Next week I'll pass through one of my favorite places. Xianjing Province in far western China is home to numerous people groups. Wikipedia helps me out here with a rundown of the groups: Muslim Turkic groups including the Uyghurs, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Tatars and the Kazakhs, and a few Indo-European Iranic groups, such as the Tajiks and the Sarikolis/Wakhis (often mis-identified as Tajiks). Other PRC minority ethnic groups include Hui Chinese, the Mongols, the Russians, the Xibes, and the Manchus.

Translation: It's an amazing dichotomy of people groups, cultures, and languages. Photographing such diversity is heaven, especially when I was here two years ago in the spring. There's something about this time of year that made people naturally smile and let down their guard in front of a camera. Ok, not all of these were taken in Xianjing, but all were within 100 miles of there.

Framing a picture is pretty straight forward when you can direct your subjects to move around. But capturing candid pictures that are framed with natural surroundings is rare (at least for me!). As luck would have it, this girl from the Philippines was just sitting in the right spot.

Our family took off for a weekend at Spring Training in Phoenix. My brother Matt was hired by the A's magazine publisher to do a piece on Alan Embree, a veteran pitcher now with the A's. Hoping to get some shots of Embree for the magazine, my brother got me a press pass for the game. I so wanted to shoot with a 600 f4 lens like the big boys but somehow coming up with $9000 for it seemed a little impossible at the moment.

The flights from Manila to San Francisco can often be routed through Hawaii for a few dollars less than a direct flight. Since I'm always into saving money, I've opted for the oh-so burdensome stopover in Honolulu. It works out well when my friends and supporters are in town... but one time they weren't and I decided to use some miles for a jaunt on the Big Island. At Volcanoes National park there is flowing lava that spills into the sea. On this particular morning I was rained out and could not complete the 2 mile hike to where active lava flows. Instead I headed over to the coast line where oddly the weather was clear enough for this amazing sunrise.