Rich-Joseph Facun: Darshana Ganga

There are a couple of images captioned "moksha" on Rich-Joseph Facun's Darashana Ganga gallery that are certainly disturbing, but the remainder of his gallery show us Varanasi and its streets at its grittiest, and being one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, it is a gritty city. This is a work in progress, and I suspect that more images will be forthcoming.For...

Дальше »

WSJ Photo Journal: Pushkar Mela

Photo © Kevin Frayer/Associated Press-All Rights ReservedThe WSJ Photo Journal with a photograph by Kevin Frayer has reminded me that the Pushkar fair (or mela) is taking place from October 30 to November 2 this year. It is one of the world's largest camel fairs, and is held in the quaint town of Pushkar. At that time, hotel rooms and other accommodations are available at a hefty...

Дальше »

Coming Soon: Bhutan Galleries!

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights ReservedPhoto © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights ReservedI'll be soon posting two galleries of some of my work made during my Bhutan Photo~Expedition a few weeks ago. One is a multimedia photo gallery of Monks' Debates at the Kharchhu Sangha in Bumthang (which has already been seen by subscribers to my newsletter), while the other will showcase some of...

Дальше »

My Work: Bhutan Monks, A Cat & TV

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights ReservedThis photograph (click it for a larger version) was made at the Wangdichoeling Palace in Jakar, Bhutan. Built in 1857, it served as the principal summer residence of the first and second kings of Bhutan; Gongsa Ugyen Wangchuck (1862-1926) and Jigme Wangchuk 1905-1952). Virtually dilapidated, it is now occupied by monks and novices who use...

Дальше »

April Maciborka: India

Every now and then I stumble on a website that, to my mind, reaffirms the essence of what a travel photographer is, or should be, all about. So I hope you will agree that April Maciborka is one of those who carry that particular torch.Her style, as evidenced by her various portfolios, matches my own visual philosophy: "travel photography meets photojournalism". Other travel photographers...

Дальше »

Mariela Furrer: Timket, Ethiopia

I'm often asked to lead a photo-expedition to Ethiopia and I always demur, citing the infrastructural difficulties (mostly in the South) of setting up such a trip, and the concomitant high costs. However, as can be seen in Mariella Furrer's Timket gallery, Ethiopia is one of the most visually and culturally magnetic countries in the world. These images bring back the emotions I...

Дальше »

Canon 7D: Shadow Image?

Photographers seem to have discovered a flaw in the new Canon EOS 7D, which results in a shadow of the preceding frame showing up in the following image when the continuous shooting mode is chosen.The flaw was confirmed by Canon in Japan and elsewhere. Canon announced that it "is currently investigating and analyzing the cause of this phenomenon, and we are planning to release...

Дальше »

NYT: Ariana Lindquist: Heshun (China)

Photo © Ariana Lindquist/NY Times. All Rights ReservedThe New York Times featured a short slideshow of Ariana Lindquist's photographs of Heshun, in Yunnan province, China. With beautiful scenery and abundant cultural traditions, Heshun is one of China's earliest border trade town, and is a perennial favorite of film directors, photographers, and painters.Heshun is located on China's...

Дальше »

The Frame: Chhath Festival

Photo © Dar Yasin/AP. All Rights ReservedThe Frame, the photography blog of The Sacramento Bee, is one the main three large sized picture blogs, along with the Boston Globe's The Big Picture and the Wall Street Journal's Photo Journal.It brings us 19 photographs of the Chhath festival where Indian Hindu devotees offers prayers to the sun. The festival is also known as Surya Pooja...

Дальше »

Field Report: B&H & Adorama

Well, I succumbed to the "bigger is better" axiom and decided to add a 16gb SanDisk Compact Flash card to my inventory.In arriving to this decision, I was guided by two facts: the first is that the images files from Canon 5D Mark II are monstrously large and that, although my 8gb CF cards are quite adequate, I filled them up a number of times in the midst of a photo shoot. The...

