“Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” -John Muir.
Happy Birthday John Muir. And thank you. So so much. Your legacy may very well be the grandest of them all.
So this is a little uncharacteristic of me, but this time, I’m going to try to go easy on the words and let the images tell the story. Yosemite is just one of those places…the type that no matter who or what you are, will be affected by it. It’s simply impossible to turn that final curve on Highway 41 and exit that 1/4 mile tunnel 30 miles past Yosemite National Park’s South Entrance, without feeling like time slows down, at least for a split-second, to work out whether or not your eyes and senses have failed you as you try to come to grips with the sheer scale and beauty of the surreal valley that lies before you. Or as you drive up Glacier Point Road for 16 miles through dense pine and redwood forest before turning on that final S Curve just before Glacier Point and essentially slamming head-on into the world’s most magnificent chunk of granite, Half Dome, as it rests gloriously upon its perch, keeping a watchful eye over Yosemite Valley 3000 feet below. I was fortunate enough to be able to spend last week in Yosemite with my cousin, her family (including her photographer husband Stephen Chiang), and my aunt – the exact same crew that put up with my shenanigans last year on the Big Sur trip that I wrote about here. While our cabin was at Bass Lake, about 45 miles from the Valley, we spent every day within the borders of the park. Each day proved to be quite different than the day before. On the first day, we were treated to a mild snowstorm, leaving a nice blanket of fresh powder through the park for the next 24 hours. After those first 36 hours, it turned immediately to Spring, as the clouds cleared and the sun shone down upon us for the remainder of the week.
This afforded us the ability to enjoy everything from a showing of “The Spirit Of Yosemite” in the Museum’s Yosemite Conservancy Theatre to a snack at the stately Ahwahnee Lodge and a stroll through the Ansel Adams gallery in the village, leaving us with ample time and inspiration to visit all the usual suspects along with a few spots and moments we were able to call our own.
We began with a quick stop at Bridalveil Falls before indulging in a leisurely stroll through the meadow across from the village, where I came face to face with a family of deer as they grazed just before the Yosemite Valley Chapel for an impromptu photo shoot as the sun made it’s way behind the valley walls. On our way out of the park, the final rays of sunlight were hitting Bridalveil Falls just perfectly, so we had to stop at the Merced River to snap a few shots on our way out of the valley back to the cabin. Not a bad first day!
The next couple of days were consumed with activity after activity that was sure to keep the kids busy and curious. As my cousin and her family biked through the valley, my aunt and I decided to hike our way to Mirror Lake. Then we spent a good half of a day making our way the Mist Trail to Vernal Falls, part of the John Muir trail. The falls were spectacular. We arrived as they were perfectly lit by the early afternoon sun and the perpetual rainbow displayed herself in all her glory. We then strolled through Mariposa Grove, where giant sequoias that are as old as Jesus, some of which that had trunks that reached 100 feet wide and that have survived close to 100 fires, towered proudly above us all.
We managed to make it to Glacier Point two evenings in a row for sunset. The first night we barely made it in time due to missing the turn onto Glacier Point Road, which, actually turned out for the better as this gave us our one and only bear sighting of the trip (I apologize in advance for the blurry picture, but, well, it was the best I could manage given the circumstances and our distance at the time), and to everyone’s delight, my cousin’s older daughter, the 8 year old, practically begged us to return the next night, our final night, for a proper showing. After a relaxing 4-mile ride on the Yosemite Mountain Sugar Pine Railroad‘s #10, the largest narrow gauge Shay steam train every built, we gladly obliged.
Anyhow, needless to say, photo opportunities greeted us every step of the way. Below is a gallery of some of my favorite images from the week, all of which were taken on either the Samsung NX1 or the new Samsung NX500, their latest 4k shooting mini-beast. That video below? Yup…shot on the NX500 with it’s kit 16-50mm PowerZoom lens (make sure to hit that little gear thingy icon and choose 4K). And to check out Stephen Chiang’s captures, many of which showcase his family and children in a very heartwarming and uniquely idyllic way, check out his Instagram feed. That’s one you’ll want to follow.
So yeah, I know, I said I’d try to go easy on the words, but…well…uh…yeah…
Canvas prints of some of these are available on my Crated site or my Fine Art America site. If you don’t see the one you like, please don’t hesitate to contact me and I’ll prepare it for print for you.
Also, click here for a background wallpaper for your mobile devices from that trip.
For more blatherings and nonsensical incoherencies: Instagram: @wasimofnazareth Ello: @wasimofnazareth Google+: +WasimMuklashy
If you support the kind of work I’m doing and the things I’m sharing, please consider ‘subscribing to me’ on Patreon.com. Yup, subscribing to ‘me.’ You can even set the price. Literally, $1 per month if you want. No joke, your little helps me a LOT.
I know I’m still not completely caught up on the Sri Lanka adventure posts, but I’ve spent the past week in Yosemite National Park and wanted to throw a lil’ bit of that paradise your way. Here’s an image from Wednesday afternoon in Yosemite Valley, just as the sun began it’s descent. I dropped the sucker in as my background and wanted to share it with you. Here it is in case you want it. Just CLICK HERE for a high enough resolution version sized for your phones or tablets.
