Readers interested in unique religious and cultural events will like this. I guarantee it. Not the faint-hearted though.

Following his participation in my The Oracles Of Kerala Photo Expedition-Workshop in March, Anthony Pond has been a frequent contributor to The Travel Photographer blog, and his Faith, Frenzy multimedia essay is the most recent of his many audio slideshows I've already featured.

Not only is it his most recent, but I wager it's his best production so far. Tony used a Canon 5DMk2, audio recordings were made with a Zoom H1, and was edited in Lightroom, Audacity, and Final Cut Pro. I'm not a huge fan of merging stills with video footage, but Tony succeeded in merging these two mediums quite seamlessly.

The Oracles of Kodungallur celebrate their festival in the Bhagawati temple, which usually occurs between the months of March and April. It involves sacrifice of cocks and shedding of the Oracles own blood, to appease the goddess Kali and her demons who are said to relish blood offerings.

Anthony Pond worked for more than two decades in the criminal courts in California as an attorney for the Public Defender’s Office. Now pursuing his passion for travel and photography, he travels repeatedly to South East Asia and India, amongst other places, to capture life, the people and the culture.

Photo © Lisa Kristine-All Rights Reserved

Lisa Kristine has been in the news with her recently published book Free The Slaves, and her talk at TEDxMaui about her photographic work. She has worked over the past 28 years documenting indigenous cultures in 70 countries on 6 continents around the world, and involved with Free the Slaves, an organization whose goal is to end slavery.

Notwithstanding the undeniable virtues of her involvement in using her photography to document the scourge of modern day slavery, I feature instead her lovely work of Bhutan which is representative of the best of  ethnographical fine art photography. Toned to perfection, these images are just superlative and were made with a large-format 4″x5″ field view camera.

Photo © Cedric Houin-All Rights Reserved

In Focus, the superlative photo blog of The Atlantic, features the winners of the 2012 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest in a much more satisfying format than the National Geographic. The finalists' photographs are shown in a 1280 pixel size; a size that will fill the largest monitors.

The winners consist of a group of 10 photos plus one Viewer's Choice winner. These images were chosen from more than 12,000 entries submitted by 6,615 photographers from 152 countries. The winners are from four categories: Travel Portraits, Outdoor Scenes, Sense of Place, and Spontaneous Moments.

First place went to Cedric Houin with the above photograph of the inside of a family yurt in the Kyrgyz lands of the Wakhan Corridor. We are told by the photograph's caption that the tribes living in the area are weeks away from any village by foot, and although located at an altitude of 4,300 meters in one of the most remote areas of Afghanistan, solar panels, satellite dishes and cellphones are prevalent.

It's not often that I agree with results of photography contests, but the judges' choice in this one is spot on. The richness of the reds of the yurt's interior, and the facial expression of the main protagonist along with the smaller details make a story out of that photograph. 

Cedric Houin is a French & Canadian documentary photographer, and a visual storyteller.

As for the Wakhan Corridor, it's an area of far north-eastern Afghanistan which forms a land link between Afghanistan and China. It's a long and slender area, roughly 140 miles long and between 10 and 40 miles wide. It also separates Tajikistan in the north from Pakistan in the south.

Photo © Ahmed Shajee Aijazi-All Rights Reserved

Ahmed Shajee Aijazi is another graduate of my Multimedia For Photographers class at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop held in Chiang Mai. Titled Under The Ramadan Moon, it's Ahmed's personal take on how the Muslim community in Chiang Mai observe and experience the month-long fast during Ramadan.

This is one of the three multimedia projects that were made in color, and Ahmed exerted much effort to gather its image and audio files despite fasting himself. Difficult under any circumstance, but Ahmed persevered, and completed a worthwhile project he ought to be very proud of.

Ahmed Shajee Aijazi is a Karachi-born photographer, with a formal background in art and design. Known as Shajee (Arabic/Urdu for "courageous"), he has been involved with professional photography for over five years now. His works have received regular press coverage in reputed papers like Dawn, Express Tribune and AAJ News.

Photo © Monica Denevan-All Rights Reserved

I'm glad to have found Monica Denevan's website with its gorgeous photographs of Burma and China. Trust me...you will find that her some 120 photographs are indeed luminous and gorgeous.