Дальше »

Swiatoslaw Wojtkowiak: India

Photo © Swiatoslaw Wojtkowiak-All Rights ReservedThe face on Swiatoslaw Wojtkowiak's website's cover is haunting...I can't tell if she's smiling or not. Have a look, and then explore his galleries which include photographs of East and West Africa, Maghreb countries, the Middle East and India, among others.Swiatoslaw Wojtkowiak is from Pozanan in Poland, and his photographs were...

Дальше »

POV: Antiquities & Colonialism

© Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters. Courtesy The New York TimesAntiquities and its politics are hardly topics that stay for long on my radar screen, but this time it involves Egypt, my birth country so I'll take a stab at the recent news which involves the bust of Nefertiti, currently displayed in a Berlin museum. What does this have to do with travel photography, you ask? Not much...but...

Дальше »

Books: Claudia Wiens: Burma

Claudia Wiens was based in Cairo, and is now in Istanbul working as a freelance photographer, and is represented by Getty Images. She has now published a book of her photographs of Burma and titled "Of Dung-Beetle Messengers And Infamous Crickets" which, although I haven't seen yet, does provide Claudia's interesting visual narrative of this lovely country and its people. Have...

Дальше »

Zhou Mi: Where The Ganges Flows...

Here's a black & white photo essay Where The Ganges Flows... by Zhou Mi, documenting his traveling down the Ganges from its source in Gangotri to Kolkata, passing through Rishikesh, Haridwar and Varanasi.It brought to mind the classic book Slowly Down the Ganges by Eric Newby, which may have been the photographer's inspiration.Zhou Mi was born in Wuxi, Jiang-Su, China and worked...

Дальше »

Bhutan Photo Expedition: Just Because

Photograph © Tewfic El-Sawy/All Rights Reserved I found this photograph amongst the thousands I made during the Tamshing Lakhang tsechu during my photo expedition Land of the Druk Yul. It appeals to me just because there's a human story unfolding here...unfortunately, I was whisked away to another spot before I could find out whether this was a monk greeting his wife and child,...

Дальше »

Adriana Zehbrauskas: Daily Life Mexico

Photograph © Adriana Zehbrauskas/All Rights Reserved Adriana Zehbrauskas is a Brazilian photographer/photojournalist, currently living in Mexico City. She received her degree in Journalism in 1989 and then moved to Paris where she studied Linguistics and Phonetics at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Adriana worked as a staff photographer for Folha de Sao Paulo for 11 years, traveling extensively...

Дальше »

TOP's Canon G10 Review

The Online Photographer blog has a recent review of the Canon G10 by Edward Taylor, which is interesting on many levels. I'm in the market for what the article/post calls a DMD (Decisive Moment Digital) camera...in other words, a small camera that is easily portable and that can deliver a near-DSLR quality image, and one that I can use for whenever I get a street photography whimsy...

Дальше »

Robert Caplin: Cuban Life

© 2009 Robert Caplin-All Rights ReservedI came across Robert Caplin's work through a recent interview published in The New York Times' Frugal Traveler. Moving from this interview to his website, I immediately saw that much of his work was typically that of a quintessential travel photographer.Caplin started out in Athens, Ohio, with a Nikon N50 film camera, but subsequently moved...

Дальше »

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Beta

Adobe just announced its Lightroom 3 as a public beta version, which means anyone with an Internet connection can download it and start putting it to the test. You do not need to own (or have tried) a previous version of Lightroom. The version of Lightroom 3 beta software available for download is offered in English only. You can download the beta and use it until the product expires...

Дальше »

Magnum: In Silence: Susan Meiselas

© 2009 Susan Meiselas/Magnum-All Rights ReservedIn Silence is the beautiful and powerful work (a combination of still photography and video) by Susan Meiselas as featured by Magnum In Motion which deals with the tens of thousands of Indian women and girls who die during pregnancy, while in childbirth, and in the weeks after giving birth, despite the Indian government's programs...

