Category: Places
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Remembering Sierra Leone
Today Sierra Leone was officially declared “Ebola-free”, having successfully gone 42 days (two incubation periods) without a new case of Ebola. In neighboring Guinea, where the disease outbreak began, health workers continue to struggle for its eradication, working to save patients only a few miles from Sierra Leone’s border. When I was in Sierra Leone…
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Rediscovering America: Oregon
The last four years have been given us amazing travel opportunities. The world is full of interesting things to see; wonderful people to meet and get to know; and of course this all translates to great video and photo opportunities. Not only have we been able to experience the vast deserts, wilderness and wildlife of Namibia, but…
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Washington, DC by Night
Washington, D.C. is an interesting place to photograph, but it goes without saying that it’s completely different from the photography environment we had gotten accustomed to in India. A couple of weeks ago we became aware that there was going to be a “supermoon” – a larger (closer) than normal full moon, and via Meetup.com…
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Final Chennai Photowalk
I’ve been out of India for over three weeks now, but wanted to finish sharing our experiences of our last few weeks in India before closing out that wonderful chapter in our lives, as documented in the TAZM Pictures blog. We have been doing photowalks for the last couple of years, and would often return to…
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The Chennai Photowalk
One of the best things about Chennai, for us, was the “photowalks.” A photowalk is basically just walking around with a camera and seeing what you can photograph. Often these walks are in groups. I discovered photowalks in Chennai, though they happen all over the world – and there is even such a thing as…
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Langkawi: the Jewel of Kedah
As our departure from India loomed closer, thoughts turned to all of the wonderful places in India we hadn’t yet managed to visit. India is so vast and diverse. We thought two years would be plenty of time to see all of the things that needed seeing. On the calendar, a few weekends that offered themselves…
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Birdwatching from the Hotel Pool
One of the highlights from our recent trip to Jaipur was the beautiful hotel pool. On our last day there, fed up with the heat, waiting for an evening flight, we arranged for a late checkout and decided to spend the morning lounging by the pool. After reading a bit, I noticed a couple of…
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Jaipur, India: Street Photography Goldmine
I have done a few posts already about our trip to Jaipur, India. It was only a 4-day trip, but as I have been looking through our photos, it’s surprising the number and quality of interesting shots we were able to get in such a short time. Especially considering that it was 104 Fahrenheit and…
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MORE Monkeying Around in Jaipur
Our recent trip to Jaipur, in Rajasthan, India’s largest state, was short but we brought back a lot of photos. I posted awhile back about our encounter with monkeys our first day there; it turns out this would not be our only encounter! Our second day there, we decided to make our way to what…
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Monkeying Around in Jaipur
With only a month or so before we leave India, we finally made it to Rajasthan, the country’s largest state, located on the northwestern border with Pakistan, and home to the inhospitable Thar Desert. Literally translated as the “land of kings”, Rajasthan could easily be the destination for a half dozen or more individual trips…
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Life Goes On in Kathmandu (part 1)
I wish my visit to Nepal had been under different circumstances. I arrived late on April 27 – after hours on the tarmac in New Delhi, waiting for a parking berth to be on the forecast so the plane could take off. Thankfully the airline arranged for an extra meal to be delivered while we…
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Having a Whale of a Time in Sri Lanka
We recently took our first trip to Sri Lanka. Growing up on the opposite side of the globe, the only thing you would hear about Sri Lanka was the ongoing civil war, which dragged on for more than a quarter of a century, resulted in between 60,000 and 100,000 deaths, and displaced nearly 300,000 people.…
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Hark!! The Breadman Cometh
Every afternoon until well into the evening, at approximately half-hour intervals, you can hear an odd whistling sound loop in the village where we are staying, just outside of Weligama, at the southern tip of Sri Lanka. At first I thought it was the “ice cream man” but eventually we managed to find the source…
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The Ashram: Following in the Beatles’ Footsteps
One of the places we were eager to see on our recent trip to Rishikesh, in northern India, was the so-called “Beatles Ashram.” The former ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, on the left bank of the Ganges overlooking Rishikesh, is where the Beatles went in 1968 to learn about Transcendental Meditation. They wrote a few…
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Strolling (and Rafting) through Rishikesh
Not too long ago, we had a chance to visit Rishikesh, in northern India and the Himalayan foothills, known as a top yoga and adventure travel destination. You may have also heard about Rishikesh as the site of the ashram where the Beatles stayed in the late 1960s, and where they sought (and found, apparently)…
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Petri 7S Test
Half a year ago, my mother-in-law asked me if I could use an old Petri 7S and a Minolta SRT101 they had laying around and after some quick research online I responded “most definitely!” The Minolta will be the subject of a later post – this one is about the Petri. The Kuribayashi Camera Industry,…
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When 2000 Giant Ganesha Idols are Immersed in the Sea
My Indian friends who grew up nearby tell me it wasn’t always like this. They say when they were growing up, during the festival Ganesh Chaturthi, they would have a small clay statue of Lord Ganesha, one of Hinduism’s most important deities, which would be dissolved in a pond or a container of water at…
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Hiking in a Himalayan Hailstorm
We went on a trek this morning – quite short and easy by trekkers’ standards, but pretty long for old(er) folks staying at a resort in the Himalayas where there’s a golf cart and driver if you don’t feel up to walking down the hill from reception to your room. In total it was about…
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Tirukalukundram
Eighteen kilometers west of the Tamil Nadu tourist town of Mahabalipuram is a town of about 24,000 called Tirukaludundram which is known for its hilltop temple, the Vedagiriswarar temple. The temple consists of an upper part up on a hill, which can actually be seen all the way from Mahabalipuram: and a lower part consisting of multiple…
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Melbourne and the Great Ocean Road
This is one more / the last post from our recent trip to Australia. Over a two-week period, we were fortunate to be able to pass through (though without actually seeing much of it) Sydney, and this was followed by a few days in Port Douglas /a day in Cairns, including several outings to the…
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Pongal in Chennai / Camera Test
Often I blog about old cameras I’m testing out, often I blog about things we see and experience in India. This post has a little of both! The Ansco Agfa Karomat 36 (known by variants of that name) is an Agfa Karat 36 rebadged for the American market, where it was sold by Ansco from…
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Katherine: Hiking the Gorge
When planning our recent trip to Australia, we wanted to include a few days exploring the country’s amazing “outback.” Confronted with endless options, we decided on the Northern Territory, but rather than the usual Uluru/Alice Springs outing, we opted for the area surrounding the town of Katherine, with emphasis on Nitmiluk National Park and Katherine…
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Chennai’s Republic Day Parade
Today was a pretty special day in India – even President Obama agreed, as he spent the better part of the day with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, having been invited as Chief Guest for the annual Republic Day Parade. President Obama is honored to be back in #India to celebrate Republic Day and to begin…