Monica travels with her medium format Bronica, one lens, and a bunch of plastic bags filled with Ilford Delta 400 film. She tells us that her photographs are printed from negatives in her traditional darkroom and selenium toned.

Classic photography in the full meaning of the word, and the farthest thing from the Instagram and Hipstamatic fad.

Born in San Francisco, Monica studied photography at San Francisco State University. She started visiting parts of Burma and China for many years, and always had her Bronica along. Her work was published in ZYZZYVA, Communication Arts Photo Annual, SHOTS, Black and White Magazine, The Photo Review, The Sun, and Artvas-The Photo (Korea) among others.

She is represented by Scott Nichols Gallery in San Francisco, Duncan Miller Gallery in Santa Monica, Capital Culture Gallery in London, and Tao Evolution Gallery in Hong Kong which produced a small catalogue of her work. Monica’s photographs are in the permanent collection of UCSF Medical Center.

Photo © Devansh Jhaveri: All Rights Reserved

Devansh Jhaveri is a travel photographer, and describes himself -quite rightly- as being passionate in capturing ancient cultures and the human condition in unique, challenging situations. I wager you will agree with me that he is extremely talented

He reminded me that he had a portfolio review with me the Delhi Photo Festival last November, and I recall telling him that he was gifted, and his photographs were amongst the best I've seen in this genre.

You will see that his imagery is varied, ranging from travel photography (in India and elsewhere such as Egypt and Thailand), classical Indian dance, portraiture, fashion (exceptional!), fine arts, interiors and also videography.

Before I share with you my preferred gallery out of Devansh's travel work, I want to highlight his fashion work because it's well worth your time to have a look at them.

As for his very broad travel work, I particularly liked his Ahmedabad gallery perhaps because of those made in the Jami Masjid...one of the most impressive mosques in India. Two photos stand out...the one above, and the one following it on the gallery which depicts an elderly Muslim checking his bag while a couple is 'canoodling' in a corner.

You will also find a quartet of Devansh's self-published books on Blurb: Varanasi, Ladakh, Colleena Shakti and Lost & Found.

Finally, Devansh's biography page is the first I see of a photographer with a QR("Quick Response")  Code, which is a mobile phone readable barcode I wrote about here.

Ruben Vicente and João Almeida have just inaugurated a photo exhibition of their work from Myanmar (Burma) in Lisbon, just a few minutes away from the Belém neighborhood. It will be available until mid September, and if I lived in Europe, I'd go just to view their images. Yes, I would. I even have the address: Espaço João Sousa Valles Rua Gonçalves Zarco, 2A Lisboa.

Ruben is a freelance photographer (and a computational physicist) and  João is also a freelance photographer (and a web developer), both living and working in Lisbon.

Ruben has just published an excellent ebook titled Myanmar: A Journey Through Time of his photographs, along with cogent and well written travel photography advice for this wonderful country, just emerging from a state of military dictatorship. I know there's a rush of travelers and photographers to Myanamr (Burma)...so do yourself a real favor, buy Ruben's ebook and drop Lonely Planet and the like.

They sent me a short video clip of the photo exhibition, which provides a preview of what attendees will see.



I also have a couple of photographs by Ruben and João to convince you to view their websites, attend the exhibition if you can, and buy Ruben's book.

Photo © Ruben Vincente-All Rights Reserved

Photo © Joao Almeida-All Rights Reserved

Photo © Mauriã Rodrigues Sabbado-All Rights Reserved

I was glad to see that Mauriã Rodrigues Sabbado, a Brazilian photographer and a member of my class Introduction To Multimedia Storytelling at the Buenos Aires Foundry Photojournalism Workshop, has recently updated his website with six photo galleries.

Mauriã's documentary photography is centered on Asia, and particularly on Tibet and China. I highlight his gallery Sichuan Opera, which documents a troupe whilst preparing for a performance, and the actual performance itself.

Sichuanese opera is a type of Chinese opera originating in China's Sichuan province around 1700, with Chengdu being its main home. It's well known for its singing, which is more free than the popular Beijing opera form. Sichuan opera is more like a play than other forms of Chinese opera, and the acting is very professional. The music accompanying Sichuanese opera utilizes a small gong and a two stringed traditional "violin".

Photo © Joshua Cogan-All Rights Reserved

"...I took to the road with a mission: to document vanishing cultures and enrich our understanding of social issue through photography and new media."

