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When it rains it pours…and everyone’s late

Mike Lusmore — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 07:14:55 +0000

It took me so long to get my last post up as work here in Tanzania has been so crazy busy but this morning I had a some extra time as the heavens had opened last night. When it rains here in Dar es Salaam there is a lot of water and most of it just seems to sit around on the surface. So everything kind of grinds to a halt, especially the traffic! So this morning is getting off to a bit of a slow start…

I'm glad this isn't where we are training...I think even with the pallets they are getting wet feet

There are a hell of a lot of 4x4's in Dar es Salaam and I can only assume this is all the action they can get - so I give them 'motion blur..'

mmmm....puddles

1 bad meal, 30 hours of travel, far too many toilet stops and a 5m long snake

Mike Lusmore — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:49:27 +0000

Milton, Bangladesh's very our Basil Fawlty bids us farewell...

I’m sat in Crystal Coffee in the car park of Medan’s International airport where it’s surprising to learn that I can’t get a straight black cup of coffee. Surprising as I have just left Aceh in the north where I tasted the most beautiful locally grown cup of coffee prepared in the most elaborate way including the final act of dropping the drink from a great height into my cup (which is apparently essential). Good job Benjamin and I cleared out the shop of their stock and have packed every crevice our luggage with the stuff to keep us energised for the long winter ahead back home.

Meanwhile back here in Medan I have settled for a ‘tehbotel‘ which is possibly the most disgusting brand of ice tea quite blatantly flavoured with cheap perfume. I have been stuck in bed for most of our time here in Indonesia due to some questionable food I must have eaten on my last day in Khulna and so the tehbotel has been my drink of choice after the doctor told me to stick to bottled water only.

I saw this in the paper just as we were leaving Khulna...driving in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The trip from Khulna to Bireuen was hellish and included a two hour bumpy bus ride along Bangladesh’s crazy roads to our flight in the same broken plane we arrived in. Upon arrival in Dhaka airport we were treated to a serious bout of mosquitos coupled with some of the most toxic paint I have ever smelt to choke down on for a few hours. Bundling ourselves onto the flight to Kuala Lumpur I was just hoping I could sleep as I felt like my insides were exploding but instead it was a fairly short flight followed by what felt like the longest layover known to man.

Prior to this we had talked fondly of our time in KL airport, a place where we could kick back and wash some tasty food down with an ice cold beer. The reality was that I felt terrible and spent the entire nine or so hours trying to sleep in-between toilet breaks. Our flight to Medan in Indonesia was quick and painless and I was trying to be as positive as I could while we stood in the stinking hot queue for our visa but it was the nine hour car journey we had next that I was really dreading. We did get there in the end but it really did feel like the longest car journey I have ever taken and as the time we arrived all I wanted to do was crash out..

Does anyone have an idea what these drugs are for...?

In reality it wasn’t that simple. We had been invited to stay at The Major’s house for the evening (think the local mayor but more important) and had to meet and great followed by joining him for dinner. He was an interesting guy and as Benjamin and The Major ate he told of his time negotiating peace in Aceh and his obsession with Starbucks before casually dropping into the conversation that he had been sent to jail for twelve years for speaking out against the Indonesian government. I was never aware of the situation that existed here in Aceh, their struggle for independence and the role that the tsunami played in the peace keeping efforts in the region.

On my first full day in Aceh the only thing I got to see was the garish bedspread adorning my new bed, the doctors surgery and the inside of my eyelids. Benjamin gave me the day off to die quietly and thankfully one of our hosts took me to the doctors to get me fixed. Twenty four hours later and it had been three days since I had eaten anything but I was finally on my feet again. The bad news was that I now had only two days to shoot all of pictures and video that we would need from here in Indonesia.

This is the last fishing hut before the beach and would have been totally destroyed when the tsunami hit. Beautiful place to work though..

