I just needed to add some colours to this website other than blue and green.
Taken at dawn among the dunes at Mesquite Flats, about five minutes outside the township of Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley National Park, CA. One of my favourite photoshoots. Worth getting up at 4.30am to take.
There’s something special about beaches. Some combination of sand, sky and water in the bright light of the sun. Maybe it’s some deeply rooted subconcious trace of good childhood memories on vacation, I don’t know. Anyways, a whole bunch of my favourite shots are from the seaside, and I hope to share some of them on this site.
I took this shot in Haiti last year. We were on Ile de la Gonave, a small (600 kmsq) island about half an hour’s flight from the capital Port-au-Prince. Allen (a colleague) and I were due to fly back to the mainland on the little MAF six-seater in about an hour’s time, but the water was so inviting we asked the driver to take us down to the beach to have a quick swim. It was a wonderful day- in fact, most of our days on the island were bright blue skies, white tropical puffs of cloud, and gentle sea breezes. The colours were really something else out there. I have only good memories of the place.
These young guys were boisterous and fun. Not too many white folks make it out to Gonave- a poor corner of the Western hemisphere’s poorest nation- and Allen and I were oddities, so we got lots of stares and attention. We swum around for a bit, and then I decided the colours were so great I needed to take some photos. The kids were only too happy to line up and have some shots taken, and this resulted. I like it. It’s a happy shot, lots of fun and energy and saturated colour that reminds that even in the poorest of places, the human spirit can find joy.
This is Modilon Road, shot right outside the entrance to the Madang Lodge, the property my cottage is on. It’s not quite the only road in Madang- the rather exquisite Coronation Drive winds along the coastline for a couple of miles as a sort of scenic loop alternative to ploughing straight into the city centre- but Modilon, starting downtown, is the only road that actually leaves Madang. As a result, this is the only photo I’ve ever managed to snap of the route without cars on it. For a little place, the traffic along here is brutal- it can take five or six minutes to pull onto it if you have to cross lanes during rush hour, when PMVs, trucks and cars pour down in a ceaseless stream of metal. Who would have thought of traffic jams on a Pacific Island? Really.
But the colours and scenery here are divine, even along the road. Here, a vibrant African Tulip Tree burns with angry crimson, while a broad-capped Rain Tree brings up the rear. Flying Foxes (Fruit Bats) live in the Rain Tree, and come 6pm each night take to the skies in their noisy squawking thousands, one of Madang’s celebrated colonies. Beneath the colony of bats, the bushes mark the edge of the cemetery, filled with hibiscus and other colourful flowering bushes. Off to the right of the frame, Astrolabe Bay is out of sight a hundred yards away, giving a view across to the Rai Coast and the Finnisterre Ranges on the far side of the sea.
I’ve grown quite fond of the little cottage I call home. It sits as one of half a dozen on a side-lot at the Lodge, quite pokey when my housemate Mike and I had to share, but since he’s shoved off to the US to be with his fiancee, I have quite a bit more room. The lifestyle here is gentle and full of dramatic scenery. I can’t wait to get out, but these are some of the things I will miss.
Prayer flags and mountains are perhaps the archetypal Nepalese travel image. They capture a element of the beautiful spirit of a people at one with their locale, uniquely adapted to living in such a savage landscape. Visually, the rich contrast between stark white and blue of ice and sky and the multicoloured flags, the tension between the eternal, indominitable towers of rock and snow and the fragile tatters of cloth with the ethereal desires they inhabit, is striking and confronting. The flags themselves are believed to offer up their prayers as the wind causes them to flutter, a faith that resonates warmly in the imagination. The snapping of reams of flags in the steady winds that course like blood through the arteries of the valleys is a constant companion to the weary, introspective trekker. If the faithful are right, then the Himalayas must truly rank as among the holiest places the world has to share.
These images were taken at what amounts to the entrance to the Annapurna Sanctuary, an outrageous ring of towering mountain peaks culminating with the 8,091m Annapurna I, the world’s 10th highest mountain. The vantage from which I shot was just below the Macchapuchare Base Camp, where the cirque of the arena empties into the one accessible passage between mountain foundations. Beneath the flags is Annapurna South, our constant companion throughout the trek, and though small among the Annapurnas, a gargantuan peak in its own right at 7,219m.
We had a big storm on Friday night. Some of the biggest waves I’ve seen yet slamming into the sea-wall in front of the restaurant at the Lodge. The murky skies didn’t clear, however, so Saturday was washed in dull grey light. We dived the Cessna at Tab Island, and although the viz wasn’t too bad, it wasn’t crystal either, quite a lot of suspended particles in the way. All in all, a good time to practice some close-up photography and bypass some of the silt.