Joshua Cogan is a prolific documentarian of cultures, and anthropologist, an interactive producer and a storyteller, whose website has numerous galleries including my favorite, which he titles as In God's Own Land (a more appropriate title than The Last Jews Of Cochin) as it has images of Kerala, whose tourism soubriquet is God's Own Country.

The Cochin Jews, also known as Malabar Jews are the oldest group of Jews in India, who migrated mto India after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The Jewish area of Mattancherry, the area around its synagogue was once the centre of Cochin jewry, but there are just nine surviving members of the community, all of them over the age of 75, except one.

The surviving members are fluent Malayalam speakers, and follow Jewish customs and rituals diligently.

In addition to Joshua Cogan's galleries on his website, I would point you to an interview made with The Asia Society regarding the forced resettling of the artists living in the Kathputli Colony by the Delhi Development Authority as part of a new housing scheme. New Delhi’s Kathputli Colony has functioned as an artists’ colony for close to 50 years.

The interview is with Joshua Cogan and two of his colleagues, who have recently completed shooting their first documentary, Tomorrow We Disappear, about the Kathputli Colony's resettlement.

Photo © Charlotte Rush-Bailey-All Rights Reserved

A third-time participant in my photo-expeditions/workshops, Charlotte Rush-Bailey was just short listed on the prestigious Worldwide Photography Gala Awards (WPGA) Portrait Awards for her monochrome portrait of Fatima. Naturally, I wish her the best of luck to win it!

This lovely portrait was made at the Kodungallur medrasa near the Cheraman Juma Masjid, during The Oracles Of Kerala Photo-Expedition-Workshop. I am especially pleased that this environmental portrait is in landscape format...as I consistently encourage participants in my workshops to adopt it as much as possible as it lends itself better to multimedia, and allows a more layered composition. I'm also gratified that participants in my photo expedition-workshops, not only learn new skills on them, but enter serious photographic competitions, and frequently win.

Charlotte is a photographer who migrated to the world of photography from a corporate career that covered three decades of marketing and communications positions in a variety of global industries including energy, financial services, media, conservation, technology and professional services.

The Worldwide Photography Gala Awards (WPGA) provides a juried competitions for professionals and amateur photographers from around the world to compete in the WPGA Annual Award for the WPGA Photographer of the Year Award and the Humanitarian Documentary Grant

Anthony Pond is hardly a stranger to The Travel Photographer blog, as Kathakali, The Story Dance of Kerala is the newest one of his many audio slideshows I've already featured.

In this latest one, Tony has very ably merged stills, ambient audio with video clips to produce a 3 minute multimedia look into the backstage preparations for a Kathakali performance, and then the performance itself.

Tony was a participant in The Oracles Of Kerala Photo Expedition-Workshop during which I had arranged a private photo shoot involving the performers of this ancient art form. The 3 hours make-up session, and the 2-1/2 hours performance took place at the Kalatharangini Kathakali School near Cheruthuruthy. The performers' intensity was incredible, and I recall mentioning that earlier on this blog that it had been the best Kathakali performance I'd ever witnessed...Tony's stills and video have very well captured that intensity.

Anthony Pond worked for more than two decades in the criminal courts in California as an attorney for the Public Defender’s Office. Now pursuing his passion for travel and photography, he travels repeatedly to South East Asia and India, amongst other places, to capture life, the people and the culture.

The Hindu festival of Thaipusam is about faith, endurance, mortification and penance. In Malaysia, it's an intensely devotional event which can stretch for 3 or 4 days, and is attended by about a million and a half people each year. It's a time for Hindus of all castes and cultures to be grateful to Murugan, a son of Shiva.

It was brought to Malaysia in the 1800s by Indian immigrants working on Malaysian rubber estates and in its government offices. The festival is celebrated mostly by the Tamil community, and commemorates the occasion when Parvati gave Murugan a spear to vanquish the evil demon Soorapadam.

On the day of the festival, devotees shave their heads and undertake a pilgrimage along a set route while engaging in various acts of devotion, notably carrying various types of heavy burdens, while others may carry out acts of self mortification by piercing the skin, tongue or cheeks with skewers and sharp hooks. Not for the faint of heart.

