Mortal Coil

Howdy everyone, hope February’s treating you well. Just this past weekend I travelled to Berlin for my girlfriends’s birthday celebrations and lugged my camera along. I love Berlin, it seems to be right at the centre of Europe’s respective cultural and political maelstroms and it’s a vibrant, ever-shifting and fascinating place to spend a few days. Of course, by choosing to travel there in early February we more or less guaranteed that it would be viciously cold, and we were not let down on this front. One (late) morning we discovered that the reason we’d felt especially cold at 4AM was that the temperature had dipped to -18C (0F). I’m from South Carolina and not even 12 winters living in London meant I had experienced that kind of cold. But, as they say, there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad preparation. Fortunately both of us were well kitted out with thermals, glove liners, toe warmers etc and still had a whale of a time. Anyway, the photos below show a rather abstract outdoor view of Berlin and don’t reflect the sheer amount of time we spent warming up indoors. But then again, once you’ve seen one blurry picture of a bar you’ve seen them all…

As usual, more photos from this trip can be found over on Flickr.

Last weekend I flew up to Scotland for a jaunt out to the Isle of Skye, accompanied by my trusty pal Corin and our able guide, David Langan, who escorted us out to the Isle of Skye for a full long weekend of trekking around Skye in search of the perfect landscapes. We braved 300m+ vertical hikes and gale-force winds in pursuit of our photos. I am happy to say that one or two of them came out.

The photo below may be somewhat pedestrian, but I had to shimmy out on to a ledge over a giant cliff to get it, which was the only way to shield the camera / tripod from the gale-force winds on the clifftop. The winds were so fierce, a waterfall nearby was blown back over the top of the cliff before any water actually fell. So this photo gets included, no matter the quality!

These and more photos can also be seen over on my Flickr feed.

From time to time, I will use these “From the Archives” posts to highlight some of my photography from the period before I started this blog in 2009. These photos have been publicly available on Flickr for some time but they have never before been featured on this blog. I hope you enjoy this blast from the past!

JAPAN
Back in November 2007, I took a 2 week photo holiday to Southern Japan. Like many Westerners I had been fascinated with Japan since I was a child – every boy goes through a ninja phase, after all – and I had a growing appreciation for the refined nature of their culture, especially their cuisine. I came to Japan with many preconceived notions, somewhat expecting everyone to be demure, deferential and bowing non-stop, but I quickly realised – of course – that the Japanese are human after all, and a few rowdy nights in izakaya and out on the streets of Harajuku and Osaka quickly put paid to my hackneyed stereotypes. The Japanese people were generally very kind and even inquisitive, and it was a joy to travel through this land, and, barring the occasional instance of having no clue where I was or how to read the signs, I had one of the most perfect times imaginable. I am looking forward to returning to this fascinating land.

Below are a small selection of the thousands of photos I took during my travels through Japan:

Girl dressed for "Seven Five Three" ceremony, Yoyogi Park, Tokyo

Parental Encouragement, Yoyogi Park, Tokyo

Tokyo Rockabilly Club, Harajuku

Shinjuku Girls, Shinjuku, Tokyo

Toshogu Shrine Roof, Nikko

Sunset from Kyoto Graveyard

Heian Shrine, Kyoto

House on the Pond in Gardens of Heian Shrine, Kyoto

Mini Zen Rock Garden, Roan-ji, Kyoto

Entrance to Senso-Ji, Asakusa, Tokyo

Lanterns, Yasaka Shrine, Kyoto

Samurai Castle at Himeji

Itsukushima Shrine by Night, Miyajima

Morning at Torii Gate, Miyajima

Owakaduni Hot Springs, Hakone

Mount Fuji from Hakone

Moto-Hakone Lake Panoramic (Mt Fuji in Background)

Backlit trees and Maniden Roof, Shoshasan, near Himeji

Incense Smoke, Engakuji Temple, Kamakura

Temple Roof Detail, Shoshasan, near Himeji

Inari Kitsune Statue, Toshogu Shrine, Ueno Park, Tokyo

Temple Gate Detail, Engakuji Temple, Kamakura

More of my Japan 2007 photos can be found over on Flickr.

It’s been a good year for me. Not only have I got a new and exciting job with lots of travel, but I also moved in with my girlfriend and we’ve had the good fortune to have a couple of great holidays (to Vietnam and South Africa) and a couple more mini-break trips to boot.

