Taita Taveta

A handful of shots from a village in south-eastern Kenya. May 2012.

NGO-funded water kiosk. Villagers travel by foot and bicycle for many miles to purchase water from the tapstand managed by this kiosk. The system was installed via a combination of NGO, government and community-raised funding. Several years ago, the management of the project was handed entirely over to the community, and it continues to operate as planned, with revenue from the sale of water going back into maintaining and even expanding the existing water distribution network. It was an encouraging success to see at work, and a moment of sustainable development to be proud of.

A bicycle leans against a mud-brick building in the village centre.

A fruit and vegetable stall in the village centre.

A Short Year in Photos

The year isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. But by the dearth of fresh photos going up on this blog you could be forgiven for thinking I’ve hung up my lenses and called it a day. In fact, by the dearth of fresh anything going up on this blog you could be forgiven for thinking I’ve hung up my keyboard, too.

Happily, neither one is the case.

I have, however, been a little overwhelmed with the inconvenience that is real life, and it’s taken me a little time to get through a backlog of photos for processing, and eventually, writing some of them up. I’m hoping to remedy my general neglect of this site recently over the next few weeks. Which I’ve said before. But I do actually have a little free time coming my way. So, maybe…

At any rate, as a taster here are a few of my favourite pictures from the last ten months or so, from a few different spots round the globe. Some of these locations I might flesh out a little more as time goes on, but for now, I hope you like this little collection of images.

Top: A muggy and overcast day on Tybee Beach, Savannah, GA. Overexposed in-camera and processed for low colour and emphasizing highlights focuses on the texture and an almost dreamlike view of the ocean. Shot using shallow depth of field means the foreground is soft while the waves beyond are in sharper relief.

Above: A baobab tree rises from rusty soils and a  flowering ground creeper in fields outside a village in rural South-East Kenya. I was struck by the lovely contrast between the spray of white flowers (actually weeds), the red ground and the blue sky- all nicely lit on a fresh morning. Baobabs make for a fantastic photographic subject- stark, dramatic and instantly recognizable.

Above: Rounded rocks on a beach at Wilson’s Prom, on the southern coast of Australia, give testament to millenia of weathering at the hands of the relentless ocean. Shot in overcast light and exposing to darken the sky with some differential exposure in post-processing has kept the rocks in low contrast, emphasising their smooth shape and texture, and emphasising form over colour in the muted palette. Wilson’s Prom remains one of the prettiest corners of Victoria in my playbook.

Above: Downtown Phoenix, seen from the air coming in to land, with the high-rise central business district just off-centre and Chase Field, home of the Diamondbacks, off to the right. The way the grid of small streets and roads lead in converging lines take the eye through downtown and on to the hills in the background, and the effect makes this one of the only shots I’ve taken from a plane window that I actually like.

Above: Trentham Falls, outside Daylesford, Victoria, Australia, as viewed from behind the falls themselves. Hand-held at slightly long exposure has given the falling water a slightly silky texture. Among the challenges of taking this image were the issue of shooting from a darkened vantage against a lighter sky and trying not to allow much of the image to burn out. Additionally, several plebs managed to find themselves in the frame, so I removed their pesky presence in post-processing to give the image a more serene look. I actually had to wait up here for a good six or seven minutes for a couple of kids to step out of the frame at bottom, where they had been chucking big rocks into the water. Overall I like the quiet scene and the relatively soft palette of greens and earthy tones.

Above: Highway bridge, Savannah, GA. You don’t generally get many good shots through a car windshield, but this spur-of-the-moment snap-shot (I use the term to refer to how quickly it had to be lined up and taken, not the camera it was taken on) works for me. Again the lines of the bridge struts give a great sense of motion, leading the eye into a contrasty late-afternoon sky, and a broad horizon giving the feeling of wide open spaces. It’s a shot that captures movement and an enjoyable juxtaposition of dramatic engineering and natural beauty.

Above: The sun sets directly over an intersection on a steamy panhandle night near Altha, FL. The warm tones and striking position of the sun are nicely led to by the wires of the phone lines, and I like the faint splash of reflection coming off the road.