Anemonefish are some of the real characters of the reef. Aggressively territorial, they lurch out from among the tendrils of their symbiotic home to defend even against a whopping behemoth like me. Their darting and diving, however, make them hard quarry to catch on film, rarely in one place for more than a fraction of a second. These two little beggars were tiny- less than two centimetres apiece. I don’t know if that makes them a really small species, or juveniles. They were hanging out above one of my favourite anemone species, with the translucent arms and blue tips. Not every macro shot I took worked out, and I got a couple where the focus picked up the little flecks of suspended matter an inch or two infront of the fish, but a couple came out usable.
For those that care, sea anemones (commonly misspelt anenome) are in fact animals, not plants.
Another fascinating inhabitant of Poseidon’s realm is the nudibranch (noo-dee-brank). Literally translated as “naked gill” (for the exposed set of gills these tiny molluscs typically carry on their backs), nudibranchs are tiny sea-slugs, generally a few centimetres long, who make up for their fragile structure and small stature by displaying a rich array of irridescent colours. There are apparently several thousand known species of nudibranch (which leaves room for many more 
unknown), and they are notoriously difficult to spot, especially to a novice like me. But very cool when you do see them. On Saturday, Lorraine proved herself to be a nudibranch spotter par excellence, and we saw several different species. This blue one with yellow spots was the brightest, however we also found a pair with a sandy 
camouflage that made them all but dissapear into the seabed but an irridescent blue underside. This strange willowy white thing may or may not be a nudibranch (it has no discernable features that I can identify) but I’ll fit it in this category until I learn better. Yes, it actually propelled itself along by itself- really beautiful to watch.
I found this bright blue fish (below) lurking among coral this afternoon while snorkelling out by one of the other islands in the harbour, accompanied by Dave and John. John is a mechanic and admin in our office and lives out on the island, commuting by outboard each morning and evening. We went out for lunch and a swim, then broke down on the way back into town and spent fifteen minutes bobbing around on the harbour while John replaced the sparkplugs on the motor.
I still have a way to go in underwater photography, but there’s a certain thrill in the challenge of trying to capture these minute inhabitants of the underwater realm. I should probably brush up on my fish identification skills as well. More to come, ear and weather conditions permitting.
Really this shot is about wanting to see how good a black and white image looks against the black backdrop. And cos it’s a shot I really like. The clouds made for awesome landscaping.
Taken at Mono Lake, California, the day before the photoshoot below of the shack and the Sierra Nevada. Click the thumbnail to see the original colour version.
Shooting underwater is a very different kettle of chordata, molluscs and/or crustaceans than shooting on dry land. Aside from the obvious challenges of underwater casings, the need to breathe, and the difficulty of stabilizing ones self in order to frame up a shot, light behaves very differently through water than it does through air. Water is not only far denser and far more absorbant of light (why everything has a blue cast and gets progressively darker at depth), but it is also full of lots of floaty things like plankton, silt, and other unsightly blobs that mar a perfectly nice scene.
I default to being a landscape photographer. That means, when I’m being lazy, that’s what comes to me without really trying that hard. Underwater, this doesn’t work so well. Unless water is remarkably clear and the sun suitably bright, scenery drops off in just metres- a bit like trying to capture a scenic countryside vista in thick soupy fog. My friend and underwater photographer extraordinaire Jan gave me the tip during my first few forays into the acquatic photographic environment: Get as close as you possibly can to the subject.
More challenging than it sounds. It’s hard to see the viewfinder through a snorkel mask and a plastic underwater case, especially if the light’s wrong. Fish life has an awkward habit of moving. Pressing the big oversized buttons to fine-tune your focus is a bit like trying to play a Brahms piano concerto with leather workmens’ gloves on. And then there’s the stability issue. If you’re not plopping down in a great cloud of obfuscating silt, you’re corking up to the surface flailing desperately for an anchor to keep you on the bottom.
*ahem* At least that’s how I’m diving at the moment…
Bouancy challenges aside, I do definitely want to build on my skills photographing up-close the beautiful, the unusual, and the downright spectacular that lives in the world beneath the waves. However I’d also like to think that as a photographer with some experience shooting landscapes, I can also bring something of that eye to the subaquatic arena.
Today’s photo is not a particularly stellar image. In fact it illustrates many of the challenges of underwater landscape photography- particularly, the murk and darkness that needs to be overcome. However it also captures the otherworldly beauty that scenery below the surface often offers. Here, beams of light filter through water just off Tab Island, in Madang Harbour, and play on an outcrop of bubbly coral formations.