I’ll be posting more words and images from this trip, as well as the conclusions of the Sri Lanka voyage, soon. Until then, if you want more things, here’s some stuffs and whatjiggernots:
Instagram: @wasimofnazareth
Ello: @wasimofnazareth
Google+: +WasimMuklashy
It was over. The main reason I found myself in Sri Lanka was all over. Here we sit at the train station waiting for our ride back to Colombo, reflecting upon the events of the past two weeks, and quietly wondering how we’d say goodbye to each other. After all, we had become family over the past few weeks and bonds had certainly been formed. And here we were, in the middle of Sri Lanka, in a village that none of us may very well ever see again, and wondering if we’d ever even get to see each other again. But it was time. The train pulled up. We hopped on, and in tradition, they hopped on with us to help us with our bags and to bid farewell, including Pirinthika, who had never even left Jaffna before this trip, had never set foot on a train before, and the next 5 minutes would ensure that she’d never forget her first time.
As we were getting situated, the train suddenly began its departure without any sort of forewarning. They were all still on the train. While the others were able to jump off, Pirinthika stood in absolute fear straddling the open door as it began to move faster and faster. They were running alongside it on the outside telling her to jump, and I was standing right behind her, at first encouraging her, but then realizing that at this point, the train was moving much too fast and she would likely hurt herself. By now, a crowd had formed around us, and all of a sudden we heard the train begin to shriek before it came to an abrupt stop and jerked us all forward, knocking us out of place. A man came running up yelling “suicide!? suicide!?” They had thought that she was about to commit suicide by jumping out of the train as her arms straddled the open door and they had emergency stopped the train. While we were all stunned, and all the passengers had commenced in hanging their heads out the window to look over at us and see what was going on, it gave her a chance to get off safely. Before even giving us a chance to explain, the train immediately began its departure again, not even affording us a chance to say goodbye properly. It ended in a simple confused wave at each other. And honestly, that was perfect as we called each other right after it happened, laughing our asses off on each end.
Once we arrived back in Colombo, we checked back into the the same Airbnb rental we showed up to in (yes, it was that good…if you’re ever in Colombo, Sri Lanka, check it out), took our first hot shower in almost two weeks (and it was GLORIOUS!), and then ran right back out to indulge in the creature comforts of Colombo that we had not had the luxury of while in the North. This, of course, included drinks. Lots of drinks. We first met up with her friend from part 1 and picked up right where we left off – sandwiches and wine at the Cinnamon Grand Hotel before graduating to double scotch neats, deep intellectual emotional already forgotten what the heck were we talking about conversation, and billiards at the nearby Cheers Pub. Once the pub shut down, we had a tuk-tuk take us down to the beach where we all, including the driver, hazily splashed around the Indian Ocean (another one to check off the proverbial bucket list). Figured why not. It was a very intense past two weeks and we were letting off a bit of steam. Besides, this was our last night together. I had a ticket to board a train to Nuwara Eliya in the central region – the apex of the world’s tea plantations and production.
However, perhaps the final round of vodka-on-the-beach-at-3am part of the evening was unnecessary as I completely slept right through that train. Once I was up and tried to get another ticket for a train the next day, I was informed they were all sold out for the next 3 days. NOT good. This left me with two options – taking a tuk-tuk the 90-odd miles up a winding single lane mountain road (uh…NO!) or hiring a private driver (uh…suuuureee). So once that was set up, it was time to indulge in yet another fine day in Colombo.
We started with a lunch of fresh falafel and smoothies at the expat-friendly Barefoot. After lunch, while Pradeepa headed to her favorite salon to get her hair done did, I decided it was a perfect time to spend a few quality hours with my Samsung NX1 just walking around the streets of Colombo capturing a few street scenes. A woman and her Acupuncture & Surgery Dispensary. Tuk tuk drivers taking nap-breaks in the back of their vehicles. Tuk tuk drivers hanging their clothes out to dry on their vehicles. Vendors selling pastry items out of the back of a tuk-tuk! A collection of images of the bus attendants and drivers, who had a style and panache all their own (I spent a solid 20 minutes just at one bust stop as bus after bus pulled up, dropped off, picked up, and carried on…click this image below for a little slideshow).
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As the evening began to draw, we made plans to meet with more of her local friends for dinner. We descended upon the Barracuda Seafood Grill, where a table adorned with a myriad of drool-worthy cuttlefish preparations waited for us on the sand, just mere feet from where the waves were breaking. The dinner conversation was dominated by talk of the evenings upcoming cricket match, the first game Sri Lanka was involved in in the World Cup of cricket. Since they were playing away, the locals wouldn’t be able to see the game until about 3am, and, if you know anything about cricket, the games can go on for hours, so wasn’t scheduled to be finished until about 10am. While the group tried to convince me to stay awake with them to watch the thing, well, no way was I going to let myself miss my ride out of Colombo two days in a row. They didn’t make it easy on me, but I was able to pull away to get back to the flat to take a nap for a few hours before the car was scheduled to pick me up in the morning.
