Shooting From The Hip On LK Road

Photo Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved Whilst teaching at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop the past week or so, I've also managed to set aside some time to fit some of my favorite style of photography, and shooting from the hip with the Fuji X Pro-1 has been high on my list to do, especially at night. Here's LK Road, a collection of street photography scenes made in one of the grittiest mainstream streets in Chiang Mai; Loi Kroh Road. The photographs are grouped under the title page of Katoey Or Not?, but I chose not to title this post with that particular name to avoid having visitors being referred to it by search engines for purposes...

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My Work: The Art of Kathakali

One of the highlights of my Oracles of Kerala Photo Expedition-Workshop this past March was spending half a day at a Kathakali school near Thrissur, and documenting the preparations and performance of this ancient art. It was totally distinct from the usual superficial performances shown at the various tourist hotels, and the professionalism of the performers was breathtaking. Apart from the talent of the performers, I was especially struck by the singing which you hear on this "photo-film".Kathakali is one of the oldest theatre forms in the world, and originated in Kerala. It's a group production, in which actors-dancers take various roles in performances based on themes from Hindu mythology, such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.The elaborate make up sessions often take longer...

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The Travel Photographer's The Vedic Disciples

This is the second of my multimedia (audio slideshows) projects of stills, audio and video made during my The Oracles of Kerala Photo Expedition/Workshop. It's of the activities at an ancient Vedic 'gurukul' (or training/boarding school; very similar to the Buddhist monasteries for novitiates), where we were treated to a demonstration of this way of teaching sacred Vedic scriptures. It is an ancient Indian educational system, which is currently being rejuvenated with the assistance of the Indian government. The young boys who populate the Vedic school usually belong to a caste of Keralan Brahmins, who are responsible to carry on the age-old tradition of chanting Vedas during religious rituals or functions. The chanting is learned by practice, and nothing is written down. The rhythm of...

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The Travel Photographer Is On Cowbird!

I've just uploaded my first Cowbird story titled The Sufi Itinerant of Qutb Uddin. While working on the photograph of Miskine, the Sufi in my post of yesterday, I realized I had a recording of him briefly telling me his life story. Coincidentally, I was invited to join Cowbird, which describes itself as "...a small community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than youre likely to find anywhere else on the Web." Cowbird seeks to feature incredible stories by some of the world's finest storytellers, and present them in the most beautiful storytelling environment on the Web. Its community...

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Kolkata's The Cult of Durga

My main project that came to be from the Kolkata's Cult of Durga Photo~Expedition & Workshop which I led and organized is The Cult of Durga. In contrast to my previous audio slideshows that on average are 3 minutes in length, The Cult of Durga is long...it's just over 5 minutes. I also broke a few of my own rules with it. Using the Ken Burns effect on a couple of occasions is one of the most obvious. I decided against a tighter edit,  thinking that reducing the number of photographs would've eliminated some important components. So I left it as I produced it in Kolkata. Durga Puja is an annual Hindu festival in South Asia that celebrates worship of the Hindu goddess Durga. It's the most important religious and social event in Kolkata. It involves a series of rituals...

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The Rickshaw Wallahs of Kolkata

Following my two weeks Kolkata's Cult of Durga Photo~Expedition & Workshop, I have now completed two photo essays centering on the rickshaw pullers of that quintessential Indian megapolis. About half of the photographs were made using a Leica M9, while the rest with a Canon 5d Mark II. The audio was recorded with a Marantz 620PMD. The first photo essay is an audio slideshow of about 30 black & white photographs of rickshaw pullers, supplemented by a soundtrack made up of Kolkata's traffic sounds, short narrative clips by the pullers themselves and live instrumental music played by Satyananda Das, a traditional Baul musician. It can be seen either as a Vimeo movie (above) or as a regular SoundSlides multimedia, which is recommended because the...

