travling photography

Photo � Tewfic El-Sawy | All Rights Reserved Having recently visited this blog's archives, I remembered it had a periodic feature called "Beyond The Frame" in which I chose a single image and wrote about its back story.  As it was quite popular with readers, I decided to re-introduce Beyond The Frame as an irregular feature on The Travel Photographer blog. Readers will recall from my many posts on The Red Qi Pao that I've produced two multimedia essays about an imaginary love story involving  a Shanghainese young woman and a foreigner in the 1930s at a time when Shanghai was a "wicked" city. Taking the opportunity of being in Shanghai in September, I was fortunate to be introduced to Yi Yi (a pseudonym); a professional model and a budding photographer herself, and featured her as the red qi pao -clad girl of Nanjing Road; a famous road in the city. Along with Eric, a photographer friend, we went to Guilin Park for a 3 hours photo shoot. The park's tea h...

Photo � Sebasti�o Salgado | Courtesy Folha de S.Paulo I'm very glad to have stumbled on the latest work by the legendary Sebasti�o Salgado. It's published as a reportage in the magazine (or blog?) of the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo , and while its descriptive text is in Portuguese, I used an online translator tool to feature it here. The remote tribe known as the Korubos received Sebasti�o Salgado, in September 2017. He was welcomed with guttural sounds such as "hey hey hey", and stayed in their village in the Javari valley for 20 days to produce his new project, "Amaz�nia". The Korubos number about 80, and maintain regular contact with officials of the Brazilian State... but have had little contact with the "white" culture. They are divided into two villages on the banks of the Itu� River, in the Indigenous Land Vale do Javari, in western Amazonas, along the border with Peru, 3,500 km from S�o Paulo and 1,200 km from Manaus. This tribe w...

This is a double feature on the eagle hunters of the Altai mountains of Mongolia; one is the cinematic work of Cale Glendening, and the other is a photographic essay by Sasha Leahovcenco. The golden eagles live in the high Altai mountains, in far-western Mongolia, and build their nests in the crags of the area�s rugged peaks. The hunters, a Khazak minority, are traditional nomadic clans who learn to climb up to these crevices to capture and domesticate the young eagles. The birds are hand fed, and live with the hunters� families for years. The hunters take their eagles high into the mountains, so they can fly down and catch foxes and other small mammals. It's a dying tradition, with an estimated number of only fifty or sixty authentic eagle hunters left. Photo � Sasha Leahovcenco  | All Rights Reserved Although eagles can live for thirty years, the hunters keep each one for only about ten years, then release it to live out its last years in the wild. The hunters are called bu...

I was in Ethiopia's Omo Valley in 2004, and photographed many of the tribes in that area such as the Hamer, Mursi, and the Bume....in their villages and at their markets. At that time, the local guides negotiated with the tribes and their village leaders a modest monetary compensation so we could photograph them in their environment as they went about their daily lives. However, I was already sensing that this would soon explode into a veritable industry, which would progressively evolve into a 'circus' of sorts, altering the authenticity of the tribes' lifestyle, traditions and relationship with the tourists and photographers. I was right. Over the course of the intervening 10-12 years I viewed that very circus through images made by travel photographers who had gone to the Omo Valley. These images proved how the tribes authentic adornments had morphed into becoming accessories for fashion shoots that would satisfy the most inventive fashionistas.  Since early morni...

Remembering Shanghai: Trailer This post has nothing to do with travel photography, but has a lot to do with 1930's Shanghai; an era and a city that has kindled my imagination for quite some time, and recently influenced me to produce a couple of my 'fashion' themes stories such as The Red Qi Pao and The Girl of Nanjing Road. However, this post is more about how to publicize a book...in this case, a memoir not a photo book, albeit with illustrations and photographs.  The joint memoirs are by Isabel Sun Chao and her daughter Claire, and tell of their recollections. As Claire says:   "My ancestors were a cast of eccentrics who lived in tumultuous times, and thankfully my mother did not resist writing an insider tell-all. There�s a bank heist, a kidnapping, a feud with Shanghai�s top gangster, a trek across China and a date on a Harley-Davidson. In between the adventures, we learn about mahjong, calligraphy, silkworms, Beijing opera and Shanghai dumplings." I...

Photo � Nagi Yoshida-All Rights Reserved I now feature my favorite 5 photographer for 2017. I do so in no particular order, either alphabetically, nor chronologically nor by preference...just randomly. Nagi Yoshida :  My first favorite photographer of 2017 is Nagi Yoshida which was featured on this blog on June 26 with her work on Ethiopia . I liked her imagery of the various tribes in the Omo Valley such as the Mursi, Bume, Hamer and the Afari people.  The Japanese photographer's love affair with Africa started when as a child, she was fascinated by being African. Some children want to become pilots, some models, but her dream was just to become African.  Photo �  Corentin Fohlen  | All Rights Reserved Corentin Fohlen : Another favorite is French photographer/photojournalist Corentin Fohlen featured in my post of March 3 , with his incredibly colorful and fantastical portraits  of Haiti's Karnaval .  This festival has been held for ove...

It's the time of year. Time flies.  The most viewed posts of 2017 on The Travel Photographer blog are: 1. POV : Can The X-Pro2 Do The Job Of The GFX 50S?  of January 8 in which I share my ambivalence about acquiring this -at the time- new camera, while owning the X-Pro2 and a bevy of lenses...and questioning whether the return on investing in a GFX 50S would be worth it. Would the quality of the GFX 50S surpass that of the X-Pro2 by such a factor that it justifies its $8000 expenditure? It seems many of my blog's followers and other readers were interested in the same question, and that boosted this post to very top of the popularity totem pole....and by a substantial margin. As readers of this blog know, I did get the Fuji GFX50s and its 63mm lens a few months later, and haven't regretted it in the least. Quite to the contrary, I have fallen for it (as I have for the X-Pro2 before it) especially doing the "fashion-lifestyle-travel" type of photograph that I'm...

Photo �  Patrick Aventurier | All Rights Reserved Having attended the Nine Emperor Gods festival's celebrations in Kuala Lumpur last month, I was interested to discover a gallery of 50 portraits of The Ma Song by French photographer Patrick Aventurier (which were in all probability taken during the festival in Phuket, and known there as the Vegetarian festival.  My own experience at the Nine Emperor Gods festival in Ampang was very much milder than what these portraits depict....but let's start with what the festival is all about.  The Nine Emperor Gods Festival is a nine-day Taoist celebration beginning on the eve of 9th lunar month of the Chinese calendar, and celebrates this community's belief that abstinence from meat and various stimulants during the ninth lunar month of the Chinese calendar will help them obtain good health, peace of mind, as well as spiritual cleansing. Its sacred rituals grant good fortune on those who observe this rite. In accordance with ...

Photo � Tewfic El-Sawy - All Rights Reserved X-Pro2/12mm Zeiss/f2.8 With the end of year closing in, I thought I'd post 10 photographs that I made during 2017 which I deem to be the "best" (always a subjective thing) for a variety of reasons.  By "best", I mean that these images combine the visual (composition et al), the ambiance and its connection to me as photographer. The first (not in any particular order) is one of many I took of "Wang"; an aging Hokkien opera performer in Ampang (Kuala Lumpur) during the Nine Emperor Gods festival in October. In fact, I have a complete blog post on Wang, and how I formed a bond of sorts when I dropped on a couple of nights by the stage where he and his troupe would perform. For me, "Wang" epitomizes the gradual decline in popularity of the Chinese Opera.  In this particular photograph, "Wang" wears heavy-handed make up on his face, with painted eyebrows. I can't decide whether his facial ...