I’ve been to some of the more dangerous places on this Earth, and each time, my friends and family sent me off with a warning and a plea to be careful. No one ever warned me about Tuscany. Yet it was there—and not the slums in Haiti or the backstreets of the Congo—that I fell off a wall seven years …
Travel Photography: More Than Snapshots & Postcards
On my recent trip to India, not everything went to plan. Bad wiring in the hotel room meant things kept blowing up. We were trying to film videos like the one I posted last week, Have Camera Will Travel, and if I wasn’t being interrupted by noisy packs of wild dogs, I was being shit on by birds, or having to …
Travel Photography: If It’s Not Muggers, It’s Monkeys
On my first (and to this point, only) trip to Russia, I was mugged. Rather, it was an attempted mugging. A man approached my friend and me in a small underpass in St. Petersburg and asked for money. When I repeatedly told him I had none, he flashed a small safety razor blade at me and growled, “Your money or …
Postcards from Venice
The train from Venice pulled out only minutes ago, heading south to Florence and away from the city that, after 8 years, I’m only now beginning to really discover, though I’ve loved her – quirky, busy, impossibly tangled with tourists, as well as beautiful, romantic, and bathed in light – from the start. Florence will be a quick one, 4 …
Postcards from the Revillagigedo Archipelago
Good morning from Mexico’s sunny San Jose del Cabo! I got off the Nautilus Belle Amie yesterday after 10 days at sea and another astonishing series of underwater encounters that blew my mind. Here are a small handful of them, including one of my dive buddy and good friend Jason Bradley after this one solitary black Jack (the kind of …
Postcards from Bahamas: Sharks!
A friend recently talked to me about his photography was driven by some of his fears, noteably the fear of getting old. I think some of my recent work taps into this a little, both in terms of what I am photographing, and how I am doing it. I think leaning into fear is a good thing; it’s healthy to …
More Postcards from Jodhpur
I’m writing this in turbulence 40,000 ft over Afghanistan on the way home from India, so it’s hardly a postcard from Jodhpur but then I usually send my mother her postcards when I get home too, so that makes you family. I’ve just wrapped up 2 weeks in Rajasthan, and now making a run for home to get my hands …
Postcards from Jodhpur
After a busy, and increasingly hot, week in Jodhpur with my first of two Mentor Series Workshops here in Rajasthan, one group of students is now leaving with beautiful bodies of work and another has just arrived. We spend our early mornings walking the streets, padding our shoeless way through temples, sitting with our favourite chai wallas, and following unexpected …
More Than Smiles
For years I chased smiles. I still do. I love a great laugh for the spark and openness it brings to a subject. But laughter and smiles, universal as they are, do not tell the whole story or express the full emotional gamut of the human race (riddling, perplexed, labrynthical soul, as John Donne so well expressed it.) I use …
Returning Home, Returning to Soul.
As always, I’m pretty sure I needed Kenya vastly more than it needed me, though I hope I served it in some way over the month I was there. Before leaving I felt like something was missing, like this digital ecosystem I’ve been so attached to was not only no longer fulfilling, but was, in fact, beginning to gnaw holes …