It’s been an eventful year for me travel-wise. According to my profile on Tripit.com, in 2011 I have had 14 trips abroad totalling 100 days, racking up 147,596km of travel to 32 cities in 12 countries. Phew.

Apologies for the length of this post – I am having a hard time whittling down my favourite photos of the year!

January
In early January I was still getting to grips with my latest acquisition, a Canon 7D. I took it out on an crisp winter’s day and put it through its paces around West London:

I also made a brief business trip to Saudi Arabia. One of the stopovers was a coastal town called Yanbu, which like many Saudi cities has an “Al Balad”, an old town, which has often been left to rot, due to lack of a tourist trade and lack of interest in anything that isn’t shiny and new…

February
In February I didn’t travel abroad. Instead I continued to get to grips with my new camera, so took it out on another winter walk, this time to my familiar (and subject-rich) stomping ground of London’s South Bank.

March
In March, springtime began to make itself known in London.

Also, the UK Uncut protests swept through the West End of London, mostly peacefully, but with occasional spots of mayhem provided by the Black Bloc splinter group.

Towards the end of March I took a business trip to Kuwait City.

April
April was an eventful month. Within the same week I had changed jobs, moved out of a shared flat and moved into a new flat with my girlfriend, and had all of 4 days to settle in and unpack before we were off to Vietnam for a 3 week south-to-north adventure. The first week of this trip saw us travel through Saigon, Mui Ne and Nha Trang.

May

For the first two weeks of May we continued travelling northwards through Vietnam, through the cities of Hoi An, Hue, Sapa, Hanoi and to the glorious Ha Long Bay.

Straightaway after returning from Vietnam, I made the first of several trips this year to Dubai.

June

In June, I celebrated my birthday and went to Lagos, Nigeria for work. Sadly, neither of these events produced photos worth reproducing here.

July

In July we went on a long weekend break to Barcelona to reacquaint ourselves with this vibrant city and to spend a little time at our friends’ place out in the countryside of Catalonia.

I returned to Dubai for work…

And, back in London, we took advantage of a sunny summer day to stroll the South Bank…

August

We started out August with a trip to the Cotswolds to have a cottage weekend with some friends, and of course enjoyed a countryside hike.

As is our tradition we also made a point of walking down to the Notting Hill Carnival to join the throngs which constitute Europe’s largest street party (Day 1 / Day 2).

September

This month we trekked down to the Isle of Wight to attend Bestival 2011, a “boutique” music festival which is threatening to get bigger than its breeches.

I also made another trip to Lagos, Nigeria, but one can only take so many photos out of the side of a moving car…

October

In October I was extremely busy with work travel, with trips to Dubai, Turkey and South Africa.

Fortunately, the South Africa trip afforded us the possibility of continuing on in holiday mode once work was done. We started out in Cape Town and explored both it and the surrounding areas.

November

In early November we were still on our South African adventure, heading out from Cape Town and headed to the Kruger National Park, where we spent five days on a self-drive safari, stalking the “Big Five”, some stunning birds, assorted other animals, and grabbing time for the occasional landscape.

Shortly after returning from South Africa we got back on a plane and headed West this time, to New York City, to meet family for the Thanksgiving weekend. Of course, I brought my camera…

December

December has (thankfully) been rather quiet on the photo front so far, aside from social snapshots from various Christmas celebrations. This has allowed me to catch up on my “queue” of photos and – goodness – I am all caught up now, fresh and ready for the photographic challenge of 2012. It already looks as though by the time February is done I will have been to Morocco, Scotland (Skye), Nigeria, and Berlin.

We capped off our travel this year with a personal trip over to New York for some family time around the Thanksgiving weekend. Lucky enough to have some relatives and friends who live in NYC, I make it over about once a year and always manage to find time to go out and shoot this mega-metropolis. Though I daresay I probably have enough Central Park shots in my library by now…

More of my latest New York photos can be seen either on Flickr (here) or Google+ (here).

This will probably be my penultimate post for 2011, if not my last – my next one will be a retrospective of the year with some of my favourite photos. It’s been a very fulfilling year.