Дальше »

Bhutan Photo Expedition: Le "Chimping"

Photograph © Gavin Gough/All Rights Reserved Here's a Soundslides candid behind the scenes look at the going-ons during the Bhutan: Land of the Druk Yul photo expedition. All photographs are courtesy and copyright of Gavin Gough (those of him are obviously not...unless they were self-taken). As can be seen from the above photo capture, we were singularly adept at the art of...

Дальше »

Book: Monumental India

As is my habit when I'm in London, I dropped by the High Street Kensington branch of Waterstones to browse its offerings of travel photography books. In the middle of a wobbly table, there was a large brick-colored sleeve enveloping The Monumental India Book by photographer Amit Pasricha, with an introduction by William Dalrymple...an Indiaphile and a damn good writer as well....

Дальше »

My Work: Debate At The Sangha

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights ReservedJust a short post today to share the above image (still undecided as to the placement of the title) from a project I'm currently working on. Debate At The Sangha will be a gallery of photographs made during two of the weekly debates at the Kharchhu monastery in Chamkar (Bhutan). I've also recorded the animated debates as they were occurring,...

Дальше »

Bhutan: Land of Druk Yul Expedition

Photograph © Tewfic El-Sawy/All Rights Reserved Here's one of the many images I made at the Tamshing Lakhang during the Tamshingphala festival in Bumthang, Bhutan. This was one of the festivals or tsechus on my Land of Druk Yul photo expedition's itinerary. It is of a young monk practicing with a conch shell before one of the festival's dances. The conch is used in Tibetan Buddhism...

Дальше »

The 37th Frame

Pete Marovich, a photojournalist based in Harrisonburg, Virginia has started The 37th Frame a few weeks ago. The site seeks to bring to its readers the best of photojournalism and photography on the internet, by searching web sites of newspapers, magazines and independent photographers around the world, and posting links to the work. Marovich states that his objective is to...

Дальше »

Another Me Project

Photograph © Achinto Bhadra The Terre des hommes Foundation (Lausanne, Switzerland) conceived the Another Me project in which the documentary photographer Achinto Bhadra and counselor Harleen Walia guided 126 girls and women through a healing journey of psychological transformation. Achinto’s portraits record trafficking survivors’ imaginative visions of themselves as human,...

Дальше »

DenverPost.com: Sukkot

Photograph AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh-All Rights Reserved The Denver Post is another of the newspapers adopting large format images for its Captured Photo Blog of photo galleries, multimedia and video. While many of its features are of Colorado, it also offers international coverage such as the festival of Sukkot, which occurs during the latter two weeks of October in 2008. This...

Дальше »

New! EOS-1D Mark IV

Canon has just announced the EOS-1D Mark IV, a 16.1 megapixel digital single lens reflex camera (DSLR) camera body, and the successor to the Canon EOS-1D Mark III. It is the first Canon APS-H format DSLR to feature HD video recording at 1080p resolution.I've been waiting for a worthy successor to my beloved Canon 1D-Mark II and this may just be the one, effectively doubling the...

Дальше »

POV: WTF! This Is My Photo Shoot!

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights ReservedI don't know if it's the bottled water in Bhutan, the crisp Himalayan air, the scent of the pine trees or the excitement of the festivals...but some tourists lose their sense of civility when faced with opportunities to photograph. And I mean tourists, not serious and experienced photographers. Having arrived at the Chimi Lakhang monastery...

Дальше »

Alia Refaat: Vedic School

Photo © Alia Refaat-All Rights ReservedI'm pleased to feature an audio slideshow by photographer Alia Refaat showcasing her work at a Vedic school in Thrissur, Kerala. The photographs and audio were made during my Theyyams of Malabar Photo Expedition at an ancient Vedic 'gurukul' (or training/boarding school (very similar to the Buddhist monasteries for novitiates), where we were...