It was time. It was time to journey solo. First stop? Nuwara Eliya in the Highlands. Tea country here I come…
Click here to read Part 5 : The Solo Journey Begins. First Stop: Nuwara Eliya – The Heart Of Tea Country
If additional digital procrastination is desired: Instagram: @wasimofnazareth Ello: @wasimofnazareth Google+: +WasimMuklashy
And if you’ve missed the first 3 parts of this adventure, start with 3 Weeks In Sri Lanka – Part 1 : The Most Meaningful Work I’ve Ever Done
All images and videos for this series of blog posts were shot with a Samsung NX1.
If you support the kind of work I’m doing and the things I’m sharing, please consider ‘subscribing to me’ on Patreon.com. Yup, subscribing to ‘me.’ You can even set the price. Literally, $1 per month if you want. No joke, your little helps me a LOT.
When you think to yourself you’ll be taking a trip that would last a little over 3 weeks to the Southeast Asian island of Sri Lanka, and 10 of those days would be spent traveling through, and experiencing some of the lushest landscapes and most culturally significant areas in all of Asia, you wouldn’t think that the most memorable and enjoyable part of the trip would be the other 12 days. The ones spent isolated in a 2-structure walled-in compound built by the World Bank in the outskirts of Vavuniya, one of the most impoverished communities in the country that lay right in the midst of some of the least exciting topography on the island. But this is where the first half of this trip took place, and, save for a 2 hour afternoon excursion between the two workshop sessions, where every second of our time was spent. It’s where we slept, were we ate, and where we worked – one building contains all the administration rooms – 1 classroom, one computer lab, and a few offices – while the next building over houses 3 stories of dormitories, a kitchen, and a dining hall.
On our 3 hour drive from Jaffna to Vavuniya, the seemingly despondent town I noticed from the train that I mentioned in the first part of this series, Nagalingam Ethirveerasingam (who I’ll refer to as Uncle Ethir from here on out, as that, for some reason, is the name Pradeepa decided to place upon him and he very willingly accepted, probably so we wouldn’t spend 2 weeks butchering his name while trying to pronounce it) gave us a short tour of some of the landmarks along the way, including a large army base in which many of the civil war fighters were dispatched from, one of the largest reservoirs in this part of the country which was controlled by almost century-old dams, and a vegetarian restaurant/rest stop adjacent to the area that housed his father’s old bus service business.
Once we arrived, we had but a few moments to settle in before meeting our first group of workshop attendees – 14 mostly primary school teachers from the immediately surrounding areas. They looked at me, I looked at them, we were completely foreign to each other, from the way were dressed to the way we talked to the way we hesitantly approached the ‘do I hug? do I shake hands? do I bow’ pleasantries. But as Uncle Ethir introduced us in Tamil and began to explain to us who they were and to them who we were during my first of what would be very many all-important tea breaks, the initial discomfort began to wear off and was replaced with a sense of anticipation of what is going to be.
This was also when I finally got a chance to see the equipment we were working with. And…well…eh…it suddenly became quite obvious that we were going to be channeling our inner MacGuyver for much of this mission. I won’t lie, I began to get a bit discouraged about whether or not we would be able to be effective to any degree, but when I turned back and saw the faces eager to learn something, anything, I knew I had to buck up! So we’d have to figure a few things out. So what? Ok, more than a few things, but still, so what? This was still part of the experience and so long as they walked away with something they didn’t know before, we could chalk this off as a success. Once I allowed myself to release the unnecessary pressure I put upon myself, it all started to flow. Plus, I wasn’t alone. Not only did I have Pradeepa guiding me through the whole thing, but I was also assigned an assistant, Pirinthika, who, as I would come to find over the next 10 days, would prove extremely valuable. She was an 18-year old student at Uncle Ethir’s S.E.R.V.E. institute described in the last post, who had been the primary editor for the videos over the past 12 months. She not was she able to get me comfortable with Camtasia, the editing program we’d be using, but she also knew English and served as an additional, and vital translator as well. I also got the chance to become more acquainted with Senthil, who’s IT skills would prove absolutely invaluable. He was definitely living in an IT-nightmare, doing the job of 20 specialists in a situation that needed 100.
And on the next day…the sessions began. Day 1 was all about script writing. We had them present to us their lesson plans and what the topic of their educational video would be, and then we showed them the structure of, and how to write a basic script and outline for what they would be filming. They didn’t understand at first why we were so insistent to spend a full day on this, for, in broken Tamil-to-English translation, “we know what we want in our heads.” But it certainly became obvious to them all once editing day came around.
Day 2 was all about lighting setup and shooting. We showed them how to set up a 3 point light setup, with, well, 2 lights. Again, equipment was an issue, a serious issue, but figured it would be a good opportunity to also explain to them how to use a reflector and diffusor, but, well, again, equipment was…yup…an issue. We spent almost two hours tooling around town from the only photo studio around to the only place that might remotely have a chance of having a reflector and diffusor, and instead ended up with foam, foil, and glue. Boom! Reflector, Sri Lanka style. Luckily, in the second session, we were able to track down a local newsman who happened to have a 5-in-1 reflector/diffusor combo that he had successfully smuggled in from India.
