Author: Tom (Admin)
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Gulshan 3: Weekend Escapes to Thailand
Mae Klong Market and Bangkok’s Unexpected Order Living in the diplomatic heart of Dhaka—nestled between Baridhara, Gulshan 1, and Gulshan 2—you learn to appreciate the finer points of organized chaos. Twenty million people, constant honking that’s considered not just normal but polite communication, and traffic that defies all logic. So when we learned the expat…
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Another Year, Another Itdyadi
I see it has been 18 months since my last post. In that time, a lot has happened in Bangladesh, to say the least. It has kept us all quite busy and on our toes. In the meantime, in the weeks prior to Eid ul Fitr 2024 – which was way back in April –…
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Our Truly Amazing TV Debut: Behind the Scenes
A few months ago, we got word through the Dhaka expat network that someone was looking for “foreigners” to play roles in a Bangladeshi television show. No acting experience or Bengali language experience required. It turns out that this “someone” was none other than television personality, writer, producer, comedian, voice actor, and singer Hanif Sanket.…
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Holi in Bangladesh Part 2: the Ruined Roll
A bit of clicking around this site will reveal I’m a film photographer. And when I went to photograph the Holi celebration for my previous post, I took with me three rolls of film. Only two turned out as intended. I had two small developer tanks that hold two spools each – two in one,…
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Holi in Bangladesh
For those of you familiar with the holiday Holi, it may come as a surprise to see a post about Holi, a Hindu holiday, in Bangladesh, a predominantly Muslim country. The number of Hindus in Bangladesh has declined significantly since the country’s independence, but given a total country population, of 170 million, there still remain…
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Hashing Out Old Dhaka
In my previous post, I shared impressions of Old Dhaka gained from an unscripted walk and a 30-minute ride on one of the small ferries. Recently, however, I had the opportunity to enjoy a completely different kind of tour of Old Dhaka – somehow simultaneously more organized and more disorganized – with the Dhaka Hash…
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The Blog is Back: First Impressions of Dhaka, Bangladesh
Taking a break and going back to school for the last two years has been such a wonderful opportunity! But then again, writing, reading, doing photography, simply because I want to, and not because I’ve got an assignment due…well, I’ve kind of missed that. So here’s our first installment from the latest phase. Adventure is…
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A Few Words About My Father
At times like this, weird things come into your head. Like how I’ve never heard my Dad sleep for so many hours without snoring. Or how all life is sacred, and with the exception of mosquitoes, any animal in my house has to be trapped in a cup and released outside. Mom is telling me…
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The Sky is NOT Always Blue in California
People in California’s Bay Area awoke this morning thinking, “I must have a few hours left to sleep” because the sky was so dark. A dingy sky carrying smoke and ash from the fires plaguing the state obscured the sun and cast an eerie pall over our neighborhood. There was no odor of smoke in…
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“Artisans” documentary series – final (?) episode
Some of you may have seen my “Artisan” series of mini-documentaries. The plan was to highlight different occupations in Madagascar’s informal sector that involve a specialized skill. Jobs that don’t really exist in the West, with detail that may even surprise some people in Madagascar. I didn’t expect the project to take over two years!…
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Every Day is a Surprise. Also, People are A$$h0Le5. (part 2)
And so, my motorcycle was repaired, and I planned for the next day to be completely uneventful – one of those days where you catch up on tasks that have been piling up. But I was wrong. The morning was pretty routine, and then I went to my place of work, where I saw that…
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Every Day is a Surprise. Also, People are A$$h0Le5.