The Quest for Windmills Continues

I’ve mentioned before that I have a bit of a thing for windmills and the Australian landscape.  They add a piece of visual interest to a spreading landscape, and at the same time communicate a strong sense of place and time.

Therefore, almost any time I see a well-placed windmill, I experience the urge to photograph it.  Sometimes it’s too impractical to do-so (because I’m doing 100kph on the highway, or because there’s a fenceline in the way), and I wrestle with deep frustration.  Often, there are ugly features in the way, like watering holes or power-lines.  And from time to time I’m able to take the time, hop out of my car (or whatever) and line up some shots.

I came across this one travelling near Geelong (there’s a few out that way; I should re-visit) and had a few minutes to spare, so I was able to wait out the sunrise and snap off a few shots.  I share these ones with you.

They are certainly not the classic windmill shot I am looking for.  That quest continues.  When I find it, I’ll share it with you.  But it’ll have to do for now while I keep my vision alive.

*Yes, yes I am perhaps a little obsessive about windmills.

Faces from a Guatemalan Village

We visited the tiny hamlet of Pavantslom high up in the hills behind Huehuetanango.  The road was a treacherous unsealed pathway of hairpin bends above panic-inducing drop-offs without so much as a fenceline between the wheels of the Land Cruiser and a five-hundred foot roll.  The hills themselves were dusty and badly eroded- a combination of geography and natural resource management.  It was hot.

Guatemala’s brutal civil war left the country’s soul badly tattered, and fear in many rural communities is rife.  I was told the villagers here hadn’t had a white visitor in years, and there was an element of disquiet and even distrust to begin with.  ML, my colleague, is a Honduran- both the most passionate and most competent community mobilizer I have ever met.  I have worked with her in at least six countries in Central and South America, and everywhere she goes she is able to inspire local people with her words and her attitude.  Her subject of expertise is community-based disaster management- encouraging communities to take measures to identify the risks they face, and then put into action a plan to reduce those risks.  People who have spent their lives planting maize in a radius of two miles from their birthplace stop and listen to her because she knows how to engage them, how to relate to them.  I’ve watched her do it equally in remote hillside villages and in urban slums, and her fluency in the vocabulary of poverty humbles me.

It took a little while for people to let me take photos.  During the civil war, people with cameras came to mountain villages like Pavantslom, and shortly afterwards, children would disappear.  I waited to be invited to break out my camera, and even invited people warmed to the camera to varying degrees.  By the end of the shoot, mothers were asking me to take photos of their children- but it took them a good half an hour to get around to that point.

Relating to people through the lens is always a dance, and this photoshoot was actually one of my first with a proper portrait lens.  Indeed, I still wouldn’t consider myself an experience portrait photographer today- although I have considerably more experience than I did two and a half years ago in these hills just south of the Mexican border.

I enjoy the variety and intensity of expressions that came through the lens that day.  Not always beautiful in a typical sense of the word, but certainly beautiful in the soulful sense, I think the reason I like this shoot so much is the lack of pretense.  The gazes are full of honesty, and unlike shoots you do in many other parts of the world where people are used to cameras, here there was no sense that people were putting on a display or trying to be vain.

I’m not travelling for a few months at the moment- at least, not for work- and my opportunities for doing portrait shoots such as this one are a little more limited.  I think I’m sharing this shoot as much for my own wistfulness as any other reason, but I hope you can enjoy travelling through the expressions captured here.

The Tasmania Tour, Gate 4: Rural Wanderings

One of my favourite things about road trips is not so much the destination (although these can be great fun), but the journey.  And I’m not just talking about the process (although I do love that too- driving new terrain is a favourite past-time, and if the company is good (and here it was spectacular) then the whole thing is a happy medley).  I’m talking about the opportunity just to stop willy-nilly and enjoy whatever surprises the landscape has to offer.

Given that we drive a fairly large portion of Tasmania in our six-day circuit, these little surprises were a regular feature of the journey.  I’ve already showcased one such little surprise, the church in the field, in Buckland.  Here’s a smattering more.

Those who know my photography by now have worked out that I’m an absolute sucker for road shots.  Love ‘em.  The way they lead the eye, teasingly, across a landscape, or into a vanishing point, giving both a visual sense of motion, and a soulful sense of travelling.  They’re reminiscent as subjects of the very feeling they evoke- that of moving from one place to another.  And, of course, they’re the archetypal road-trip image.  Can’t go wrong.

