This group of photos represents a lot of 4:40am wake-ups in Japan in order to get the best atmospheric conditions as well as to avoid the tourists. Lots of foul weather as of late, which played nicely into our shoots. I especially like the Lotus stems!
Most recent photos from Art in Rajasthan!
Sacred cows, sarus cranes, the Ganga Aarti, tigers, monkeys, and chitals–India is always colorful and alive.
Holi has brought me back to India. We experienced the Festival of Colors in the ancient Vrindavan temple near the city of Mathura. I am happy to say the cameras survived, covered in rain guards.
Celebrated all over India since ancient times, Holi is an annual festival which takes place on the day after the full moon in the Hindu month of Phalguna. Originally Holi was an agricultural festival celebrating the arrival of spring. In keeping with this tradition people now choose to celebrate the occasion by throwing brightly colored spices or herbal powders into the air. Symbolically they are ridding the gloom of winter and rejoicing in the colors and liveliness of spring.
Yes, we finally did get out of Punta Arenas! Antarctica was waiting for us with beautiful skies, ice, microflora and of course, penguins. I even started to see them in the patterns of my abstracts. Can you?
Flying into Antarctica can be a dicey proposition. We were stranded in Punta Arenas, Chile for a few days before the weather cleared enough on the icy continent, then hours later we couldn’t land and had to return for another try a day later. We did get a great view of Fitz Roy and the Patagonian Icecap, though.
On the last leg of our east African sojourn earlier this year, we stayed at the idyllic Mnemba Island Lodge on tiny Mnemba Island adjacent to Zanzibar. Within twenty minutes of arriving we witnessed the last batch of green sea turtles leave their nest and enter the Indian Ocean. One in a thousand will return twenty five years later.
No trip to east Africa is complete without a visit to the magnificent Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania. It is the largest unfilled, inactive volcanic caldera in the world. Various hominids have lived here for 3 million years and currently about 25000 large mammals from rhinos to hippos to zebras make this area home.
Yellowstone National Park is spectacular in the winter. We stayed at the Old Faithful Snow Lodge, one of the few lodges open in the winter. From there we explored the Norris Geyser Basin via snowcoach, passed all the while by snowmobilers, who now are restricted to roads and use significantly quieter engines. As always the wildlife is varied and accessible, but what I liked photographing were the landscapes, especially the pine forests that burned back in the late 1980s. Their regimented geometry was softened by the falling snow.
Nothing is more exciting than flying for 8 hours above herds of wildebeest and other critters of the Serengeti, above Lake Natron’s spectacular mineral deposits and lesser flamingos, and finally around the summit of “Ol Doinyo Lengai” volcano the Maasais call the home of the gods. The surface of Natron is surreal, colorful, and geometric, seemingly made for me. In some of the flamingo images you will see both reflections and shadows from the same birds resulting in beautifully complex compositions.
See the First and Second videos in the series of East Africa Video Journals.
