ceiling and bouncing down into the box.

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To eliminate reflection from the surface of the image, I draped a piece of matte black cloth from a background stand across the front of the box. Think of the box as a puppet theater and the black cloth is the front curtain. I could stick the lens of my camera through the curtain and let the cloth drape over the lens to block any reflection from the markings on the camera itself. I used my Nikon D300 and a Nikkor 60mm macro lens to be able to get the close focus that I needed.

The system worked pretty well but there is some pitting in the surface of the glass covering the portraits that was accentuated in the copies. For the tighter shots that I made, where the frames are cropped out, I’ll need to do some significant spotting in Photoshop. I like the wider shots warts-and-all, though. The wear on the cases and the pitting of the glass show the age of these images which were likely made between 1840 and 1860.

Published images, cat update, etc.

In my last post, I talked about my desire not to look back on a year and see time wasted. In a funny coincidence I was alerted days later to one of my images appearing as a double-page spread in the new book, “Make the Most of Your Time On Earth” published by Rough Guides:

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It’s a shot I took of some monks at Haeinsa Temple in South Korea. The temple stay program there is featured as one of Rough Guides’ 1000 must-do experiences. It’s an interesting book with tons of ideas for adventurous travel. Some of them I’ve already experienced but so many more of them I have not. So much to do, so little time. Anyway, I thought it was interesting that this particular usage would pop up just as I was having thoughts of making the most of my own time on earth.

I’ve been busy planning upcoming trips and trying to get my stock files fed at various agencies. Good work to do when it’s cold and snowy out. More on the upcoming travel plans later but, for any cat people out there, I’ll leave you with an update on our broken-legged cat. You may remember that Caper fell from an upstairs bannister and broke his leg around Thanksgiving. After two surgeries and weeks of seclusion in a room emptied of anything he might jump on, Caper has finally been cleared to resume all cat duties. He’s still hesitant to make the big jumps but he’s getting around really well. Here he’s enjoying watching the snow fall:

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I had brought the camera to the living room window to shoot the snow-covered redbud tree in the front yard. As I was framing the shot, an SUV came sliding down the street, out of control. I instinctively tracked the car’s path with my Nikon and fired off a burst of shots just as it slammed into the neighbor’s mailbox across the street. The driver then left without so much as a “sorry ’bout that”. I jotted down the license number as they drove away and reported the incident to our local police, following up with an email that included the series of photos along with one enlargement of the car’s plates. Needless to say, the neighbors were quite pleased.

Decade in review: 2009

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Winding up my review of the the past decade…

My first trip of 2009 was to Egypt — a few days in Cairo, a flight to Abu Simbel and then a Nile cruise from Aswan to Luxor. Egypt is one of those places I had wanted to go to since childhood. I was a kid when they were moving the temples at Abu Simbel to get them above the rising waters of the Aswan dam. The King Tut treasures always seemed to be in the news as well. I remember making drawings of that golden mask over and over again.

Sometimes places live up to our childhood imagination and sometimes they don’t. Cairo was a lot to take in at first. Big and bustling. The pyramids were astounding but hard to really experience amidst all the tourists and people selling everything from postcards to camel rides. Access to the Sphinx was very limited, allowing only a few angles for photography. If I were visiting as a tourist, I’m sure I would have had a very different experience but, as a photographer, I found it difficult.

Abu Simbel, Egypt, Africa

Once I was out of the city, the Egypt of my childhood imagination reappeared. Crowds were fewer or gone altogether and the monumental temples and sculptures were more accessible. It was easier to lose yourself in the place. If I were to give anyone planning a trip to Egypt some advice, I’d say to check Cairo and the pyramids out, but be sure to visit some sites further afield. For me, that’s where the magic was. Again, I’ve posted on this Egypt trip before so enter “Egypt” in the search at the top right for more.

Aswan, Egypt, Africa

I had a couple of opportunities to get out on the Nile in felucca boats. But it was the temple architecture that really caught hold of me.

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Oh, and that hot air balloon ride was a highlight, too. That was near the Valley of the Kings across the Nile from Luxor. Walking down into the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and seeing the wall paintings still bright with their original color was something else. That was definitely another crowded spot, though. We were granted special permission for interior photography, then it was quickly taken away when tourists saw us and starting snapping away themselves. But temples like the one below in Dendarra were almost deserted. You could walk around and feel like you were discovering it for yourself (although someone had come along before you to install some fluorescent lighting).