The most inspiring part of this all came during this day, for this was when they were forced to be creative, perhaps, for many of them, for the first time in their lives, at least in this autonomous sense. You can see that through the years and generations of war, that they were so used to deferment to other ideas, other people, other authorities, and had trouble at first accepting that they could make the decision for themselves in how they wanted to present their work. They were constantly looking for acceptance or an ‘ok’ until we hammered home that they could create it the way they wanted. There were no rights or wrongs. And little by little, one by one, they broke through. You could see it and feel it! And it was a sight to behold. Off they went with a vengeance. Each group took turns with our single usable camera, and they went and shot lessons covering topics from ‘Tsunami Safety’ and ‘States Of Water’ to ‘Sri Lanka’s Geography’ and ‘Testing For Glucose,’ all the while helping each other out.
Day 3 was all about one thing: editing. This was the day that all the mistakes we allowed them to make on Day 2 would come to light. We’d purposely talk during their tapings to see if they’d notice or stop us. We’d purposely check their framing and if a wall outlet or shadow was invasive, we wouldn’t tell them. We’d purposely not remind them to slate their shots. Because we knew that these were things that we take for granted until it comes time for editing. The time you wish you had done those things. And that’s the sort of thing where the only way to learn is the hard way. Because believe you me, oh believe you me
, once you make those mistakes once, you do EVERYTHING not to make them again. And just as suspected, they started to see the value of everything we had taught them and the mistakes that they made along the way. The frustration shone through on many moments (and gave me horrible flashbacks to my almost-decade of full-time editing), but they powered their way through the longest of the 4 days, taking us well past midnight in each session.
Once were all finished, on the 4th and final day of each session, there was a ceremony, and this was when I realized how big a deal this was. For the ‘graduation’ ceremonies, a top level government official from the office of the Minister of Education of the entire country travelled down to be at the ceremony with us, talk to the students about its effectiveness, and helped hand out the certificates to each of them. There were representatives of the World Bank that had asked for pictures and a report as well. The fact that it was taken this seriously was a particularly encouraging sign for the future of education in Sri Lanka and I felt more and more humble to be able to be a part of this thing, however minor. It just felt good.
By the end of the 10 days, we all started to become family. It was difficult to say goodbye and so amazing and inspiring and encouraging to see how far we had come. We laughed together, a LOT. We dined together, a LOT. We had the all important tea breaks, a LOT A LOT, we got to know each other and opened up
to each other more than I thought we would. It was 12 of the most important days of my life, for during those 12 days, I was fully present – in every single moment, all of my senses were alive, being exercised, being challenged, and every single one of those moments was beautiful because of it. We all put our heads together, our enthusiasm together, our ideas together, and despite language barriers and obstacles that ranged from electricity suddenly disappearing to a room full of absolutely useless computers that could barely handle the minimal stresses we were putting on them, to lack of proper (and in many cases
any
) equipment and burning out fuses on powerstrips, every single one of those teachers ended up successfully writing, shooting, and editing their very own educational videos. And you should have seen how proud and tall they stood besides their work. That sort of empowerment is something that hopefully will stick with them as strongly as it has with I.
Needless to say, these teachers weren’t the only ones learning. I got one heck of an education myself. Not only did I learn about their culture and customs and interests, but I also learned valuable skills myself, including how to wash my own clothes in a bucket while the lot of them laughed at me from across the yard as I hung them on the fence separating the property from the village. I also learned that their generosity is ingrained so as much if they find out you like something, they go out of their way to make sure you get that thing. The example that pops to mind was what happened in the middle of a blazing humid long day.
We were in the midst of a lesson in proper lighting, and I heard a jingle make its way through the window, and before I can even think about it, my hot sweaty self blurted out “is that an ice cream truck!???” They, of course, had no idea what I said, they just saw a startled me and looked at each other blankly. When one of the translators told them, they all laughed out loud hysterically at me as I was digging through my pockets looking for rupees preparing to run down the dirt road in search of the nirvana that would have been that first bite of something cold in days. They stopped me, and told me it was a bakery truck, basically a small truck that goes around selling bread to the local inhabitants. When they saw my disappointment, they laughed even harder.
At the end of the 12 hour day, about 7 hours after the event, the grounds keeper and manager of the grounds showed up with his wife and 6 year old child, and along with a group of the teachers, handed me a pint of ice cream. I damn near almost cried. This turned into a tradition that they repeated…every night for the next week. The even crazier part was, they all had to pitch in to get it, and there was no fridge or freezer, so, to my insistent behest, they took it to a friend of theirs in town who owned a small store who had one of the only freezers around and housed the ice cream there almost every day.
Another thing I learned was to pay ever more attention to perspective. As testament to how isolated we are in the West to the rest of the world, when it came for presentations on the final day of each session, many of them felt bad about how many mistakes they had made, so we came up with the idea of showing them blooper reels from the top actors in Hollywood, just to illustrate that everyone makes mistakes and that they shouldn’t be so hard on themselves. When I figured I’d look for Johnny Depp or Tom Cruise bloopers, I thought of course they’d know who those people were. But when I asked them, they looked at me blankly. I went as far as to ask them what famous actors they knew, they responded the only Americans they knew were Schwarzenneger and Obama.