I snapped the top image of a road snaking down through gentle country somewhere an hour or two north of Hobart, coming down off the Great Western Tiers.  The contrast between bright fields and somewhat patchy sky add drama to the view, and the road guides the viewer through the scene.

In a similar vein, on our second day we found ourselves south of Swansea on the way up the east coast, beneath a dark and brooding sky which threatened rain at every turn.  The road was largely empty of traffic and the mood was quite desolate in its own way.  Tassie was drier than either of us were expecting, and the fields were full of yellow-white grass which was a lovely counterpoint to the dark clouds.  I took a little detour into a field we were passing (which required an involved negotiation of a pair of barbed wire fences at the bottom of a little ditch- quite the delicate operation with an expensive DSLR camera and associated lenses…) to frame up this shot of a gum tree in a field, accompanied by a cattle track.  The otherwise-dull light was made more interesting by upping the contrast and saturation for a somewhat artificial but (in my humble opinion) engaging image.  This next image was snapped feet away in a different direction, and turned into a high-contrast black-and-white photo to emphasize the mood of the gusty wind in the hay.

Sometimes the light just works out, even when you’re not in any particular location, and this can make the simplest of subjects turn quite dramatic.  Part way through an afternoon sprint across the north of the island, the blue sky was dripping with saturated colour behind my polarizing filter, transforming quite the ordinary tree in the ordinary field at the roadside into a set of photographs worth indulging in:

Given my exhortation of road photography above, the next two images need no justification, save to point out that they were taken about forty-five minutes outside Launceston in some beautiful countryside, again beneath that un-ignorably blue sky.  The clouds were a great balance to break up the texture above.

Meanwhile, this next landscape was taken at near-full zoom standing in almost exactly the same spot as the above two photos (perhaps a little off to one side to avoid passing trucks)- but shot at right-angles out towards the line of hills in the middle distance.  The landscape was one I could have explored for far longer had I the time.

And finally, on the same afternoon but a couple of hours and several hundred k’s further on, these two shots of Mt. Roland were begging to be taken.  In the first shot in particular I loved the faint rows of cut grass leading the eye up to the mountain.  The blue sky against the green fields and that textured rock made this a shot I was really chuffed with.

All up, lots of great touring to be had in Tasmania.  Destinations aside, I’m pretty sure I could go back and just drive around taking photos of random aspects.  That’s the sort of place Tasmania is.  We basically spent six days looking out of the car window going- ‘oh wow, isn’t that beautiful!’  You may have noticed, but this is the nth post I’ve put up now exhorting you to go visit.  Taken the hint yet?  Get there!

Up soon: Wineglass Bay

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Australiana

I think windmills are awesome.  For me they capture a certain flavour of classic rural Australia, touched with a tinge of nostaliga.  They perch on a landscape that often as not is as flat as a billiard table, framed against a changable sky in an act of defiance against an inhospitable climate.  I’ve seen many photos of them backlit by a moody sunset sky, or standing among a collection of ramshackle farm buildings surrounded by parched earth and signs of man’s efforts to eke out survival.

This one we found just off the Oodnadatta Track in South Australia.  This isn’t a great photo, nor even a great example of a windmill.  It also happened to be sitting (as is often the case) next to a great big water-hole lined with tarpaulin that was photographically terribly inconvenient- hence no sweeping horizon to accompany the shot (though the horizon did indeed sweep).  However it was the closest I came on this trip to realising my desire to catch a shot of a good old-fashioned Aussie windmill.

I’m hoping to be in rural Australia in a few weeks’ time.  If I get more luck this time round, I’ll be sure to let you know…

A Drive in the Hills

One of the beautiful things about Melbourne is the surrounds it finds itself set in.  Probably what makes it one of the world’s most livable cities.  Perched on a sweeping bay, with sandy beaches just five minutes’ drive from the skyscrapers of the city centre.  With some of the world’s most dramatic coastline- the Great Ocean Road, for example- an hour to the south-west, while to the north lie ranges of small mountains and, closer to home, vineyards set in gentle countryside.

