Jackie Alpers: Food Photographer

Photo © Jackie Alpers-All Rights Reserved

What is a food photographer doing on the blog of The Travel Photographer, you ask?

Well, it's a case of mistaken identity from Jackie's side. You see, I saw a message yesterday in my tweet feed from Jackie Alpers saying that she was thrilled to have been featured on The Travel Photographer's blog. Since I was flying over the Atlantic at the time, and unaware that I had posted any new posts since leaving New York City earlier that day, I was puzzled.

Not for long though. I clicked on the link on her tweet and saw that it led to a "travel photographer"...a generic kind of blog giving no photographer name, no personal identity and seemingly just a sort of website to sell stuff....or something.

I was initially excited to see that someone may have had the silly idea to ape my blog and risk legal headaches...but it soon waned when I realized what it was.

Jackie sounded so thrilled in her tweet that I decided to feature her work on the REAL The Travel Photographer blog. May it bring her luck and exposure.

Jackie Alpers is a food, culture & cuisine photographer based in Tucson, Arizona who specializes in photography for cookbooks and magazines, among others. Her biography is quite interestingly illustrated, and I recommend you drop her website.

Geoffrey Hiller: India

Photo © Geoffrey Hiller-All Rights Reserved

I've recently received an email from Geoffrey Hiller with the link to his dedicated India website with photo galleries of its various cities and areas. The one that caught my particular attention, since I've announced a photo expedition to Kolkata during the Durga Puja, was his work in Kolkata . The rest of his galleries are of Mumbai, Bangalore, Mysore and Chennai.

You'll see that Geoff's photographs of this quintessential Indian city is a mix of environmental portraits and classic street photography, including a few shots made during the Durga Puja too.

To my knowledge, Geoffrey Hiller is one of the first photographers who embraced multimedia, and I recall his work on Burma which introduced me (and certainly others) to this medium. His photography has been published in the United States, Europe, and Japan in such publications as Geo, Newsweek, Mother Jones, and The New York Times Magazine. His photo-essays have covered Asia, Latin America, Europe, and West Africa, and his multimedia projects about Vietnam, eastern Europe, Ghana, Burma, and Brazil have earned recognition from Adobe, the Soros Foundation, Apple, The Christian Science Monitor, and USA Today.

(Posted From London)

On My Way: Some Thoughts And My Gear

I'm poised for next week's In Search of the Sufis of Gujarat Photo Expedition™, and have now readied/cleaned my cameras and lenses, reformatted all the CF cards, and recharged all batteries. I find this task to be one of the most tedious (but pleasurable at the same time) things I have to do before traveling on a photo expedition or assignment. It's a comfort kind of thing, a kind of reassuring thing to do, a ritual of sorts if you will, but it's still tedious...I don't know how else to describe it....and I don't know how all my stuff finally fit in my bags (not those in the above picture!).

On the other hand, one of the pre-departure tasks I don't mind doing at all is to review the itinerary I've developed, while trying to anticipate what may go wrong during the trip...my 10 years of leading photo-expeditions have prepared me for snafus, but each photo-expedition and itinerary can bring its own set of challenges.

I always look forward to a new photo-expedition, but this is also accompanied by a smidgen of anxiety. After all, I'll be meeting new photographers who've joined it, and while we've developed an online relationship with emails and links of mutual interest for the past months, a "face to face" is different. Neither of us knows what to really expect from each other.

As for those of you who are interested in gear-talk, here's the list:

Photo Equipment:

Canon 5D Mark II
Canon 7D (which replaces my trusty old friend the Canon 1D Mark II)
Canon 70-200mm f2.8
Canon 24-70mm f2.8
Canon 17-40mm f4.0
Canon 24mm f1.4
Canon 580EX II Strobe
Lumix GF1 with 20mm


Audio Equipment:

Marantz PMD620
ATR6250 Stereo Microphone
SONY Headphones

A F-3X Domke shoulder bag

13" MacBook Pro

2 Iomega hard drives (500mb and 1TB).

And my krama scarf. The most important item!

As I wrote a few times, I can't wait for the time when cameras such as the Lumix GF1 (the so-called EVIL cameras) perform as well as the current crop of digital SLRs...and reduce the enormous load factor that I'm obliged to carry on these trips.

I will try to post as much as I can...no problem from London of course, and perhaps none from Delhi except for availability of time. Once I'm in Gujarat though, it'll be silence from The Travel Photographer.