What I couldn’t wrap my head around was the way they spent their time when they weren’t working. The leisure time we so feel entitled to way too often in our ‘civilized’ and ‘developed’ cultures was an extreme commodity to these people. They felt blessed to get any time at all, and any of that time was always spent with family and friends – talking, eating, laughing, crying, helping, living. Career never took top billing. It was literally impossible to ignore how genuine and open and happy they were, despite the poverty and unfathomably harsh conditions they live in, and I couldn’t help but attribute this health of spirit and soul to where they rest their priorities – their human interpersonal and community based interactions and communications, something perhaps can be argued, we’re only recently coming around to in our sprawling-gated-community-metropolis-laden-self-imposed-big-box-store-isolation-tanks.
After all, in the end, when you look past the superficial, the noise, the things we do and use to fill the spaces between our boredom, the things we put our stock in, all that’s left are family, friends, memories, emotion. And it’s hard to argue that there’s anything truly more important.
After seeing what they go through and how they are forced to live, it’s hard not to come back home and not feel like every problem I thought I had was so…
trivial
. Perhaps because they have been through so much – there’s literally not a single person in this part of the country that doesn’t know of someone, or is related to someone, that was either killed or maimed by war – those very aspects seem to be the central and primary focus of every one of their actions. And it’s a shame that often times we don’t really put enough stock in those things until absolutely necessary when they are the very things that should embody our every action, our every thought, our very being.
Anyhow, enough of my mush (for now). Below you’ll find a gallery of selections from those two sessions with the teachers and students as well as several images from the only times I really got a chance to check out the town of Vavuniya itself. We had a 2 hour window to head into town, pick up some supplies, and catch the final hours of the afternoon light. This is where the poverty and harsh conditions really hit home. We’re fairly isolated in our compound, but what each of the teachers in there these 10 days knew as everyday life, is what I had 2 hours to observe. You could see it in their faces. They knew things. They’ve seen things. They’ve done things. They’ve experienced things. Things that most of us could never even imagine. They were definitely jagged around the edges, but all it took was a simple hello, and they were surprisingly quick to open up with the warmest smiles and greetings you could ever feel.
Two situations that illustrated this happened within those two hours. At one point, I was standing in front of the central market as the golden hour light was falling upon the facade of the building. I found myself an angle and as I knelt down for several minutes waiting for the moment I wanted to capture, the entrance way started to fill up as they noticed me. They didn’t seem all too happy about this yahoo aiming a big black box at them, so I figured this was probably a good opportunity to give them a peek of exactly what I was doing. Once I showed them what was on my LCD screen, it took all of two seconds for them to start smiling, posing, and ham it up for the camera as shown in the sequence if you click this image:
The next instance was in an alleyway behind that same market. There was a man sitting alone and desolate, eating something from a foil wrap. I stood across the street and started snapping a few images. The colors of the building and the framing of the doors around his chosen spot were striking to me. At one point, he noticed me, so I walked up to him, showed him the back of the camera, and, again, immediately his demeanor went from despondent and skeptical to cheery and open. Click the following image for a slideshow of that sequence:
It was quite obvious that after all they had been through, despite their rough exteriors, they all longed for an opportunity to open up and express all the emotions that define beauty. To be able to open up and trust and climb out of the understandably hardened shell was something they seemed to yearn for, and jumped at any opportunity to do so.
Anyhow, that’s more than enough for this time. Next time in Part 4: The Creature Comforts Of Colombo, I jump into the beginning of the second half of this trip, where I reaquaint myself with the creature comforts of Colombo before embarking on my solo journey through the country.
If you’d like to start from the beginning at Part 1: The Most Meaningful Work I’ve Ever Done, click here.
And for more of my mehs and blehs:
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All images and videos for this series of blog posts were shot with a Samsung NX1
If you support the kind of work I’m doing and the things I’m sharing, please consider ‘subscribing to me’ on Patreon.com. Yup, subscribing to ‘me.’ You can even set the price. Literally, $1 per month if you want. No joke, your little helps me a LOT.
So I had this crazy dream last weekend. A dream where I was sent to Hawaii to go whale watching off the shore of Kona with Chris Robinson, the Editor-In-Chief of Outdoor Photographer Magazine. A dream where I found myself taking a helicopter tour over the big island with Chris Gampat, founder of The Phoblographer, marveling over Hi’ilawe Falls, one of the United State’s tallest waterfalls, and where I imagined myself zip-lining through a rainforest canopy of Koa and sycamore trees with Videomaker’s Editor-In-Chief Mike Wilhelm and Big Picture Big Sound’s Editor-In-Chief Chris Boylan.
One where I saw myself discussing the personal project of Philip Ryan, an editor of Popular Photography Magazine over a glass of Oban 15, just after a 5-course dinner overlooking the Hawaiian sunset with HD Video Pro’s Editor Neil Matsumoto and Slashgear Executive Editor Chris Davies. In this same dream, I could have sworn I saw myself photographing a luau and discussing handheld photo technique next to a Hawaiian waterfall with Jack Neubart of Shutterbug Magazine just after chimping over images of those very same waterfalls with DP Review’s Magazine Editor Barney Britton.