Directly north of the city, closer still, you find hilly farmland, where suburbs melt into the bush and become picturesque roadside towns engulfed in seas of grey-green gum-trees, where galas and cockatoos flit among the branches by day, and where kangaroos can be seen sipping from household ponds as the sun goes down.  Just half an hour’s drive from sprawling shopping malls like Westfields in Doncaster, the rural idyll couldn’t be more removed in atmosphere and setting.

I came up this way looking for something to photograph, just a few days back.  The winter afternoon was clear and the air was cool but refreshing.  I accidentally left my Melway (road map) at home- something I should do more often- as it meant that within fifteen minutes I was on roads I didn’t know.  That I found my way out of the maze that is the Northern Suburbs is in itself a miracle.

I’d love to tell you where I ended up, but truth be told I don’t actually know.  After getting onto one smallish country road, I turned down a gravel access road, and then down another, and quickly found myself wending my way down a narrow dirt trail lined by white eucalypts, while the late afternoon sun turned golden and flickered between tree-trunks, low above ridgelines quickly turning to silhouettes.  Mailboxes dotted every couple of miles along the pathway were hints to farmsteads set on rises out of sight of the road.  Green council recycling bins reminded me that although the bush felt isolated and in the middle of nowhere, I was still in easy access of the municipality.

After driving for a while and trying (unsuccessfully) to catch a shot of shafts of sunlight filtering through the dust in my wake, I came to the top of a hill and found this old wreck.  It was lying at the corner of a hilltop paddock just by the fence, nicely accessible, and I couldn’t resist lining up some shots.  Nearby was an old weatherboard shack also worthy of some photographs, but sadly the light wasn’t cooperating, so I focused on the vintage farm truck instead.

The light in fact did let me down- and these shots are courtesy of some graduated neutral density filters applied in post-processing which have allowed me to expose the darkened foreground without blowing out the sky (though a couple have used fill-flash as well).  The gentle evening light was lovely to look at and gave the countryside beyond a soothing feel.  The red colour of the rusting chassis set against green fields and landscape however is so striking, and I am determined to go back and find it again, when the light is fully on the vehicle and not lost behind the trees, hopefully reducing the need for as much work in post.  But for my first photoshoot out, I was quite pleased with the result, and was given a beautiful sunset to boot.  While I stood at another gate lining up the final shots of the day, a herd of grey kangaroos loped past to graze fifty yards away- they’re terribly tame, even in Melbourne’s environs.  I couldn’t obviously take any photos of them, lacking both the light and the telephoto lens, but it was a lovely moment to enjoy.

If I learned anything from my little excursion, it was a reminder of how much fun it was to get lost.  I must remember to leave my map at home more often…

Something Old, Something New…

So, once again I have little choice but to apologize for my utter slackness in posting lately.  Not only have I not been updating my site here for a few weeks, but I also left what is a fairly drab and average photo at the top of the page- not likely to inspire my readers to keep coming back for more!  I am sorry for abandoning you and being rather boring and self-indulgent therefore.  Sadly, I can assure you it will happen again.

Anyways, I’m back to work tomorrow, after a 2 week break on leave and a full 3 months away from my desk here in Australia courtesy of overseas assignments.  I’d love to say that I’ve been up to all sorts of wonderful, exciting and photographically titilating experiences, however most of my time off seems to have involved life administration (like finding a place to live, currently under-resolved), and catching up with friends.  And while the latter is greatly more entertaining than the former, it isn’t much more photogenic.

That said, I’ve managed a few little shoots here and there.  That, and I still have a few images from my recent time overseas left to post.  Not to mention stacks more stuff from yesteryear drifting around my hard drive waiting to be uploaded.  So all I really need is the time and inclination.  I’m sure now that I’m back in the office and looking for ways to distract myself I’ll start posting again…  ;o)

The image at the top of the post I took on a recent meander through the countryside north of Melbourne.  More on that shortly.  The the middle shot, a rather marvellous sunset we had over the bay on Friday night.  And I’ve also managed to get myself extremely cold kite-surfing as well.  So I guess my time-off hasn’t been a complete waste…

I look forward to being slightly more regular in my presence here for the next little while.  And… thanks all of you for dropping by, I really appreciate having you drop in.  Have a lovely day!