The doctor gave me the all clear for my baggarap ear today. For the last four weeks its been keeping me out of the water. No longer! I’ve already hired my BCD and regulator for the coming weekend, and plan to get back into that most obtuse but serene of environments as much as I can while my time in PNG remains. I’ll be looking for pretty little critters to work my macro skills on, for sure. And all the same, I’ll be keeping my eye out for any acquatic landscapes I might be able to capture as well.
Watch this space…
I spent four days driving around California last May. Hired a car from LAX and tripped off four thousand k’s of highway, byway and desert track, taking photos of some of CAs most outrageous landscapes. Mojave Desert, Death Valley, Mono Lake and Yosemite Valley were the main stops on the tour.
Day four I started my journey at 4.30am, leaving a sweet little motel in Lee Vining, out on the eastern rim of the Sierra Nevada. I backtracked ten minutes down the highway and dropped into Mono Lake for some sunrise action, by parts intriguing and irritating the few other photogs on South Tufa Beach by wading out into the frigid waters to get some low-angle shots of the sun coming up over the otherworldly limestone formations.
Just off the highway I’d earlier spotted a bunch of derelict little shacks gradually deteriorating in the High Sierra environment. By now it was six am. My toes were numb and my trousers were wet, but the sky was void of any clouds, and the sun was directly behind me and bathing warm yellow light over the fields and foothills. I wanted to get into Yosemite Valley as early as possible to beat the traffic and make the most of the light- a worthwhile undertaking, it turned out. But I let myself get distracted for a few minutes by the little ghost-town on the road’s edge.
Looking at this webpage you’d think I had a penchant for portrait (vertical-format) photographs. The reverse is actually true, although the vertical format lends itself nicely to this page. However this morning, the landscape let me down a little. I was shooting with a polarizer, and you can see on the first shot of the hut the unsightly dark blob on the upper-right corner, an unescapable effect of the filter at certain angles to the sun. Even photoshop was only able to soften, not remove, the blight. 
But I like the context, with the old hut and the mountains behind. It makes me wonder who once lived here, and what that life must have been like. It’s a beautiful landscape, but a hard one. There would have been no easy living here. Later that morning as I headed over the Tioga Pass road into Yosemite, there was still snow at the roadside, even in late May.
The next shot reminds me a little of a paint-by-numbers painting. Something about the variety of distinct hues and colours all gabbled together in discrete little groups gives it an appealing artificial feel. This one was shot with a telephoto, compressing the hut into the mountains behind. There was actually a barbed-wire fence between the highway and the shacks, ensuring I couldn’t get too close.
The next shot, by contrast, was shot with the lens as wide as it would go, standing in exactly the same location. It throws the shack right back into the landscape, and gives a better feel for the wide expanse of space and sky.
I like the shadows cast by the scrub in the low morning sunshine. For some reason, although the polarizer gradient is visible, I don’t mind it quite so much in this image.
For me my favourite shot of the lot is the one at the bottom of this post- and ironically, one that I discounted when I did my first run-through of digital negatives for processing. As a rule I prefer when images don’t capture the presence of the photographer, and a careless photog who accidentally leaves his or her unsightly shadow smeared across a landscape is a rudimentary error I do my best to avoid. However when I came back to this image, I found a certain drama in the way the shadows seemed to leap from the bottom of the frame, reaching out nicely centred towards the little hut in the centre and lending not only a quirky angle but a great sense of perspective and scale to the place. Because I wanted to capture the feel of that wide-open landscape, this one worked for me. As an extra bonus, I’m shooting with the sun directly behind me, so the polarizer’s effect is nice and even across the sky, eliminating that ugly blobbing.
Over the next few weeks I hope to share a few more of my photoshoots from California. Time is always too short on any trip to fully enjoy a place, but in this instance, four days was just ridiculous to take in some of the most exciting scenery that North America has to offer. I reckon it’s time to rekindle those CA friendships and get me a plane ticket…
Over time I want to be able to share some of my favourite photos and memories on this site, for no other reason than I quite like them. This shot was taken in Nepal in November 2007, on the Annapurna Sanctuary Trek. Each day we’d start fairly early (8ish) and usually break around 11am for an early (and frequently prolonged) lunch at one of the many tea-houses that dot the route. This was taken at one such lunch-stop at a little village called Jinhu, a couple of days into the walk.
This photo is of Annapurna South (7,219m), looking north up one of several valleys that winds through the foothills of the Annapurna Conservation Area outside Pokhara, Nepal. Off to the right you can see Hiunchuli (6,441m), and if you know where to look, you can also find the peak of Annapurna I, at 8,091m the world’s 10th highest peak, and the first of the 8,000ms to be climbed (read Maurice Herzog’s famous account of the 1951 ascent in the gripping “Annapurna”). Annapurna I is nestled off behind the shoulder of Annapurna South, the bulge just to the left of the col in this photograph.