Faith-Thaipusam is a 5 minutes video by a photographer called Luj Moarf who describes himself as a traveller, wandering into the world discovering places and people.

Some of the rituals followed during Thaipusam, including the red garments worn by some of the devotees, reminded me of The Oracles of Kodungallur.

Photo © Malgorzata Pioro-All Rights Reserved

The BBC has featured an audio-slideshow of Travel Photographer of the Year 2011 photographs which are on show at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London, from 22 June to 19 August 2012.

I found the conversation between one of competition judges, photographer Nick Meers, and RGS Director Rita Gardner to shed a little light as to what goes through the minds of photo competition judges...some of it was interesting and other parts were not, but it reaffirmed my long standing belief that photo competitions of that sort are won by photographs that speak to the judges...or to the majority of judges. In such competitions, a photograph might be technically perfect, but it could well be arbitrarily chucked out of the running because of the judges' subjective values...

I think the criteria for categories in photographic contests and the like are too broad. The image above is a winning entry in the Exotic Portfolio category.  For the life of me I can't see what's exotic in it. It's of a man passing a sex shop in Soho in London. It's a colorful, well timed and well composed street photograph, but exotic?

Most of the photographs I saw on the slideshow are really good, but it's a pity that the BBC chose music by Norah Jones and Lenny Kravitz. Good music for sure, but with no logical linkage to the photographs.

Apart from being an attorney in Northern California, Kris Bailey is a photographer who's keenly interested in South and South East Asia, and is particularly attracted to unusual rituals and religious festivals. She joined my The Oracles of Kerala Photo Expedition/Workshop™, which was her second expedition-workshop with me; the first being Kolkata's Durga Puja.

On her blog and Vimeo page, Kris describes herself as "Inspired by the stories of a young adventurer with a french accent and a cheap wooden guitar, Kris ran home from school one day and announced that she was going to live in Europe. Eight months later, wearing a cowboy hat and white bell-bottom jeans, Kris boarded a DC-10 bound for Brussels. She was 15 years old."

No longer with a hat and white jeans, she has just produced her audio-slideshow Red Rivulets, of her stills and ambient sound recordings made during the festival of the Oracles in Kodungallur. As readers of this blog probably know by now, this was one heck of an intense religious event, and Kris reveled in photographing it.

As background, the festival is called Kodungallur Bharani, and is a wild and unusual localized religious festival near Kochi. It is here that once a year the so-called Oracles of Kodungallur meet to celebrate both Kali and Shiva. By their thousands, these red-clad oracles arrive in this area of Kerala, and perform self mortification acts by banging on their heads with ceremonial swords repeatedly until blood trickle down their foreheads, then daub the wounds with turmeric.

Photo © Christina Feldt-All Rights Reserved

"As far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated by other cultures, faces, customs and ways of living."

And this is in essence how Christina Feldt started her photographic career. She was not joking...she writes me that she's just back from a 9 months trip through Mongolia, Myanmar, SE Asia and Ethiopia; a trip that generated enough galleries to occupy its viewers for quite some time. She has also established a Photoshelter website which you can view here.

I've gone through most of them...starting with Ethiopia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia, Mongolia, Bangkok and Singapore, and when I got to Vietnam...I paused at Christina's lovely photographs made against the yellow walls of Hoi An.

That done, I read the compelling blog post she wrote about Mai, a 31-year old Hmong woman from Sapa, who told her that her dream was to see the ocean and to be able to read and write, so she could read the text messages on her cellphone.

It's no surprise that I stopped at her Vietnam gallery...after all, this is my forthcoming destination where I'm holding a 15-days photo-expedition/workshop, and her photographs serve to reinforce the 'visuality' of Vietnam and its people.

As Rasha Yousif writes on her Vimeo page, Islam is the second-most practiced religion in India following Hinduism, while 24% of Kerala's population is Muslim. Muslims of Kerala believe that their origins in the area started in the 7th century AD when Islam originated in Arabia.

During my The Oracles Of Kerala Photo Expedition-Workshop, Rasha worked on a number of multimedia photo projects and one of her Soundslides (now converted to video) photo films is her At The Madrasa, whose still photographs and audio were taken at the madrasa of Cheraman Perumal Juma Masjid.

