Procrastinating in Kathmandu

Jun 11 2011 under nepal | 1 Comment

I had four days in Kathmandu, Nepal. It was an extended layover, really. On my way from Thimphu, Bhutan, to Vancouver, Canada.

And I had a lot to do in those four days.

I had three or four hours of interviews to transcribe before meeting with an editor for a Nepali magazine I was working with; I had to tie up whatever loose ends I still could with the magazine back in Bhutan; an NGO I’m increasingly involved with was keeping me busy with online modules and a demanding volume of emails; and I still had to book flights out of Nepal and back to Vancouver.

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A must-read guide to the basics of photography

May 16 2011 under caught online | 1 Comment

Today, I came across a really fantastic guide to the basics of photography. It’s a post by a guy named Wasim Ahmad at visual journalism site called Journographica.

The link: Basic Photo Tips: Framing Your Shots.

The tutorial covers such concepts as the rule of thirds, dealing with hotspots, ensuring you’re aware of surroundings and especially backlighting, framing and utilizing unusual perspectives, focal length, catching that perfect moment, and quite a few others.

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Photos of the rain in Thimphu

May 10 2011 under bhutan | 1 Comment

Things have been pretty slow around the office lately. The magazine is really struggling financially. For two months now, an unresolved debt owed to our printing press has prevented us from putting out an issue. Subscribers are beginning to call, et cetera. So there really hasn’t been a lot of work to do.

Most of us still come in every day. But we just hang out, more than anything else.

So yesterday, when Bhutan’s daily spring rains came, I thought I would take a break from a music download binge and go and try my hand at photographing water.

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3:00 a.m. -The revealing of the great thangka

Mar 29 2011 under bhutan | 1 Comment

For days I hadn’t been able to sleep more than a couple of hours a night. On the eve of the final day of Paro Tsechu, it was no different.

And so, despite a state of exhaustion that was beginning to make me feel like my brain had been burned out of my skull, I had no trouble waking up at two in the morning for the unveiling of Bhutan’s “great thangka“. In my zombie state, I stumbled out of bed.

The thangka wasn’t going to be revealed for another hour but already, lines of Bhutanese pilgrims snaked down every street in town, merging to follow the river, and then move up the hill to Paro Dzong.

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Hitching a ride to Paro tsechu

Mar 26 2011 under bhutan | 1 Comment

We started off early, before dawn. I was hitching a ride with a UNICEF vehicle that was making a morning run to the airport. My friend Jake, a journalist with NPR who I’ve mentioned before, was catching the same free ride. Jake was on his way out of the country. I was on my way to Paro for tsechu, an annual Buddhist festival held each spring.

I’d been trying to get out of Thimphu for weeks, dying for a short break from the city. And when Jake told me about his free ride to Paro and I realized I could catch the last two days of tsechu, I figured I had my weekend getaway.

Once in Paro, locating a room wasn’t easy; a sizable chunk of the country makes the pilgrimage to the small town for tsechu. But after a couple of hours and a self-guided tour of practicably the entire town, I found a cheap enough little guesthouse. Bucket showers and no hot water, but a bed.

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Photos of daily life in Thimphu

Mar 8 2011 under bhutan | Leave a comment

Life continues in Thimphu. I work at the magazine Monday to Thursday. And starting this week, I’ll begin volunteering Fridays at the school that Cara works for, the Early Learning Centre. I think I’ll be spending just a few hours a week there, helping the school update its website.

Earlier this month, my first day at the magazine, Drukpa, was a little stressful.

I thought it made sense to start in on the website by installing a simple but long-overdue update on the site’s back end. But I lost my internet connection halfway through the update’s installation. When I was able to get back online, the website was gone. And I mean really, completely gone. I couldn’t even access the back end’s admin panel. It was like the site never existed. So there I was, thinking that on my very first day, I was going to have to tell this young publication’s staff that I completely wiped out their website.

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Playing with cameras at the Mahabodhi Temple

Jan 7 2011 under india | 4 Comments

Eating dinner a few nights ago in Bodhgaya, I overheard the guys next to me going on about the adventures that they’d had taking photographs over the years. I’d been having a bit of a problem with a new lens of mine and so I asked if they would take a look.

The next morning, one of the guys, David, walked into the same little restaurant where I was then eating breakfast and asked if he could join me.

The next thing I knew, I had spent the entire day receiving lessons in photography from a veteran film producer and camera operator for the Discovery Channel.

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Beijing was cold

Dec 31 2010 under china | 2 Comments

Beijing was nice enough. Clean, mostly quite modern, not really crowded. The traffic wasn’t bad and the subway system was real easy. I liked it.

It was very cold, though. Actually, if I never visit again, 20 years from now, that’s probably the only thing that I’ll remember about Beijing. It was cold. That, and that at the McDonalds there, they come by your table and make sure that you have all the free coffee refills that you want. But that might be it. The rest of the time, it was just cold.

From the airport, I caught the very first train into the city. It was dark for the first hour or so, the temperature was -10C, and there was a wicked wind blowing down every street I walked.

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