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Khari Baoli: The Porters of Spice

Khari Baoli is a street that runs from the Fatehpuri Mosque on Chandni Chowk to the western edge of the old city of Delhi, and is its wholesale spice market. Little has changed there for centuries. Enormous jute sacks of herbs and spices are brought to the wholesalers on long, narrow barrows or carried by porters. From ginger to chilies, from lentils and rice to jars of chutneys, pickles, nuts and tea...all kinds of spices and hers can be found here. The market itself is on the south side of Khari Baoli, and was built by wealthy merchants in 1920s. It is now Asias largest wholesale spice market. It's an important and busy commercial district, and caters to the vast spice market of North India, including states of Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan and even as far as Madhya Pradesh, making it...

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My Work: The Bali Trilogy

I'm glad to present Bali: The Trilogy; a three-part audio-slideshow (based on a chaptered SoundSlides platform), which consists of black & white documentaries of Balinese ceremonies.The Melasti ceremony is an all important Balinese tradition of purifying temple deities in the waters of the ocean, the Ngaben is the Balinese tradition of cremating the dead, while the third is Tajen, the ancient tradition of cockfighting, technically illegal but still practiced on the island (and elsewhere in Indonesia).This above link will not work on iPads (by the way, about 6-7% of my daily readers view this blog on their iPads, and I think this percentage...

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Bali: Odalan at Pura Desa Sapat

Photo  Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved Here's the first gallery of my own work whilst I was leading the Bali: Island of Odalan Photo~Expedition™ last month. It's a linear photo gallery of about 20 large color photographs made during an important anniversary of a Balinese Hindu temple, and it's titled Odalan: Pura Desa Sapat. It's more photo journalistic in style than travel, and there are graphic photographs of animals being sacrificed, which may be disturbing to some. This was one of the two most intense photo-shoots during the whole photo~expedition...not only because of the time spent photographing, but also because of the...

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The Travel Photographer's Motion

I set up The Travel Photographer's Motion as a parallel portal (using the F8 Graph Paper Press theme) for my audio slideshows, which are originally produced in the SoundSlides format, and subsequently converted to mp4s, then uploaded to Vimeo. I have no real preference between Vimeo or YouTube, and I'll eventually have these mp4s uploaded on both. The current line-up consists of Baneshwar: Pind Daan (the annual rite of remembrance for Rajasthan tribals), White Shadows (my favorite! The sad life of the widows of Vrindavan), Debates at the Sangha (Buddhist debates in a Bhutanese monastery...much more animated than those in our Senate), Gnawa...

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Recent Kudos To The Travel Photographer

I think the British are great...read on and you'll know why I say this. Adam Westbrook is a freelance multimedia journalist, blogger & lecturer with several years experience in television, radio and online. His blog is one the best multimedia-biased on the internet, and if you haven't bookmarked yet, you should. He recently published a free e-book titled 66, wich is a series of six blog posts giving advice to the budding multimedia journalists. This is a must-read e-book for anyone who's interested in getting started into journalistic multimedia, and one that I shall use in my own teachings of the subject. In his Best of the Blogs 2009,...

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Sunday Break: Chinatown's Columbus Park

Photo  Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved I thought New York City's weather on Sunday was just perfect for a few hours of street photography on Chinatown's Mulberry Street, but ended up spending an interesting time at Columbus Park (Mulberry and Bayard). This is the only park in Chinatown, and is built on what was in the 19th century the most dangerous slum area of immigrant New York. Photo  Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved Now, it's the venue of choice for hundreds of Chinese residents, a few of whom I saw were practicing tai chi, while others (mostly women) were playing mahjong and card games, and groups of men were engaged...

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Sunday Break: Gansevoort Street Fair

Photo  Tewfic El-Sawy -All Rights Reserved New York City's Meatpacking District is alive this weekend for the Target High Line Street Festival, a free celebration of the opening of the High Line, New York's newest and most innovative green space. Aside from the gigantic lemonade stand, there's performances by various musical bands such Hungry March Band, Zona Del Barrio, and Michael Arenella and his Dreamland Orchestra, among others. Naturally, crowd-pleasers such as pretty girls and magicians were also on hand to entertain the crowds. The High Line is a 1.5-mile-long historic elevated rail structure on the West Side of Manhattan,...

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