The photographs are in monochrome, and Rasha has done very well in merging the various audio tracks that include the students voices, and religious chants. You will see these Muslim children learning the Qur'anic texts and theology probably in the same style as their forefathers/mothers did centuries ago.

She is a photographer from the island nation of Bahrain, and is only the second Middle Eastern participant in my photo expeditions-workshops since I started them 10 years or so ago.

As a historical note, the Cheraman Perumal Juma Masjid in the Kodungallur is the first mosque in India, believed to have been built in 629 AD by Malik Ibn Dinar, who was a Persian slave and a contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad's disciples.

Photo © Tahnia Roberts-All Rights Reserved

Ngaben is the cremation ritual/ceremony performed in Bali to send the deceased to the next life. The bodies of the deceased are placed in elaborate sarcophagi, and cremated following rituals and ceremonies that are full of simultaneous solemn and joyous pomp. The Balinese believe that the deceased will either reincarnate or find final rest known as moksha, and that the bodies are temporary shells, considered impure.

Tahnia Roberts' Ngaben is a collection of photographs she made during the cremation of the late A.A. Mangkling, an elderly Balinese. A word of caution is necessary since there are images of the deceased in full view. I ought to add that Ms Roberts had the permission of the family to photograph the cremation ceremony. Her description of cremation ceremonies is quite comprehensive and informative.

Tahnia Roberts is a portrait and documentary photographer, originally from New Zealand, who is currently resident in SE Asia traveling extensively to experience authentic cultural activities of the region.

I suppose I ought to mention my own Ngaben gallery, which was more rural and perhaps less elaborate than the one documented by Ms Roberts.

I have blogged about Photoburst, a travel photography daily contest, before...however its website was just revamped in a dramatic fashion, with its daily winning photograph large enough to take up all of my large monitor...and readers of this blog know my often expressed preference for large images.

It's a real eye-candy now!

The basis for the contest is a simple one. The best photograph submitted by its contributors is uploaded, and showcased for that day. The author of the best photo of the month receives a US$50 gift certificate to Kiva.

Gastão Bettencourt, Pedro de Sousa and Pedro Patrício are the three photographers behind Photoburst, and since inception, it attracted hundreds and hundreds of travel photographers and their submissions. I've seen impressive quality amongst the submissions, from well-established photographers with professionally-built websites, and from emerging photographers with Flickr galleries. The submissions range from landscapes to environmental portraiture, from candids to posed photographs.

Photoburst also affirms that all photographs contained on its website remain the property of their authors, as indicated over each photograph.

So whether you seek to participate in Photoburst's contest by submitting one of your travel photographs or just get your daily travel photography fix, bookmark its website and make it a daily destination. You're certain to get your travel photography buzz!

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved

I am a member of Cowbird which describes itself as "...a small community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web."

I occasionally upload some of my photographs along with a short audio clip to it, and now have 9 stories under my name. The latest two are The Sufis of Cairo which I photographed (and recorded) a couple of years ago in one of the impoverished neighborhoods of Old Cairo.

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved

I also uploaded another photograph of The Shadow Puppets of Kerala as well as an accompanying sound clip of the performance which we attended during The Oracles of Kerala Photo Expedition-Workshop.


It's really fun...and takes no time at all.

Photo © Rasha Yousif-All Rights Reserved

As a photo expedition-workshop leader,  I very frequently see fantastic photographs by participants that make me wonder (after I stomp my feet in frustration) why I haven't shot them too, but I'm also glad it was these photo workshops that made these possible.

One of these photographs is the one made by Rasha Yousif of the Katha'kali dancer in full regalia, adjusting his belt. It was during The Oracles of Kerala Photo Expedition/Workshop™ this past March, and which saw us spending the better part of half a day with practitioners of this ancient dance form.

Rasha is a photographer from the island nation of Bahrain, and is a portfolio manager at a financial institution and has a Masters in Finance from DePaul University.

As Rasha writes on her blog: "One of the most memorable experiences I ever had in India was watching Kathakali dance performance. We had access to backstage makeup and costume preparations before the show. I came back from India with 6000+ photos I haven’t gone through most of them. I picked these two just to give a sneak peek of the photos that are yet to come!"

This photograph of a fisherman in Kochi is included a section of her iphone photography on the same blog,  and I encourage you to explore it...there are many gems in there.

Photo © Rasha Yousif-All Rights Reserved