The village we spent most of our time working in was almost entirely destroyed in the tsunami. Only five houses remained in this town of well over two hundred after the wave came in and yet the place is once again thriving. They have a great farming community here with shrimp and fish which you’ll be able to find on the shelves of your local supermarket back in the UK. Finding my way through the maze of ponds to the beach and it was truly amazing to stand and look at the vast ocean ahead of me bearing down on the endless miles of flat land that is so many peoples homes and livelihoods. It’s humbling to think that all the people working away in the searing heat around me would have experienced such a catastrophic event and that they literally picked up the pieces, rebuilt their lives and homes and got back to their lives.

It took me a while to realise that everyone had left me behind on the beach as the sun started to set over the mountains in the distance. This wouldn’t normally cause much concern apart from the warning I had been given by a local farmers wife earlier to ‘Watch out for the 5m python on the way to the beach’. She even refused to walk that way…which was a little disconcerting. I hadn’t exactly let this slip under the carpet and had protested insisting we took the car and went around the long way but everyone seemed to ignore the pasty white guy and continued onwards and so I had to make peace with the snake warning. I never did see the huge python, thank goodness but did use it to have a laugh the next day as I saw Benjamin crouching down near a pond to pack away some audio gear… I really wish I could post a video of his response as I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone jump so high in my life! It was hilarious.

More fish, this time in Indonesia. Yum!

It seems strange to be leaving Indonesia now as I really feel like we just got here. I’ve only tried one coffee house and a few different local dishes which were all amazing and I feel like I’ve only just started to explore this wonderful place. I guess that’s the trade off of a great job like this. You get to travel to an amazing place that you may never see again but you need to get a job done and that is the absolute priority. It’s travelling in a whole different way though and you get to meet the most amazing people, definitely an experience worth treasuring.

Right then. Just another ridiculous number of hours travelling to get back to the lovely warm British weather…actually couldn’t send this from the Crystal Coffee house and am struggling with the bitterly slow KL airport wifi………………..it’s like dial up all over again…

Yes that is Benjamin and I cracking into a well deserved BEER at Kuala Lumpur airport. Nothing else to do here but wait for the slow arse internet!

Poverty’s not so black and white?

Mike Lusmore — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 04:29:13 +0000

A boy holds his younger brother in Khulna, Bangladesh where there are over 34 million children living in poverty. © Mike Lusmore

It’s plain to see that people here in Bangladesh don’t have as much money in their pockets as the average westerner. The majority of children don’t get the education, nutrition and the healthcare that someone from the UK like myself would expect to be able to provide for their family.

A recent UNICEF director stated that more than half of Bangladesh’s 68 million children live in poverty. The boy pictured above is photographed with his younger brother in the middle of the day on a street with more rubbish strewn over it than a friday night in Cardiff. If it was your kid you would probably want them to be in school, but like many Bangladeshi children this one probably works to earn money for their family.

It’s important to realise how lucky you are if you can choose your favourite cuisine for dinner, decide whether you’re a MAC or PC and earn a salary that even as a photographer dwarfs that of a family here in Bangladesh and that most certainly puts food on your table and clothes on your back.

That said I’m not sure the photograph at the top of this post is an appropriate way to approach these stories even though it is a method widely used in the media.

I’m talking about the use of black & white photographs of the poor in third world countries that news outlets often use and that more travellers seem to end up with than hangovers. The stero-typical poor …………(insert nationality here) person staring blankly at the camera and then converted using the ‘Poverty’ filter in photoshop that we see more often than a hipstamatic print.

Now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love black and white photography and some of my favourite photographers shoot almost solely in the medium. I’m currently shooting a project in black and white myself! In fact it was David from duckrabbit that gave me the skills (and some of the bits) to develop my own photographs for the first time and I think it is a hugely important process to be involved in that is hugely fun and produces the most beautiful images. I just see more and more articles about impoverished countries and their people that are illustrated with black and white imagery that’s clearly there to make me feel sorry for the people in the picture/story. All it really seems to do is make me think ‘why can’t I see the original colour pictures?’ and that ‘this is another dreary story that inevitably involves Bono’.