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I must have been making up for the cold weather of Banff the year before but 2009 was mostly hot destinations. My last international trip of ’09 was to Mexico — Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara.

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I’m not a hot weather guy and it was HOT. Beautiful and hot, but hot. Steamy, too. I would walk out of my hotel room and find a chair where I could sit for the 15 or 20 minutes that it would take for my lenses to clear up.

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On my last day in Guadalajara, a friend had asked me if I would like to accompany her to some restoration shops run by the local car club members. Shiny objects are always of interest and vintage shiny object especially so. To make things even better, one of the car club guys picked us up in a restored 1941 Packard convertible. We were rollin’ Guadalajara in style.

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But you know the grungy parts of the shops were my favorite:

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Thanks for tagging along as I’ve meandered the backroads of my last 10 years as a travel photographer. It’s been fun for me. I’ve learned a lot by looking at where I was in 2000 and where I am now. In some ways I feel I’ve improved. There are also some things that I think I used to do better. In the early years I was much more in control over where I went and what I shot. As I started making a conscious effort to build my international stock, I started looking for opportunities to travel affordably and then worked out a plan from there. I needed to shoot a little of everything so I would go anywhere. Now I’m beginning to feel like I’ve covered a lot of bases. I have stock from North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. I’ve begun working with more agencies so that I can focus more on shooting and less on marketing and sales. When I sold directly, I had to be more focused and niche oriented. Now I can put just a few images of a place with an agency and they will still be found by buyers. I don’t have to be “the Egypt guy” to sell an Egypt photo.

I’m now reaching the point where I feel I would benefit from becoming more focused again. I want to start planning trips that are of particular interest to me rather than taking whatever comes along and seeing what I can make of it. I want to develop some themes and explore them more deeply. It’s a little bit about slowing down, but it’s also about being more productive. It will be a steady transition — I already have multiple international trips lined up for the next two years — but it’s something I want to start working toward.

One more thing I’ve learned from researching these last 10 posts is that I want to look back at every year and wonder how I managed to get so much done. I don’t want to look back at a year of my life and wonder what I did with it. We don’t get many years and we need to make each one count.

Decade in review: 2008

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Continuing my review of the the past decade…

More adventures in Canada in early 2008. This time it was a winter trip to Banff and Jasper in the Canadian Rockies. I had visited this area briefly in 2000 on my way to Vancouver. It had been in the spring of that year and a completely different experience. This is grand country but I think it shows itself best in the winter. Still, I’d like to go back in the summer to see the green waters of Lake Louise.

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Snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, hiking on frozen lakes — I added a whole repertoire of ways I’ve traveled to get a shot. Perhaps my favorite part of this trip was a moonlit hike up the Maligne Canyon. You strap some steel spikes onto the soles of your boots and start walking up a frozen river at night while the canyon walls climb around you and stars shine in the narrow streak of sky above. At frozen waterfalls, your guide can shine his powerful flashlight behind the ice to illuminate the intense blue and green colors. Slippery, cold and dark… but a great experience.

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2008 was another extremely busy year in terms of domestic travel. Michigan, Kentucky, Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico and more. All while buying a new house and moving. It was a crazy year. I remember spending election night in a cabin in the woods in Arkansas and going down the mountain to check email at the nearest wifi hotspot. I had received a last-minute invitation to go to China in less than two weeks. I needed to send my passport in for my visa and luckily I had it with me. The next day was filled with driving back and forth across Arkansas visiting various Post Offices in different towns trying to find where I could get additional passport photos taken and get my package over-nighted to Chicago. No one Post Office seemed to be able to do both of these things but by splitting the chore between two (I believe in Harrison and Fayetteville), it got done. Ten days later, I was in Shanghai.

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I’ve posted about the China trip on this blog before — you can enter “China” into the search box at top-right to find more. The trip started in Shanghai and then went up the Yangtze to several water towns with historic districts built on canals. The colors were phenomenal.

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Those last two shots were from an open-air performance in Zhouzhuang. It was spectacular.

The architecture was also fun to shoot. Pagodas were everywhere, including the world’s tallest in Changzhou that had opened just a year before. Over 500 feet tall, it appears through the glow of the morning sun in this shot on the left:

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The pagoda on the right is from Zhouzhuang. I hope to return to China again soon. It’s a big country and there are so many more things I want to see. But that’s the way it is with the whole world, isn’t it? So many things to see, so little time. I’ll continue to do my best to see and photograph as much of it as possible, for as long as possible.