Year: 2015
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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…
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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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Stars over Shenandoah
It’s Labor Day weekend in the Shenandoah Valley and it’s packed with tourists escaping to the country to enjoy the fresh air, nature and sunshine. I wonder how many of them noticed the night sky? I used a low ISO to cut down on “noise” – but this means a 30 second exposure. The…
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Found Film: Kodak Hawkeye Instamatic II
I ordered one of these for a few bucks on eBay because it combined two things I like: old cameras and found film – i.e. an undeveloped 126 cartridge was still inside the camera, according to the seller. The Hawkeye Instamatic II was one of many “instamatic” cameras sold by Kodak in the 1960s and 1970s.…
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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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Found Film: My Very First Camera
What was your first camera? Mine wasn’t the one pictured above, but it was close: A Kodak Instamatic X-15 like the one pictured below. This camera was manufactured between 1970 and 1976. I got mine toward the end of that period, when I would have been 8 or 9 years old. But mine is somewhere in…
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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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Vintage Camera Test: Brownie Reflex Synchro Model
The Brownie Reflex Synchro Model was made between 1941 and 1952 in the US, and until 1960 in the UK, and closely followed the (non-synchro) Brownie Reflex. It was called a “Reflex” because, like most SLR (single lens reflex) cameras still in use today, it used a mirror to reflect the image from the lens…
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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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Found Film: Photos that tell your fortune!
I’m often surprised by what I discover on a roll of “found film” – but this roll was especially unusual: these photos included a fortune on each one! All mundane photos, shots taken of almost random places on the streets of Portland, Maine. I was able to track down the location based on the unusual…
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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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I Wonder What Mrs. Mangelly Would Say Now
Way back in 1977 – I was about 10 at the time – I wanted to learn the piano. But we had to be concerned with something called a “weight allowance” – the maximum weight the US government will agree to transport from assignment to assignment at their expense, every time they ask you to…
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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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Found Film: Portland, Maine
I occasionally acquire rolls of film on eBay or inside old cameras that haven’t been developed, and were never seen by the photographers. You never know – sometimes they’re old, sometimes they’re not. This roll is not. At first, I thought this was shot in Boston. But boats move around, and this could be any…
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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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Found Film: The Happiest Place on Earth
It has been some time since the last time I wrote a “normal” found film post – i.e., one which hadn’t yet been developed. In fact, since October, I have been sharing a box of already-developed found film shot by the late Raymond Albert. I had a bunch of film piling up, and I have…
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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…