I mean I’m not talking about the photographers/artists who decide to shoot in black and white film all the time. I’m talking about the editors who are turning colour to black and white to get me to engage with the story, when in reality it’s making me want to disengage…I mean I don’t think the photographer is handing these pictures into the desk in black and white so it’s an editorial decision. Which combined with the way the story is written and the facts are presented is hugely influential to the way the story is being told..

The Africa page on The Guardian is all a bit mono-tone today..

I was inspired to write the post after logging onto the Guardian yesterday and seeing a photograph (which is now gone…doh!) on the front page of four young black children staring blankly into the camera illustrating a story about Ghana.

It was a good story if you read it through to the end but the picture didn’t really make me want to read. And the massive irony was that the story was quite positive about Ghana’s hard work to be a leading light for other African countries and that a new investment program was going to iron out some of the current problems….yes Bono was mentioned. But could they have used a more inspiring picture of this beautiful country and their people, one that made me think they had made some positive progress? A picture paints a thousand words and if we don’t connect with it straight away we may not even read the headline.

Lets take our kid from Khulna in the picture at the top of the page for example…..this kid…

The same boy...the same amount of poverty but a different story.. © Mike Lusmore

He was just one of the many kids that asked me in their best Benglish (pointing) to take their picture whilst I strolled around Khulna to soak up some atmosphere. I took about 5 or 6 frames of the kid and like a lot of the Bangladeshi children they always start off by staring at you so I try and take a few by which time they are all embarrassed as their friends and family gather around the picture and usually crack a smile.

I’ve lost count of the number of staring children photographs I have seen when in reality these children play games just like yours, in many cases go to school just like yours and have fun just like yours.

A lot of the time and especially in Bangladesh they just haven’t ever seen a white person carrying around a big camera. I mean we visited a village the other day and Rajib (you know Rajib the man who locates beer and tigers..) told us they had never seen a white person there before…ever. Now you don’t get that when you go travelling in Thailand! The facts at the top of the page are still true and by western standards Bangladesh is still a very impoverished nation. But according to the statistics (at unicef) more than 80% of the kids are enrolled in education, it’s just that school finishes by 1pm and in a nation as feverishly busy as it is here people pitch in at all ages.

So yes, Bangladesh is poor when you measure wealth in iphones, cars, HD tv and the distance to your local Starbucks – there is no Starbucks in Bangladesh… But the country is rich in many other ways and has a thriving agriculture industry with soil so rich in nutrients that if you throw your apple core out the window there will be a tree there on your return journey. It’s full of positive, hard working people many of whom live very fruitful, if a little different from that of people the west’s lives. Yes they could do with help from better off nations but I think we should see the positive in them and invest in that, not feel sorry for them and give them a hand out.

Isn’t that the difference between the black and white photograph here and the colour one? One makes us feel like we should give money because we feel guilty about the huge difference in our lives. And the other makes you see that these are real people that are worth investing some time, some science, some of our knowledge, some of our experience, some of our technological expertise and some of our money in to make their lives better. That’s the story we’ve been blessed to be paid to come to Bangladesh and tell.

Knocking your head against a wall (Bangladeshi style)

Mike Lusmore — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:06:08 +0000

A room with a view...Shrimp ponds in Bangladesh. © Mike Lusmore

I’ve been in Bangladesh for just over a week now and in that time seen some wonderful things, met some lovely people and experienced some things I probably never would have anywhere else in the world. To add to that I have on occasions laughed pretty hard. This evening was no exception to that as after three days of shooting my way through all the cf cards in my bag it was supposed to be a special evening.

Our videographer supremo and unofficial Bangladesh fixer Rajib had been trying to track us down a beer since he arrived a few days ago in Khulna. Ever since we arrived in the dry country (that would be Bangladesh if you’re not up to speed) Benjamin had assured me that Rajib was our man and would secure us some proper liquid refreshment just when we needed it. After a few failed missions including the promise of beer at a hotel in town only to arrive to the possibility of warm take away cans of Fosters for twice the price of our dinner (each!) at the Hotel Royal (Benjamin’s new fav hotel) we thought we had it nailed.