Life is funny. Some days you wake up and things are – meh – run of the mill, nothing to write home about. Other days you wake up and experience a day you never imagined. I’ve had three traffic accidents in the last month. In the first, I was found at fault – a “tuktuk”…
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When Langtang Vanished
April 25, 2015. I was enjoying an idyllic vacation in Mauritius, swimming with the largest animals in the world. When we returned to the dock, my phone rang: how quickly could I get to Nepal? There had been an awful earthquake, thousands had perished, and many were still missing and/or trapped in the hills and…
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Reunion Island: a Little (Volcanic) Piece of France in the Middle of the Indian Ocean
Living in Madagascar, people would sometimes ask, “Don’t you get island fever?” Of course, this never happened – given that it stretches the distance from New York City to the tip of Florida, it’s more like a small continent than an island. Still, from time to time, it’s nice to visit some of the smaller…
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Onward to Mahajanga, Madagascar
In my previous post I talked about our meticulously planned trip to see all four islands of the Comoros archipelago, which was so rudely interrupted by political violence…and so we shifted to Mahajanga, on the west coast of Madagascar. I’ve blogged about Mahajanga before, and I’ve even made videos similar to what I plan to…
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Mayotte: From Above and Below
During my time in Madagascar, I had the opportunity to visit nearby Mayotte a few times. Never heard of it? It’s and island in the Indian Ocean – part of the Comoros Archipelago, claimed by the Comoros as its fourth island but administered by France as its 101st Department. If you want to know more…
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Voigtlander Vitoret: Test/Review
The Voigtlander Vitoret is a relatively inexpensive camera manufactured in the 1960s in Braunschweig, then-West Germany. It’s pretty simple compared to its fancier cousin, the Vito, and it came in different versions – with an exposure meter, rangefinder, and other features – but this is the simplest of them – set your aperture (f/2.8-f/22), shutter…
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Yet Another Sh*tty Camera Challenge
If you spend any time on “film photography twitter” you’ll have heard about the CULT (allegedly) that is the Sh*tty Camera Challenge. The rules are simple: find a camera that costs less than a roll of film and see what you can do with it. This time around we were given a bit more time…
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Found Film from the 1940s: Prudential!
Some of you who have looked at my blog once or twice are aware that I used to develop “found film” that was found undeveloped inside cameras, either that I had bought or that someone else had found inside a camera and didn’t know what to do with. Occasionally it would be a trove of…
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Episode 3 of “Artisans” Published!
Eons ago (ok, October last year) I posted the first episode in a series of mini-documentaries about jobs in the informal sector in Madagascar, about the traveling blacksmiths that wander through the city repairing umbrellas, plastic tubs, roofs… A couple of weeks later, the second episode, about brickmakers. And then, for a long time, nothing.…
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An Old Camera Gets a New Life
Admittedly, I own too many cameras. So when it was time to leave Madagascar, I invited a couple of friends – who happen to be the only other film photographers in Madagascar, as far as I know – to see if anything caught their attention. Safidy and Toni browsed my collection just days before they…
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Memories of Favorite Places: Ile aux Nattes, Madagascar
Off the eastern coast of the island of Madagascar stretches a 57-kilometer long by 5 kilometers wide island, covered mostly in green and dotted with thatched-roof villages. Ile Sainte-Marie (Saint Marie’s Island), or Nosy Boraha, as it is known in the local Malagasy, is a popular destination among the whale watching community (see this post…
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Introducing Kids in Madagascar to Photography: Results (3)
This is the third in series of posts in which I write about introducing kids to photography, using point-and-shoot film cameras from the 1980s and 90s, at the youth center, Le Cameleon, in Antananarivo, Madagascar. You can find previous posts in this series here, here and here. When it came time for the kids to choose their third…
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Introducing Kids in Madagascar to Photography: Results (2)
This is one of a short series of posts in which I write about introducing kids to photography, using point-and-shoot film cameras from the 1980s and 90s, at the youth center, Le Cameleon, in Antananarivo, Madagascar. You can find previous posts in this series here and here. Previously I wrote about how we had sent the…
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Introducing Kids in Madagascar to Photography: Results (1)
I wrote last time about the youth center, Le Cameleon, we crowdfunded and built in Antananarivo, Madagascar, and the project we organized to introduce a half dozen interested kids to photography, using point-and-shoot film cameras from the 1980s and 90s. I was excited and hopeful the kids would wind up with good results, because I…