Дальше »

Verdict: Bhutan Land of the Druk Yul

Photograph Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved After almost 3 weeks of not posting, getting back in the "groove" is not as easy as I thought it would be, but what better way to restart this blog's activity than by writing on the results of my photo expedition in the Land of the Druk Yul. All of the festivals we photographed at were regional (or less), since I make it a point...

Дальше »

"Toothpick" Photo Expeditions

Photo © Tewfic "Toothpick" El-Sawy-All Rights ReservedOne (or possibly two) of the sharp wits on the Bhutan Photo-Expedition decided to rename (or name) it as in the above photograph. In Bhutan, each tour group has to have a paper nameplate on dining tables, and these are carefully and dutifully written by the tour guide.Unhappy with the formality and simplicity of the rather boring...

Дальше »

Rafaela Persson: Afghan Women

Rafaela Persson graduated from the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism program at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2008. She holds an MA in sociology with studies in human rights, international migration and ethnic relations from university of Lund, Sweden.Her photographs were exhibited in Copenhagen, the International Center of Photography in New...

Дальше »

Book: 100 New York Photographers

As previously announced on TTP, I am chuffed in being featured in Cynthia Dantzig's new book: 100 New York Photographers, which is a 442-page review of contemporary New York photographers and their diverse and divergent images. So here I am in the august company of well-known photographers such as Annie Liebovitz, Jay Maisel, Amy Arbus, Hugh Bell, Arnold Crane, Bruce Davidson,...

Дальше »

My Work: Tsechu Drummer In Bhutan

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights ReservedHere's what is largely a grab shot of a Bhutanese tsechu drummer on his way to join the rest of the musical group that accompanies the traditional dancers in Tamshingphala Lakhang in Bumthang. I've been to Bhutan 4 times so far to photograph during the tsechus season, and I can only recall one overcast day. The bright sunshine and the resultant...

Дальше »

Zackary Canepari: Kathputli

As my many posts on TTP show, one of my favorite photographers is Zackary Canepari who has recently shown off his talent with Kathputli Is My Home on 100Eyes, an excellent photo e-magazine published and edited by Andy Levin.Kathputli Colony slum in North Delhi is an illegal settlement or shantytown, which is both home and a mecca for the thousands of itinerant and non-itinerant...

Дальше »

Bhutan: Pow (Shamanism)

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights ReservedMy recent field reports on the Bhutan photo-expedition generated much interest as to our shaman (known as "pow" in Bhutan) photo shoot, and since it will take me quite a while to edit my photographs, here's one of the images while he pow performed his exorcism.In Bhutan, traditional households will frequently call on the healing powers...

Дальше »

Tyler Hicks: Kandahar

The New York Times features Tyler Hicks' photography on its LENS blog with a gallery titled Under The Radar In Kandahar.While I've seen much better from Tyler Hicks, these black & white photographs are nevertheless gritty and raw, and certainly worth a look. More interesting to me is the article which accompanies these images, in which Mr. Hicks speaks (or writes) of the dangers...

Дальше »

Bhutan Photo Expedition: The Verdict

(Gangtey Goempa). Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights ReservedOn completion of every photo expedition I undertake, I publish a verdict on what worked and what didn't. I'm probably the only travel photographer and photo expedition leader who does that so publicly, but it's a transparency ritual in which I believe very strongly. It's designed to assist those who intend to visit (in...

Дальше »

Hakka Dwellings: Ryan Pyle

Photo © Ryan Pyle/GlobalPost-All Rights ReservedThe GlobalPost website features Ryan Pyle's Chinese Hakka Houses, which are also known as Hakka Tulou "apartments" in Yongding county, Fujian province. These structures are indigenous to the Hakka minority group and other people in the mountainous areas in southwestern Fujian.In 2008, UNESCO granted the Tulou dwellings World Heritage...

Дальше »