In D.C. for some meetings... I've always wanted to shoot here at night.

the "making of" the garden photo below. It was muddy...hence the yoga stretch so my pants wouldn't get dirty. Nice shot Hazel!

meet hazel. You met her (below) but now it's different. :)





photo by Arnold Tiempo

Today I finally got around to going through the pictures from the Germany trip I took with my brother. I was actually forced to, because a newspaper is asking for it. Matt was hired to do a global warming piece for German Life magazine and a few other outlets...some newspapers and hopefully a travel article for National Geographic Adventure magazine. As it happened, there was just enough in the budget to include a photographer on the trip.. and it just so happened I had about 9 days of vacation coming to me from my other job. So off we went to Munich to catch a bit of the Octoberfest and then to Bavaria, one of the most beautiful places on the face of the earth.

















Matt (left) and I on top of Mt Watzman, the third highest peak in Germany.

Mom and Dad have officially made the blog. Welcome to you both. We had a nice time being tourists in SF the other day and I was their official paparazzi.

It pains me a great deal that my my camera failed me on a recent trip to Tajikistan. I was forced to use my camera phone which challenged me to no end. To get a sharp image you have to shoot subjects that are relatively stationary. "Stealing" pictures of people's front sides proved to be very difficult, hence the following back shots. Urgh! As disappointed as I am, I thought these dresses were too interesting not to share. Nearly all women there own and wear these dresses which look a lot like bathrobes from the 1970's.

The country is in an early Spring after one of the most brutal winters on record. The women seemed especially happy to be out and about enjoying the 70 degree day.

I've always wanted to try using just candles for portraits and Ms. Hazel was kind enough to lend me her beauty and modeling talent for this experiment. Thanks Hazel!

For those photography geeks out there (zac, paul, mark, you know who you are), these look noisy because it was hand held with a slow lens, f4 so I cranked up the ISO to a whopping 1600 and would have gone higher if my D200 would let me.

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.