I also saw myself meandering through a random Hawaiian village sipping on fresh Kona coffee with Imaging Resource’s Associate Editor William Brawley just after bouncing around the back of a old World War 2 military Pinzgauer Jeep as I went off-roading through a private guava forest with Sound & Picture’s Editor-In-Chief Daron James and Digital Trend’s Photography Editor Les Shu. One where I found myself running around an island with two Samsung Imagelogger comrade-in-arms, Fraction Magazine‘s Editor-In-Chief David Bram and Hawaiian expert and nature photographer Bob Kurtz. A dream in which we had our very own New York PR fashionista posing atop a jetty of lava rock as the sunset light rested upon her face.
And on this dream, a talented team of photographers and enthusiasts ready to cater to our every photographic whimsy, handing us various lenses and grips and flashes and batteries like they’re glasses of water, including photography industry legend Jay Kelbley, who apparently personally worked on original Ansel Adams negatives and prints and seemed to be nursing the much touted yet seemingly mythical Samsung 300mm f2.8 lens, and Charles Leone, the man, the myth, the PR legend from Allison & Partners, who has managed to cull together and keep this over-visually-stimulated group of trigger-happy shutterbugs in line throughout the whole thing. Not to mention Anthony Zirfas and Andrew Bieker, a team of technical gurus by our side at every step of the way to make sure all those bits and bytes and circuits and stuffs kept doing what they were supposed to.
In this dream, I woke up each morning, opened up two sliding glass doors to nothing other than lush Hawaiian gardens with volcano rock paths leading to open cabanas lining a flawless Kona Kilauea beach. All this whilst fondeling a new 4K camera that magically appeared in my hands just as I began to drift away into the REM phase.
Basically, this was a dream in which I was completely in my element: hardcore geeking out with photography and imaging nerds in a hardcore playground for photography and imaging nerds: Hawaii.
The craziest part of the dream? In playing testament to the wonders of modern physics, I somehow…some way…woke up from it with a memory card full of images in a brand new Samsung NX500, essentially a Samsung NX1 in a sexy brown retro-styled body.
Take THAT Inception!
The images I pulled off that bugger might be some of the first to come from the Samsung NX500. Check ’em in the gallery below. Just be sure not to pinch yourself. And please, for the love of God, don’t pinch me. That part can be very very painful…
And as an added bonus, here’s a bit of 4K footage shot on the Samsung NX500. Make sure to choose the 4K resolution setting from that little gear symbol icon thingy in the bottom right of the video:
For more of the psychotica: Instagram: @wasimofnazareth Ello: @wasimofnazareth Google+: +WasimMuklashy
It was 5am, just 4 hours after the airport finally dropped off my lost luggage at our Airbnb rental in Colombo, and just 15 minutes before we were to board a 7-hour train from Colombo to Jaffna, the northern most city in Sri Lanka. After our brief, but efficiently utilized, 20 hours of living it up in Colombo, it was time to put our foot on the clutch and get ready to switch gears. Jaffna sits at about 50 kilometers from the southern tip of India and was one of the hardest hit areas of the bloody decades long civil war. As a matter of fact, the very train I was sitting on had barely been open a year after being shut down for over 20 years, effectively cutting off the north from the rest of the country.
The differences were immediately evident as the train exited the outskirts of Colombo and casually rolled through the rural areas north of the capital city just as the sun began to rise. While this region of the country was flat, it was gorgeous countryside, lush greens, farmlands full of palm trees, rice fields, (lots of) cows, and various fruits and vegetables from cabbage to citrus, the abject poverty was clearly visible along every tie of the track – shanty towns cobbled together by corrugated aluminum siding, wooden pallets, cloth furniture pads and blankets, mismatched bricks and mud – piles of burning trash dotting the horizon as well as the sides of the tracks – barefooted malnourished figures popping in and out of the shadows carrying everything from cords of wood to butchered meats. And the faces. The faces looked hardened…jaded…chiseled…knowing.
As the train continued on, there was a region that stood out to me as what was perhaps the most downtrodden of the communities I had seen through the windows of that train. Perhaps not so ironically, this was the exact region we’d be driving back towards in 2 days.
Before then, however, we had 48 hours in Jaffna ahead of us. We arrived at the train station and were picked up by a Ministry of Education van that dropped us off at our hotel, the Gnanams Hotel, smack dab in the heart of Jaffna. The history of the city, as I’d learn over the next 36 hours, is quite rich. The Jaffna Public Library, which was destroyed during the war, was, at the time, amongst the biggest in Asia, and housed some of the oldest collections of Asian history in existence. While the library has since been repaired and re-opened, they’ve been scrambling ever since, trying to piece together and reassemble anything they can of that written history that may now forever be lost.
Then there was Fort Jaffna, which, during its almost 400 year history has been occupied by everyone from the Portuguese to the British to the Dutch, eventually being used by both sides at different points during the Sri Lankan Civil War, and the Nallur Kandaswamy Temple, built in 618 and remains one of the most important temples in the Hindu religion, especially for northern Sri Lankans. On top of it all, Jaffna was once one of the most educated parts of Asia, and the Jaffna Central College, originally built by British Methodist emissaries in 1817, was one of the most distinguished schools in this part of the hemisphere. This is the school that Nagalingam Ethirveerasingam once attended. This is where his rise as an athlete began. This is a big part of why the man has spent the past 30 years focused on one thing – education. Bringing back education to the level that it once was. The level that he knew it to be when he was a student himself.
