…looks much better from twelve floors up, at night.
Blog
More from Vanua Levu
It’s taking me a while to catch up (I’ve been travelling a lot, look out for photos from Canada and more from the Philippines soon), but i’ve finally put up the other images from my village stays in Bua, Vanua Levu, Fiji. Check out the updated Fiji village life page.
Nasavu photo studio
I work for the Wildlife Conservation Society in Fiji. In March this year our team spent five weeks living in remote villages in Bua province on Vanua Levu, whilst we undertook biological surveys on the coral reefs around the island (you can see more photos from the trip here. For our first week in the field we were joined by iLCP photographer Keith Ellenbogen. In addition to photographing the reefs and documenting the research that WCS was conducting, Keith had an idea for a side project – to take portaits of all of the villagers of Nasavu.
We set up a makeshift “photo studio” in the house that we were staying in and invited everyone to come along and have their photo taken. At first people were quite shy and a bit wary of all the camera gear, but once they started to see other portraits uploaded on our laptop screens, everyone wanted to be part of the project. In the end we had people turning up to our bure several days later asking to have their photo taken! I can’t wait to see what Keith does with the photos.
In flight
Brisbane – Suva.
Catching mudcrabs in Wainunu
A couple of weeks ago I was in Daria village, Wainunu (on the Fijian island of Vanua Levu) doing freshwater biodiversity surveys for the Wildlife Conservation Society. On one of our days off, I asked one of the ladies from the village to show me how they catch mudcrabs in the mangroves. It poured torrentially with rain all day, but once we were soaked to the skin it didn’t matter. It was fascinating to see the technique of how to find the crab holes and how to dig them out without collapsing their burrows – another crab will move in, making them easier to find next time around. It was a great day, and dinner was delicious. See the full story here.
Borough Market, Falmouth Regatta
Catching up with a couple of galleries of photos from my brief trip back to the UK in August: a gluttonous day at London’s Borough Market, and some temperate seascapes from the Southwest during the 2010 Falmouth Week regatta.
For Falmouth, I hired a Nikon AF-S DX 18-200mm from Lenses for Hire to try and get closer to the action on the water. As it turned out, the zoom lens wasn’t always necessary… in the photo above, we accidentally got caught up in the race for the finish line for the Cornish Shrimper class regatta (we were in a Shrimper ourselves, no doubt causing much confusion). In any case, I was pretty happy with the lens, which managed to get reasonably sharp photos of moving boats from a moving boat, even around the 150-170mm range. It’s on my list of future lenses to buy, when I can find the money! The service from Lenses for Hire was fantastic and good value – I’d definitely recommend them.
Bondi, St Ives
I spent my 26th birthday in New York, seeking out culture on a 48 hour side-trip after a week-long conference in D.C. One of the exhibitions that I saw was Ed Kashi’s “Curse of the Black Gold and THREE: A Perspective in Triptychs” at the Leica Gallery. I knew of Kashi’s work from many fantastic photo essays published in National Geographic. In his “THREE” project, Kashi curates triptychs of photographs from his extensive archives, bringing together images from different places and times to tell new stories. The idea stayed with me – in my house in Townsville I had a postcard of Kashi’s triptych of Ze Piexe (a 74 year old Brazilian boat pilot who guides ships in and out of the port of Aracaju by swimming) blue-tacked above my desk. Now that my PhD is finished, and I have slightly more time on my hands, I’m enjoying going back through my own, more modest archives, finding similarities and contrasts in photographs taken in different times and places. I’m finding that I am consistently drawn to the same subjects and scenes wherever I am in the world.
I love the contrast between the beach culture of Bondi (Sydney) and St Ives (Cornwall). Bondi is full of sun, surf and beautiful people enjoying the laid back Aussie lifestyle. St Ives shows the Great British determination to spend a day at the beach, no matter the wind and rain. Both photographs were taken whilst people-watching over a strong black coffee. More diptychs from the archives to come.
First
A while back my Dad e-mailed me this photograph, with the question “What makes this photo important?”. The answer, which i knew instantly, is that it is the first photograph that I ever took. (I’m not sure how old I was, but judging by the girls in the boat, friends from childhood holidays, I must have been quite young.)