Throughout the day, somehow it must have blessed me because I made great strides in my project today - met some new contacts and immediately felt a great connection with them. I also accidentally ran into a climber from Germany who had made attempts on Annapurna, Dhaulagiri, K2 - all the difficult 8,000 meter peaks - but failed to reach the summit on each of them. Franco was certainly an interesting character, tattoo-clad and cursing in English and German every other sentence. Also got a very friendly call from a mountaineering agency who heard about my project and was interested in participating! A great change to have people call me instead of the other way around!
After finishing up with my work for the day, I ran across the rain to Durbar Square, one of the oldest sectors in Kathmandu, to witness the colorful festival rites. The rain made everything so vibrant; people were either taking the full brunt of the rain as they made their offerings to the Gods, or were just huddled beneath the massive Hindu temples.
As an unofficial ethnographic thought-exercise, I did some casual interviews with a few people and learned quite a lot. Offerings to Lord Shiva included flowers, oil lamps, the potent hallucinogen datura, and marijuana - I suppose this is why so many hippies are attracted to Hinduism. I managed to catch a shot of a passing rainbow as the clouds lifted briefly and overall, had a great time romping around this beautiful place.
Please critique the photos - Inspired by my lover Joyce who is currently chasing life, or being chased by it, somewhere in the Utah desert, I'm trying to get better at photography, so any advice is greatly appreciated!
1 comment:
...and you inspire me too, oh muse of mine. :)
first off, if you want your images not to link to photobucket.com whenever the arrow passes over the image, then use the html code
< img src="STICK IMAGE URL HERE">
(it just bugged me. i also use photobucket but don't like forever advertising for them, therefore changed my coding)
in your photos, i think i told you this before, but i LOVE your sense of light and composition. i think your problems are actually about the same as mine, such as watching the edges of your frame, making sure you don't include some unncessary elements, not cutting stuff off at odd angles, and making everything you have in the frame very deliberate; you chose for it to be there. for example, in photo 1 (witht light posts), cutting out the unnecessary small tree on top of the roof, and cutting out the red rectangle on the top right in photo 2. all the photos provide a great sense of mood with the light. photo two is clearly a great scene-setter; it may be considered a bit busy by some, but i light the repetition of the motorcycle mirorrs and building windows, all curving in a circle, my eyes moving from the bottom motorcycle mirrors, to the left, then receding into the right distance of biuldings, then forward again to the sillouetted people. it looks like a movie set! the light says "heat, heat" (whilst it looks like the humans are staring at you thinking either "shoot me! shoot me!" or "weirdo. what's that?" )
photo 3 is just lovely. wish i could see the detail of the buildings though, not just the detail of clouds. pity you don't have a neutral density filter, huh? ;) just kidding (sorta). nice symmetry, though. photo 4 (flower vendors) has splendid color! i like the movement of the epersons foot in the right top corner; wish you played that up more. try switching your camera to shutter-priority, "S" mode (i think it has that, right?), slowing down the shutter to 1/30 or slower, holding camera steady on your knee, and perhaps getting more movement and walking, movement of vendors' hands, and stillness of the flowers. maybe get closer to one flower for a betters focus, fuzzed out movement in the background (bg). building photo i think is so-so. building roofs are gorgeous and really fascinating but the photo itself gives the viewer neither full cloud nor full building detail; difficult light situation, though. i love the final photo. were you thinking of galen when you made that? :) because that's what i immediately thhough of; love the color. did you step back a little and try giving the photo a bit more background? those are seriously gorgeous buildings though...
so glad you are shooting.:) keep the photos, coming man!
i love your photos; i love your vision; i love YOU!
- 20 and 20 :)
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