And, somehow, someway, for some reason, here I find myself in the privileged position of not only sitting with him…but also planning out a course of action for the next 10 days. This is also precisely the moment, over a lunch hot potu and spicy chicken curry, that I began to realize the scope and magnitude of the work I’d been flown out here for.
So here it goes…
A big part of what Ethirveerasingam’s work has culminated in has been to create S.E.R.V.E., an e-learning institute designed for underprivileged youth in the Northern Province, specifically the city of Jaffna. Since then, in less than a single calendar year, he’s managed to turn some of the most underperforming students in the region into the top performing students in all of Sri Lanka. We got a chance to hang out at the institute for a day and observe their methods, speak to some of the children, and get an overall feel for what a hunger for education is like in a country starved for this sort of opportunity. And it was beautiful. The children were eager and hungry and enthusiastic, immediately apparent as we watched one group put together and test out their first circuit board, while another group was interacting with an e-learning video based on how to properly use a microscope.
So what does any of this have to do with me? Well, apparently, the school system has taken notice to his system and the effect it was having and has begun to implement it in almost 150 schools in just the past year. This has created a demand for more materials to widen the e-learning offerings to cover a wider portion of the education curriculum. What I was going to be doing was training two groups of students and teachers from the Northern Province how to write, produce, set-up, shoot, and edit educational videos to fit into the curriculum. The idea was to give these subjects the basics skills necessary in order to make use of the new studio and resources in order to be able to not only create more videos themselves, but to take the skills we give them and be able to eventually train more and more educators themselves.
While this seemed like an obscenely large responsibility, not a single part of me ever had any doubt about being up for this challenge. I was all in.
The only thing now was preparing for, and getting over, a couple of hurdles. For one, most of my students spoke only Tamil. I’ll leave it at that. The second hurdle? I was completely unfamiliar with the editing software, Camtasia, that I would be teaching. The third hurdle? Most of these people have never even turned on a camera before. The fourth hurdle? The computers we’d be using were…well…embarrassing even 10 years ago – we’d have to shoot at the lowest possible resolution just to hope that the computers could handle the footage.
Whatever I signed up for…was certainly going to be interesting…
I get started with that in the next part, 3 Weeks In Sri Lanka – Part 3 : Teaching The Teachers In The North
If you missed the beginning, click here for 3 Weeks In Sri Lanka – Part 1 : The Most Meaningful Work I’ve Ever Done
And if additional accoutrements and souvenirs strike your fancy: Instagram: @wasimofnazareth Ello: @wasimofnazareth Google+: +WasimMuklashy
All images and videos for this series of blog posts were shot with a Samsung NX1.
If you support the kind of work I’m doing and the things I’m sharing, please consider ‘subscribing to me’ on Patreon.com. Yup, subscribing to ‘me.’ You can even set the price. Literally, $1 per month if you want. No joke, your little helps me a LOT.
So I just threw one of the images I made in Sri Lanka on my mobile phone as the background. Kinda dug it. Figured I’d share it. If you want the thing, click here to download a high resolution 2400-pixel version that should fit any phone or tablet you so feel fit.
This was shot on a Samsung NX1 as the sun was setting behind the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, Sri Lanka last month. The temple houses the relic of the tooth of Buddha. “Since ancient times, the relic has played an important role in local politics because it is believed that whoever holds the relic holds the governance of the country. Kandy was the last capital of the Sri Lankan kings and is a UNESCOworld heritage site mainly due to the temple.” [via Wikipedia]
If you missed yesterday’s post, I began with the back story of how and why I found myself in Sri Lanka. Here’s the link:
3 Weeks In Sri Lanka – Part 1: The Most Meaningful Work I’ve Ever Done.
And for more stuffymajigathings:
Instagram: @wasimofnazareth
Ello: @wasimofnazareth
Google+: +WasimMuklashy
It was the most meaningful and rewarding work I’ve ever done.
Bold statement for a man well into his thirties? Perhaps. But I’ll start from the beginning. I received an email from a friend that simply said “What are you doing the first two weeks of February.” Mind you, this was closing in on the last week of January. 48 hours later, a round trip ticket to Colombo, Sri Lanka in my name arrived in my email box.
This friend is Sri Lankan. While she works as a producer in Los Angeles, most notably as head of production for YOMYOMF, Justin Lin of ‘Fast & Furious’ franchise fame’s network, and runs Jeeva Productions, her own production company, creating advertising and publicity campaigns for clients including TheTruth.com and Bedsider.org, Pradeepa Jeeva has made it a point every year to return to her home country to work on some social project to help out the impoverished nation, especially the Northern Province, which was hit extremely hard by a bloody and brutal 30-year civil war that came to an end just 6 years ago. To this day, they are still finding mass graves from the brutal onslaughts brought about by the fighting, and the UN is currently debating when to release its findings in a detailed human rights abuses report. Not to mention, in the middle of all this, the country was hit by the now infamous 2004 tsunami that ravaged the coastal cities throughout the nation. Not surprisingly, amongst the chaos of mother nature and the unforgiving nature of war, the region’s infrastructure was destroyed, and not the least of which being the education system.
The project she flew me out for was based specifically around this.