One of the guys at our Hotel had arranged via a whole host of mobile phone calls passed back and forth with Rajib to deliver 8 cans of Heineken to the hotel in the day and put them in the fridge for our arrival at dinner. The day was long and I was looking forward to that beer a whole lot when Milton the manager of the hotel approached us in the lobby to say there had been a problem.

It transcribed that our beer hadn’t been delivered but Milton had arranged for it to come now..only it wasn’t Heiniken anymore and it wasn’t Fosters and it wasn’t anything I had actually ever heard of. ‘Was Royal Dutch beer ok?’ Having never heard of it we asked about the percentage to which Milton beamed a big smile and replied ’6%’.

The six turned to eight and by the time the beer arrived it had changed it’s name to Barons Extra Strong and become a whopping 11.8% can of warm lager.

Naturally we declined the offer of what would be affectionatly known to me back in the UK as tramp juice and returned to the dinner table. I searched the beer online and found a review that described as ‘like knocking your head against a wall’. As a photographer I spend most of my days doing that already so a beer is supposed to have the opposite affect for me!

Benjamin tries to ride all of our equipment into the rice paddies! © Mike Lusmore

So having a beer wasn’t to be, and we settled for a couple of cold cokes, well a microwaved warm coke for Rajib and tucked into our rice, dahl, shrimp and oily potatoes.

It’s a pretty basic menu here at the hotel but it’s been good food considering some of the stories I have read including the one I found when I typed in ‘Khulna’ and ‘food’ into google. The story of two women who went out to get food and died within hours of food poisioning two months back. Hmmm….yeh that kept everyone quiet for a bit, that was until our encounter with Ali Baba’s.

Rajib (right) looking for a beer. © Mike Lusmore

Ali Baba’s was it’s name – and strange looking food was it’s game. Now I don’t do restaurant reviews but I haven’t laughed so much over dinner as I did at this place, so for entertainment value I’m going to give it a four out of five.

In the car on the way to the place we were told by the guy that recommended it that we weren’t getting the shrimp that we had pre-ordered (everything needs to be pre-ordered here in Khulna) as the last two people he had brought to this place had gotten food poisoning. I think these are the sort of things we should discuss before heading over to a place but by this time we were pulling up at Ali Baba’s.

It said ‘Chinese Food’ in big letters on the doors which was a bit ominous as I figured we would be eating Bangladeshi cuisine but we pressed on and as I entered the place I realised half of the restaurant did Chinese and the other half did the rest. I say the rest as you seemed to be able to order fried chicken, burgers, dahl…infact it looked a bit like most kebab houses in most cities in the UK with an extended seating area and way to many balloons tied to the ceiling. Come to think of it I have never seen a kebab house with any balloons on the ceiling but this place was obviously celebrating something.

We waited whilst our food was cooked/prepared/killed/warmed and Benjamin entertained us all by trying to read the back of a kebab box which he thought was a menu – very funny.

As we were no longer allowed the shrimp our mutton curry arrived looking like it was in a sauce made up of the chesty cough I have had all week (not good) and served with a dose of everyones favourite here, a lot of oil. To be honest I wasn’t hungry by now and picked away at my rice like a five year old as Benjamin tried to work out what had happened to the real Bangladesh cuisine we had come for. ‘I told you this restaurant couldn’t cook’ was the only words forthcoming from our host which I think just about summed up Ali Baba’s. I don’t think I’ll be heading back there anytime soon.

Dinner

It’s a shame Ali Baba’s was so damn random as when you step outside Khulna into the countryside of Bangladesh the food seems so plentiful and obvious it’s amazing.

Rice paddies being planted and harvested all year round, vegetable plots, shrimp and prawn ponds, freshwater fish, saltwater fish, coconut trees, wonderfully sweet bananas and fresh date juice being tapped from every other tree are just the things I managed to see on my small trip.