Now, if I am totally honest, I wasn’t on the hunt for landscapes in the Kruger. For one thing, we spent every waking moment looking for wildlife. For another, you’re only allowed to get out of your car at certain points, and there’s no clambering through the bush trying to get that perfect framing of mountain, tree and sky. Taking landscapes out of the side of a car window is not ideal. And, regrettably, while Kruger is often beautiful, with wide expanses of veldt broken by a solitary tree, it is also quite often either A) flat or B) barren, and from about a half hour after sunrise to a half hour before sunset, the sun is a blazing presence, obliterating all shadow detail and washing out colours left, right and centre.

All this is a roundabout way of apologising that quite a lot of the pictures below feature, well, trees.

Well, that’s it for the South African photos (finally, a month after arriving home). Next up are shots from New York from a short trip there last month. Then, I think, a roundup of 2011.

Following on from my last two photo reports from our Kruger safari (see “The Big Five” and “The Birds”) I will close off the animal-based photos with, well, everything that isn’t a “Big Five” or a bird. This menagerie includes a wide variety of wildlife, from the ever-present (Impalas) to the tiny and rare (dung beetle).

Giraffe

Wildebeest

Zebra

Hippos and Crocodiles

Reptiles and Insects

Leopard Tortoise

Dung Beetle

Warthogs and Hyenas

Antelope

Kudu Bull

Impala Ewe

Impala Ram

Male Steenbok

Well, that’s it on the wildlife photography front from our Kruger trip. Next up will be a few landscapes from the Kruger Park, and then a selection of shots from our trip to New York last weekend. See you soon.

On our self-drive safari adventure in Kruger National Park (see previous entry on the “Big Five” here) we were amazed at the sheer variety and exoticism of the birds we saw. Apparently over 400 species (resident and migratory) call Kruger home, at least for part of the year. The park is really well set-up for birdwatching, with many hides set up next to waterholes and so on, and while I would not in any way call myself a twitcher, I did at least take an interest in what birds crossed paths with me, which is more than I can say at other times in my life.

In any event, we were lucky enough to encounter these fellows during our time in Kruger:

Scops Owl

Common/Steppe Buzzard

Goliath Heron

Cape Glossy Starling

Southern Masked Weaver

Southern Ground-Hornbill with Scorpion

Common Bulbul in a Bird Bath

Lilac Breasted Roller

Martial Eagle in Flight

Crested Barbet

Guinea Fowl

A few more bird shots can be found on my Flickr set here.

Next up: some more of the fantastic creatures lurking around the Kruger…

Following on from our brilliant time exploring Cape Town and its beautiful surroundings, we hopped a plane to Johannesburg, picked up our soon-to-be-abused rental car (a miniscule VW Polo we nicknamed “Egbert”) and headed west-northwest towards the Kruger National Park. What attracted us to Kruger was not only its reputation as a game-spotters paradise or its size (think Wales), but primarily we liked the sound of a self-drive safari. Yes, that’s right, instead of having to squeeze into a ruggedized Land Rover with ten random fat tourists, we were free to explore the park and get up close to the animals as we saw fit. As a photographer this is a blessing. Of course, next time I would have chosen a slightly bigger / higher car, but I still preferred it to being subject to the whims of over-excitable children (“LOOK! AN IMPALA!” for the 80th time) or, worse…. birders.

“THE BIG FIVE”
Ever since Victorian times, there have been five animals in Southern Africa which have been known by this collective moniker. This is not because these are the five biggest species around – no, it’s because, back in Victorian times, these were the five animals most likely to turn around and make a run at you if you missed them with your first shot. We managed to see four of the Big Five, only missing out on seeing leopards, who are very elusive at the best of times, but in the 35-42C heat we experienced (early November) the leopards were well-nigh invisible. But we had many, many consolation prizes…

Lion
As mentioned above, the daytime heat, even in early morning / late afternoon, was pretty staggering – so the lions we saw were generally interested in one thing only: sitting around and panting. This had plus points and minus points. The minus point was the obvious lack of “action” shots. The plus point was that, once you worked your way through the scrum of cars angling for a look, it was generally safe to stick your lens out the window from a distance of down to 10 feet / 3m and shoot away without fear of losing a limb. So, out of a wide variety of sitting-around-and-panting shots I have chosen these three:

Adult Male Lion (who was just sitting outside the gate at Skukuza Camp….)