The flowers look suspiciously like Marigolds to me.
This image combines a few elements I’m quite fond of. Aside from the mountains (which goes without saying), the colour contrast from the sprinkle of orange appeals very much. I also love the lushness of the forest. Although most of my shots represent the rugged mountains we saw, fully half our time was spent passing through subtropical rhododendron forests, beautiful and peaceful and incredibly thick. Unfortunately the poor light and the closeness of the trees makes photos hard to take in there, and this was one of the few that captured a bit of that greenery. Finally, I’m partial to the layering that this shot has captured, and the overhanging fronds in the top left corner add to this.
I could go on about the beauty of the trails into the Annapurna Sanctuary- and chances are, over time I will. It’s enough to say for now that the range rated then and continues to rate now as one of my favourite places on earth. It is among the most peaceful, removed places I’ve visitied, and the scenery swings from the rich, cool, oxygen-soaked glades of impassable forest to the dizzying heights of ice-shrouded peaks towering six, seven and eight kilometres into the atmosphere. I am not usually a big fan of retracing my footsteps- once I have been to a place, I am usually satisfied to move on for a time. The Annapurna Sanctuary is an exception to this rule and I am gagging to get back. That, and the last time I was there my camera broke down, so I have a whole long list of shots I still need to get…
It has to rate among the oddest living things I’ve ever seen.
We couldn’t snorkel at Magic Passage when the divers went down. The current was tearing into the harbour at five or six knots, and getting into the water it was all we could do to hang on to the tow line and feel the water pour past us. It was like floating in a flowing river. Pascal went for a swim, pounding away at the back of the boat as though he were in one of those tiny exercise pools with the water-jets, swimming for all he was worth and staying perfectly still. Looking for all the world like the aquatic equivalent of a hamster in a wheel. The rest of us just lay on the boat and gently crisped our skin.
When the divers surfaced (nicely worn out), Jan cruised us over to the anchorage at the northern end of Tab Island, a spectacular sandy-bottomed lagoon and an old favourite. 
The diving and snorkelling around Tab remain some of the best in the area. No sooner was I in the water than I was in the midst of a shoal of little blue fish whose name I must learn someday given how fond of them I am. They are a metallic blue-green colour and shimmer beautifully in the rippling sunlight. Can’t get enough.
Paddling further around the little harbour, I saw Rich signalling me. 3 weeks out of the hyperbaric chamber in POM after a fairly serious diving accident, his enthusiasm for all things aquatic hasn’t waned much- even if he is relegated to surface exploration for the next five months.
And explore he had, stumbling upon a jellified behemoth bobbing
- or perhaps blobbing- in shallow water just off the beach. I had never seen anything quite like it. A five-foot long tube about six inches in diameter, when I looked more closely I could see that each distinctive purple ‘ring’ about its circumference was in fact a series of tiny little beads, like a miniature pearl necklace. It floated there without seeming to move of its own accord. I’m quite pleased. In my mind’s eye I could see it rearing up to osmose one of us through its transparent jellyfish hide.
Rich, of course, had to touch it.
I went online to try and figure out what the heckit was or what it was called. I failed. Googling “Giant Purple Tube Jelly” came up with some entertaining results, but none that closely resembled our gelatinous companion. I did, however, uncover some fascinating jellyfish facts, such as:
•The turritopsis nutricula, a particular species of hydrozoan (don’t ask me about the ins and outs of jellyfish class taxonomy) can return to the polyp/colony stage after reaching sexual maturity and repeat its life-cycle indefinitely- effectively making it immortal. Unless something eats it.
•The Lion’s Mane jellyfish can grow with its body up to 2.3m in diameter and its tentacles over 35m in lenght (100 feet). This makes it a contender for the world’s longest animal- competing directly with the Blue Whale. I just can’t figure out how it’s going to eat something that gets snagged in its tentacles 35m away from its mouth.
•The well-known Portuguese Man o’ War jellyfish (a.k.a. Blue Bottle), infamous for its venomous stings, is in fact not a jellyfish, or even a single organism, but in fact a colony of four highly specialised different animals living and operating together in perfect harmony. For those that care, it is known as a siphonophore. Cool. Weird, but cool.
No, I do not have too much time on my hands.
Anyways, if anybody can figure out what this thing is called, please do drop me a line as I’m very curious. Maybe there’ll even be a prize. When I can think of one.
Tell you what. When I next come across whatever it is, I’ll let you touch it.