I’m not saying every one of the estimated 170 million people here in Bangladesh are eating well but the farming methods are really something to marvel at. The mixed use small holdings are just how small time farming should be and provide within the villages and further afield it’s hard to imagine that anyone reading this wouldn’t have eaten some shrimp or rice that came from somewhere here in Bangladesh. I only mention it because it seems to always be mentioned how poor it is here in Bangladesh and I think that is a very relative thing.

Don’t get me wrong it IS very poor here in a lot of ways. There aren’t many cars or modern machines, the roads are very poor and the mobile phone is about the only bit of technology I see on a regular basis but they are rich here in other ways.

I have never seen people work so hard in my life, it’s almost like a race to get all of the fish fished or build as many things as possible before dinner coupled with the wonderful contrast in the villages that are so peaceful and unspoilt. I think we would all be jealous of the beauty and simplicity of some of the lives here.

Farming with a view east of Khulna. © Mike Lusmore

Plane sailing

Mike Lusmore — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:07:02 +0000

It’s been a a bit of a trek getting out to Bangladesh where I am working with Benjamin for a few weeks and if I thought the trekking was over I was wrong. The transport here in Khulna is slow progress and the roads would keep the highways agency back in the UK busy for a lifetime. That said the drivers do their best to overtake everything in their path, and with one hand on the horn they get around as fast as possible using the whole road and a little bit more. If your still not put off by the driving out here in Khulna I suggest trying a trip in the dark. Lights here are definitely an optional extra here and after seeing the first coach load of people appearing from behind a single light resulting in our car lunging toward the water surrounding the road I started to worry a little bit.

This wasn’t the first time my heart had been left beating hard since leaving home. As we crossed the tarmac at Dhaka airport to head west towards the fishing areas I saw our transport for the afternoon. No not the learjet with the armed guard parked up at the end of the runway but the ageing twin prop next to it. I didn’t really take a second look until we had all boarded the place when I noticed out of the corner of my eye a mechanic staring blankly up at the engine. He was joined by the captain, another mechanic and another all of whom looked more bemused than the last. The last straw came for me when the air hostess started to offer up suggestions to the cockpit…surely they aren’t trained for this..’Chicken or Fish….oh and maybe you should try the big red button..’

Not what you really want to be looking at whilst sitting on the runway..

Thankfully they shipped us back to the terminal where we kicked back in the vip/cip lounge (suggestions on a postcard..?) whilst they looked into the problem although with all honesty, my confidence was low. Half an hour later we were boarding the same plane with the faulty engine already running as we arrived. I can only assume that they hadn’t really fixed the problem, rather just got it running and didn’t really want to stop it. To make up for it we must have had a very talented pilot as it was a smooth ride all the way although I would say that next time I’d prefer not have the faulty engine staring me in the face for the flights duration.

More to come from Khulna soon. I’m heading off to Ali Baba’s restaurant tonight so maybe a restaurant review is in the pipeline.

I was pretty happy to be coming in to land in Jessor by this time

M1 ‘plane crash no.2

Photog Bites Off Video (and chews)

duckrabbit — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 08:40:39 +0000

Making the transition from still photography to videography is bloody hard. There are no short cuts. But rarely has someone made the transition so convincingly as Chinese based photographer Sean Gallagher. Armed with a grant from the Pulitzer Centre he’s been investigating the plight of the Chinese alligator.

Watch his short film and then read Sean in his own words about how he trained himself to become a film-maker. Hats off to you Sean, you did a great job.

As China continues its rapid economic development, the wetlands of the country are increasingly coming under threat.

Many of the species that inhabit these wetlands are being pushed to the brink of extinction, including the Chinese Alligator. Only 120 individuals are now estimated to be left in the wild, as a result of wetlands reclamation since the 1950′s.

Photographer and Videographer Sean Gallagher travels to Anhui Province in central China to document the crisis facing this species, for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

http://www.threatenedwaters.com (Coming Oct 2010)

“My first experience with video came when working on assignment in North Korea in August 2009. At that time I could only use a touristy camcorder because of the restrictions we were under and the fact I was posing as a tourist, however after producing three short videos for The Globe & Mail (Canada’s national newspaper), I became hooked on the possibilities video could give me for new ways in visual storytelling.

