Category: Places
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Anjezika: Antananarivo’s “Waterworld”
This is Anjezika. Once a vibrant fishing and rice-growing village, it has gradually been encircled and choked off by the surrounding city of Antananarivo, Madagascar. Now, nobody grows anymore rice here. A few small fish can be collected from the stagnant water that separates small squares of low-lying land where the people have built their…
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Merry-Go-Round, Madagascar Style
In retrospect, the kids somehow look terrified. But they were having a great time, I assure you!
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Heartbreaking
As in many parts of the world, when you drive around urban areas of Madagascar, people will tap on your window asking for money. Frequently these are little people. There are many theories about how to respond – sometimes the kids are exploited by adults and sent out to beg, often carrying babies – and…
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Introducing Analog / Film Cameras to a New Generation
You don’t have to be as old as me to remember using analog/film cameras. But there’s an entire generation entering university (depending on where you grew up) that has grown up with photography as a purely digital phenomenon – often involving phones. Awhile back when we were still living in India, a friend I met…
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Children of the Street: Ankorondrano
A group of about a dozen kids gathers on a small patch of green with a few benches and trees. Basically a large roundabout. Imagine an oblong Dupont Circle, except Starbucks is 3,000 miles away. The sound of traffic is constant. Two young volunteers lug a bag of supplies to a cement bench and quietly…
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Children of the Street: Ambohijatovo
In this third installment on a project Anne and I are involved in, we assist “Zanaky Ny Lalana”(Children of the Street) at yet another location. This week we went to Ambohijatovo, one of the ten locations where Malagasy volunteers for “Teach for Madagascar” currently hold sessions. Teach for Madagascar is a program whereby Malagasy volunteers provide literacy and…
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Love Your Neighbor
Truth be told, we didn’t ask to come to Madagascar just for the lemurs – although they’re a pretty nice bonus. A big reason we came here because we want to try and make a difference, somewhere, in someone’s lives; to have a purpose. But Saturday was a pretty tough day. We started the day…
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Children of the Street: Ampefiloha
Last week I posted about a new project Anne and I are involved in – assisting the NGO “Teach for Madagascar” via a group of street photographers called “Zanaky Ny Lalana” (Children of the Street). This week we went to another of the ten locations where Malagasy volunteers teach children who don’t have access to other…
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Children of the Street: Anjezika
“Zanaky Ny Lalana” is a group of street photographers that was brought together about a half year ago with the goal of highlighting the challenges faced by some of Madagascar’s most vulnerable inhabitants. I don’t exactly have much in the way of street photography credentials, but we were fortunate in that the group’s founder has allowed us…
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Travels in Madagascar: in and around Ampefy
Ampefy is a little town about 100km west of Antananarivo, in a landscape dominated by volcanic landforms – many of the surrounding hills have the telltale conical shape of dormant volcanoes. There are a few hotels in town, but we opted for an AirBnB (yes, even in Madagascar!) lakeside lodge that went for around $22…
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Scenes from a Moving Car: Antananarivo Commute
When I first got to Antananarivo I would stare out the window during the commute to work, and started taking pictures with my iPhone through the window of the shuttle. The water in the rice paddies has dried up significantly (but not all), and much of the effort has shifted to digging up the mud,…
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Getting Lost in Antananarivo, Just a Mile from Home
Less than a mile from our home is a lake that functions as a water catchment area during the rainy season, but also offers a running trail, a place for young lovers to escape, a livelihood for a small informal community, and maybe a bit of photography. We took a walk there late one recent…
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Madagascar’s Saha Forest Camp: An Eco-sperience! Part 2.
As the title suggests, this is a continuation of my previous post, wherein I describe Saha Forest Camp and its surroundings…in case an orientation is needed! We’re not serious hikers. But our local guide had done a good job so far guiding us through the rain forest, and we had nothing planned, so we decided…
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Madagascar’s Saha Forest Camp: an Eco-sperience! Part 1.
A couple of hours north of Antananarivo, at the end of a rutted, slick red clay road that meanders for about 10 kilometers eastward from the town of Anjozorobe, where the winding rice paddies finally end in a jumble of primary forest, Saha Forest Camp is perched on a hillside. We arrived at a clearing…
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Madagascar’s Mantadia National Park: the Lemurs
Normally when we go on a trip somewhere, we end up with 6-10 really good photos worth sharing, which give an overall impression of the experience. But I have been stalling on this post because the number of close-up lemur photos we got is pretty overwhelming. So I’m just going to post a bunch of…
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First Photowalk in Tana
We’ve had a few weeks to settle into the groove here in Antananarivo (pronounce “tananarive” but more frequently shortened to “tana”) and so we figured it was high time we got out and about with our cameras. There is so much going on, and so many fascinating street scenes to photograph here – but we…
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Madagascar: Paying Attention to the Little Things
Walking through the jungle in Madagascar in search of lemurs, it’s easy to overlook the little things…and trample them underfoot. Bugs, tiny plants, lizards. There are upwards of 100,000 species of insects in Madagascar. We didn’t see the long-necked giraffe weevil, but we saw lots of other interesting creepy crawlies. For instance, this little guy,…
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(Re)introducing Madagascar: Golden Hour in a Roadside Village
So it was our first “real” weekend (i.e. the first during which we were not stumbling around in a jet-lagged haze) and we decided to head out of town. We decided to return to a destination we had visited on our vacation trip in 2012, and a place many visitors to the country go and see…
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24 Hours in Paris
When moving to a new home, as we’ve done every 2-4 years for the last 25, we’ve always traveled with pets. When we were traveling with a 100-lb dog requiring (due to his size) a separate booking on a cargo flight, the object of the game was to get to our destination as soon as…
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…and we’re off – to Madagascar!
When we were posted in Namibia, we took a trip to Madagascar. The thought was, “when will we ever have this opportunity again?” because plane tickets from the U.S. are wicked expensive. How ironic that a few short years later we should discover that we will be posted there for a two-year assignment (extendable to…
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Photo Assignment: Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial
Given that a trillion photos were snapped in 2015, the odds of snapping an “original” photo at a tourist attraction or monument/memorial in Washington are ridiculously low, but it’s fun to try and see what you can accomplish. The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial is one of my favorite places to visit in Washington. Compared to the…
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Washington’s Cherry Blossoms
The last couple of weeks, the National Capital Region has been all abuzz about the annual return of the cherry blossoms. I blogged about it the last time I was in the area for a few months, back in 2011, and so I thought it would be good to check it out again this year.…
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Testing the Minolta SR-T-101
Awhile back, I posted about the Petri 7S, one of two cameras my mother-in-law had passed along to me. This post is on the other camera, a Minolta SR-T-101. This Minolta is an SLR that first appeared on the market in 1966 and continued to be manufactured until 1975. From this website you can figure…
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Rediscovering America: Shenandoah
In a long(er) blog post in October, I wrote about the benefits of a career that takes you all over the world, and highlighted the fact that being away often helps us better appreciate the natural beauty of our own country – which, ironically, we don’t get to experience all that much. After spending some…
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Autumn
We haven’t really seen any real “autumn” to speak of for a number of years, so it has been refreshing to re-experience those surprisingly brisk mornings, doing those runs where the cold air tears at your lungs a little, and the smell of wet leaves… I keep telling myself to bring a camera to capture…