Buffalo
I have to be frank here and say that, despite their fearsome Victorian reputation, I did not find the African Buffalo to be particularly captivating. I suppose they must suffer a lot for this, as many people can name four out of the Big Five and then stall when trying to remember the poor old buffalo…

Rhino
One of the first encounters we had with a rhinoceros was at close range, as it was ambling along the side of the road, grazing on the fresh green grass to be found there. We were one of only a couple of vehicles and for a time we were able to almost idle alongside it and snap away. It might have been the heat, but almost every time we saw the rhinos I did not feel the slightest hint of threat. It was great as well to get up close to a creature that has essentially not changed for millions of years. Our only regret was that we only saw white rhinos, not the much rarer black rhino.

Elephants
Elephants were byt far the most numerous of the Big Five we encountered, which was lucky as we were so enamoured of them. They are the real deal, by turns majestic, powerful, slightly menacing, and – would you believe it – playful. Once we got over our initial nervousness of how to manoever around the big bulls (in short: do what they want and be ready to run like hell) we really got to enjoy just sitting and watching these giants do their thing, which is primarily running ravage over the countryside, leaving a trail of shredded, snapped and denuded trees in their wake. And you haven’t lived till you’ve been in the middle of a herd of 30-40 elephants as they cross the road in front of and behind your car…

We were very happy to see quite a few instances of play-fighting by the younger elephants, usually in and around the water. On our last day, when three separate herds totalling over 70 animals had shown up at a watering hole below our picnic spot, we watched amused as the elephants played tug-of-war with their trunks, splashed about in the mud, and in one instance, even cheekily mock-charged a pod of hippos hanging out nearby.

More Shots from my Big Five collection may be seen here.

Next installation of photos from Kruger will be…. birds. After that I will move onto some other critters we encountered on our safari. Stay tuned!

I’ve been clocking up the miles lately. For most of October I was away with work, first in Dubai, then Turkey, and finishing up in South Africa. Fortunately, when my work was done in South Africa, I was able to kick back and relax a bit, and Nicola flew down to join me for a 10-day trip combining a bit of a a sun-and-fun city break in Cape Town with a magical 5 day safari drive through the Kruger National Park up on the borders of Mozambique / Zimbabwe. But I am getting ahead of myself…

CAPE TOWN
We started out in Cape Town, a fascinating city with much to recommend it: from the amazing geography of the place – all views dominated by Table Mountain looming above – to the diverse and vibrant population (somehow not bitter after all their potted history), it was a great start to our trip. And the Capetonians sure know how to eat, drink and be merry. We based ourselves just on the other side of the mountain from downtown, in a swish beach resort suburb called Camps Bay. From our 1 bedroom flat overlooking the ocean we set out each day to get to know the town and the surrounding area, including the Winelands, the Cape Point, the Kirstenbosch gardens and of course Table Mountain itself. We had very full days punctuated by some of the finest meals we’ve had in ages. A great start to the trip.

Around Cape Town

Houses of Bo Kaap

The Victoria & Albert Waterfront

The Victoria & Albert Waterfront

Camps Bay

Camps Bay and Table Mountain (Panoramic) – click here to view this in a large format

Boy on the Rocks, Camps Bay

Camps Bay and the Twelve Apostles

Sunset on Camps Bay Shoreline

Kirstenbosch and the Winelands

Kirstenbosch Gardens

Kirstenbosch Gardens

Kirstenbosch Gardens

Franschoek Countryside

Franschoek Countryside

School Bus, Franschoek Countryside

The Cape Peninsula and False Bay

The Cape of Good Hope

Cape Point Lighthouse

Cape Point

Ostrich at Cape Point

Penguin at Boulder Beach, Simon’s Town

Beach Huts at Fish Hoek

40 Winks, Fish Hoek

Surf off of Hermanus

Table Mountain

Table Mountain Cable Car

Abseiling Table Mountain

Top of the World

Atop Table Mountain

Fynbos Flowers on slope of Table Mountain

Cape Town from Table Mountain (Panoramic) – click here to view this in a large format

Of course, these and other Cape Town shots can be found over in my Flickr set here.

Stay tuned – in the not too distant future, I will post select shots from the second half of our trip – our safari through the Kruger National Park…