My first 24 hours in Sri Lanka were spent tuk-tuk’ing around Colombo, the capital city, as I tried to fight jet-lag, a battle I’ve never quite struggled with to this degree before. It might have something to do with the fact that the 16 hour leg of the flight from Los Angeles to Abu Dhabi found me squashed in between two people that decided to use my shoulder to prop their heads, leaving me no opportunity for relaxation, let alone sleep. I felt like I was a zombie lurking in a dream for most of my first two days while Pradeepa led me through a hazy tour of town that included my first (of what would be very very many uniquely decorated and equally terrifying) tuk-tuk rides (which I’d quickly realize is the lifeblood of this country – people eat in them, sleep in them, serve food out of them, work in them, and they are the primary source of transportation throughout the island…a terrifying fact on your first one, but something you get quite used to, and, eventually, fond of).
Next stop? A poolside beer and club sandwich at the Cinnamon Grand Hotel because “Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but for the next 12 days you’re going to be eating nothing but Sri Lanka food, so might as well get this while you can,” mojitos at the historic Galle Face Hotel pool bar straddling the Indian Ocean, picking up linen pants and a shirt at the local mall (because the airlines lost my luggage and figured if I was going to be frolicking around Colombo, Sri Lanka, might as well do it in style), brazenly swerving through traffic to get to the rombutan stand on the other side of the street (if you don’t know the fruit…Google it…trust me…worth it!), buttery sushi and sashimi in a private room at Nihonbashi, one of the cosmopolitan city’s premier Japanese food joints, and Scotch neats at the Sky Lounge, overlooking the city, the ocean, and the Sri Lankan capital’s skyline. Yes, we were living it up, and I had nooooooo problem with that, but I would soon understand why she was so intent on “getting it while we can.” As Deepa so eloquently put it, “The next 2 weeks are going to be drastically different.”
The day that I arrived marked less than two weeks that the universally detested President of old was ousted and replaced by a new President that everyone seemed to have hope would bring things back together. He placed a self-imposed ultimatum to begin progress in all sectors of government, including unifying the country’s spirit and split populations as well as instituting constitutional reforms based on an executive cabinet responsible to parliament within 100 days of taking office. One of the first things he did was double the budget for education from an obscenely insulting 6% to a slightly more respectable 12%. Not a bad start.
The even better news here was that $20,000 was allocated by the Ministry of Education to helping build a small studio in a town called Vavuniya in the central Northern Province. The purpose of this studio was to begin recording educational videos based on the country’s curriculum. The idea behind this purpose was to help spread education in a more accessible, interesting, and interactive way to students that have been stifled by an uninterested educational system at best. The reason behind the idea behind the purpose for this studio was that the education system needed a boost – the children needed to be interested – the perpetual cycle of memorize and regurgitate outdated information had been well past tired. A key figure behind the reason behind the idea behind this purpose was one Nagalingam Ethirveerasingam.
Ethirveerasingam came to fame in Sri Lanka in the mid-1950s when he became the first Sri Lankan to compete in the Olympics in 1952 and 1956, and the first Sri Lankan to medal in the Asian Games, winning gold in 1958. He is a native to the Northern Province and has made it his life’s work to reform the education system to break that perpetual cycle that was was more adept at creating fighters and laborers than educated children with a wide-open and limitless future. He was so dedicated that he found himself literally hopping through trenches to collect information from schools during the height of the war.
This was the man we’d be traveling to meet the next morning.
And that is where the next part of story, 3 Weeks In Sri Lanka – Part 2 : Jaffna And The Northern Province, picks up.
Until then, here are a few images from that first hazy jet-lagged half-day in Colombo.
For more thingamastuffs: Instagram: @wasimofnazareth Ello: @wasimofnazareth Google+: +WasimMuklashy
All images and videos for this series of blog posts were shot with a Samsung NX1.
If you support the kind of work I’m doing and the things I’m sharing, please consider ‘subscribing to me’ on Patreon.com. Yup, subscribing to ‘me.’ You can even set the price. Literally, $1 per month if you want. No joke, your little helps me a LOT.
A client I’ve been doing some work with the past few months that you may have seen me post about here a few times, tattoo artist Jun Cha, had the opening gala for his new design/tattoo studio, Monarc Studios, last Thursday at The Well in Downtown Los Angeles. Whether you like body art or not, check him out, he’s insane: www.MonarcStudios.com. At the very least, I’m quite confident you’ll appreciate his work as an artist.
Anyhow, just wanted to share a few images from that evening, which consisted of a pop-up gallery showcasing Jun Cha’s work, both on human flesh and outside of it. And if you look close enough, you’ll see some of my images from the studio space displayed on the pop-up wall underneath the Monarc movie screen in a few images. The same sort of intricate attention to detail, as well as elements of the monochromatic Greek and Roman mythological theme, were given to this showing as he gave to his studio when I shot it back in August. He’s definitely got a work ethic that’s a rare commodity in this day and age. And to think… the cat is only 25…
The wide shots were shot on a Nikon D7000 with a Tokina 11-16mm, and the vignettes were shot on a Samsung NX1 with the 85mm/1.4.
As always, for more stuff things whats and knickknacks: Instagram: @wasimofnazareth Ello: @wasimofnazareth Google+: www.Google.com/+WasimMuklashy