I was very excited to see video come out in Canon DSLRs in late 2009 and was blown away by the quality of the footage. Rather than rushing out to buy one however, I actually headed to Amazon and bought a bunch of books about how to shoot, edit and produce documentary films. I knew I had a lot to learn, so rather than rushing into it, I decided to take my time and try to learn the fundamentals of video to try to give myself a solid base from which to build on.

I think by taking this approach, it has facilitated a smoother transition for me to shooting video. Video really is a whole different world compared to stills, so rather than being overtaken by my initial enthusiasm and trying to ‘learn on the job’ say, I forced myself to take a little more of a planned approach to learning this new skill.

In terms of books, I highly recommend “Directing the Documentary by Michael Rabiger. It’s a bit of a tome but is my ‘go to’ reference book. With regards to websites, I think DSLR News Shooter has been very useful to in terms of the technical side and seeing what has worked (and what hasn’t) for other professionals, in these teething stages we are in with DSLR video.”

WOW WOW WOW

duckrabbit — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:57:29 +0000

Watch this video featuring National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen … really do!

Behind the Veil

Adam Westbrook — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:17:55 +0000

This week long mini series by the Globe and Mail is causing quite the stir among multimedia journalists this week. Tracy Boyer’s eagle eye spotted it on the weekend, and it’s had plaudits from the likes of The Travel Photographer and The Bombay Flying Club.

I like it too, for several reasons:

it’s full screen (why hasn’t that been done before?)
it has it’s own embeddable widget (why hasn’t that been done before?)
it’s got a great flash navigation
and it’s beautiful to look at
the extras (like a timeline, photogallery and reporter’s notes)

But of the whole experience (which is still being unveiled throughout this week) the page which intrigues me the most is this one:

Look how many people worked on this project. I’ve counted it for you and it’s 15. That’s as many as work on a small TV documentary. And it’s interesting because it goes against the trend of multimedia and online journalism to this date.

Multimedia Journalism (and online video journalism) has so far been characterised by the lack of people working on it, not the abundance. And I think that’s what has given it charm and a non-corporate appeal. I watch a piece by a single journalist and I can put myself in their position and engage with the story.

Do pieces like Behind the Veil lack this? Or does multimedia’s Hollywood have a place too?And am I being unrealistic to expect 1, 2, or even 3 journalists could create an experience as detailed as the 15 on The Globe and Mail?

ADAM WESTBROOK

The Snakebox Oddessy by Paul Close (where it’s at)

duckrabbit — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:56:53 +0000

Bang. Bang. Bang. WOW.

This blew me away.

I mean this REALLY BLEW ME AWAY.

For more info look here and here.

If you only look at one thing on the web this week go here.

If you are a blogger please spread the word on this amazing work.

Paul Close, duckrabbit salutes you!

The Bangladesh Project – Geoffrey Hiller

duckrabbit — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:36:10 +0000

It seems that every great photograph is coming out of Bangladesh right now, just when duckrabbit is about to set off there!

Bangladesh Project is a record of Geoffrey Hiller’s year there teaching interactive media. As he explains:

‘Bangladesh is a photographer’s paradise. These images were taken while I was in the capital, Dhaka, on a Fulbright Scholarship from August 2008-May 2009. I went out every day on foot or by auto rickshaw and shot people in the streets, in markets and shops, on construction sites, in schools and madrasas, focusing on Old Dhaka. I also tried to capture the ever-changing urban landscape of this megacity that encompasses 15 million souls.

During this time I taught Interactive Media at the Independent University, Bangladesh. My students there often accompanied me to help conduct interviews and to film in various locations. As a foreigner I was welcomed by an incredible diversity of people, who kindly shared their time. Often it is easier to photograph as an outsider, since we have fewer preconceptions than the local population about ‘how things are supposed to be’.

Well worth your time, as is the treasure chest that is The Travel Photographer where I first learned about Geoffrey’s website.