Once upon a time is how many adventures begins. This one starts now (or well it started Tuesday after many preparations). Day Zero. Time is reset as I leave Danish airspace destination Nomadic life, first stop Bangkok.
The flights are turbulent. First one to Amsterdam is physically turbulent as we pass through a major rain storm. Second one from ‘Dam to Bangkok is emotionally turbulent. This is huge. Hours earlier I said goodbye to my two best friends. Now raw electricity shoots through my veins. Goose bumps. Heart races. Into the Wild, the wild unknown. Leave it all behind. New life. Reset time.
Bangkok – alien in Ramkanphaeng
Immigration and luggage is a breeze and I find my good friend Kai – he worked with us on the Malaysia and Borneo expedition in June. We get a taxi to his suburb Ramkanphaeng. Part of the fun and challenge of travel is knowing nothing. This is at the extreme end of that scale! Ramkanphaeng is a large uni suburb, mostly students or people who work at the uni. Kai speaks very good English but no one else does and everything is written in Thai. For 3 days I do not meet any other tourists. Not a single whitefella actually. I cannot read and only Kai understands me. I eat at the street kitchens where I point to food and handover money not understanding the price (does not matter anyway is lunch is something like 30 bath = 1 US dollar). This is actual true Bangkok life, no touristy Khao San Road from hell and it is incredible fascinating to experience this. More Ramkanphaeng stories to come, here are a few snapshots from the streets and markets.
Main road of Ramkanphaeng, add some rain and this is Blade Runner! Very busy street, even more so at night.
Fresh food markets, a symphony of colours and smells:
A typical street kitchen on the small road where I stayed. This is away from the main road and a charming neighbourhood of real life.
My Hood – kitchens and shots on the street where I stayed.
Randomness
As I am ordering lunch from a street kitchen using my special pointing technique a guy asks me in English “oh you know and like Thai food”. “Yes”, I say surprised, “Love it”. Turns out he is from the Philippines and when I reveal I am Danish he promptly speaks to me in Danish. He used to have a Danish girlfriend. Small world at times or weird coincidences surely!
I did spend a few hours in the city centre and saw Khao San Road which is hell on Earth. A disgusting terrible tourist trap backpackers from hell street of nothing but pubs, restaurants and shops pushing crap to tourists. Interesting to see, a completely different world to Ramkanphaeng.
Naturally as time is being reset some weird glitches occurs in the ‘Matrix’. In ‘Dam airport a young Brit two meters from me is arrested by the Police and he then promptly proceeds to regurgitate the drugs he is smuggling. On the plane to Bangkok I actually sit next to a couple from Finland named the Harkonens! (read Frank Herbert’s Dune).
Nomad. Basically means either a pastoral nomad, moving his herd every day in search of food, or a hunter gatherer nomad moving with the wildlife. Bruce Chatwin was forever fascinated by nomadic life and once spent years and years writing a book about his own thesis on ‘the nomadic alternative’. This brick of a book was according to his publisher almost unreadable and Chatwin ended up instead traveling Patagonia and writing ‘In Patagonia’. The rest is history.
I have spent the past 4 months attempting to realise my own Nomadic Alternative. On Monday the 23rd of November dreams become reality as I board my plane to freely travel the world, photograph, experience, write and live! New life. The road is the home. Nomadic Alternative.
I now own basically what I can carry. Well, carry with some help as there is an awful lot of camera gear, laptop, books and clothes. Still, my life and possessions is reduced to a mobile state and I have no home but the world, the road. Nomadic alternative. These are truly exciting times! Complete freedom and total liberation! I do know how lucky people consider me to be and I will live up to it. But I have basically created this situation myself and I believe everyone can do this or parts of this. Most of what tie us down are in our minds!
While I do call it my Nomadic Alternative, like Bruce Chatwin would say, that is a truth and a half. Chatwin liked to say he was travelling with just a notebook and a backpack. In reality he carried a whole home with him, including a ton of books. In reality I will be jumping from base to base as a place to sleep is always quite nice! My first base will be with friends in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. A dear friend from Copenhagen will also join me in Chiang Mai and together we will explore Asia for the next 4 months. Thailand, Malaysia, Borneo, perhaps Burma, Laos and a little gday to Australia as well could be on the menu. No plans, except to live! photograph, experience, travel and be free, free!
“Not all those who wander are lost.” – Tolkien
"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun." -Chris McCandless
The road is home
Let us conclude with the road, in this case a lovely red dirt road from Karijini, Australia. Red and blue dawn at it’s finest. Into the Wild.
I once spent a LOT of time customizing the css for my blog so the layout and look would match my main web page. Turns out it matched so well it confused absolutely everyone and no one could tell if they were on my blog or my web page. So I am testing out some new WordPress themes at the moment, which is why you will see the design change quite a bit here as I try and land on something I like. Apologies for the mess while we re-decorate the entire place
Apologies for not blogging much lately, battling fatigue, a cold and a headache after pushing myself a bit too much changing my life completely. So I will let a lovely African image speak for itself today. Gorgeous Springboks in front of a huge wall of sand at Namib Naukluft National Park in Namibia. Springboks and antelopes are an absolute joy to watch as they playfully run and jump around the plains of Namibia simply toying with gravity.
This image originally had another crop where a sliver of sky was visible. Turned out on second thought that this actually hurt the image, it is much more open and expansive with just the wall of sand and no sky visible. This way there are no borders to the sand. The art of cropping, possibly the most dramatic improvement you can do to your images is a perfect crop in my opinion. The art of cropping – will be the subject of a longer article sometime soon.
Recently I finally found some time to get creative with video editing, something I have wanted to do for a very long time. The result of my video editing baby steps is just a very basic little movie of the absolutely gorgeous pristine coastline of James Price Point, Western Australia. Edited entirely in iMovie from a Canon 5D Mk II recording and featuring a few of my landscapes from James Price Point and the wonderful music of James Newton Howard from Blood Diamond soundtrack; this is Images of James Price Point:
I use Vimeo.com for hosting videos although I feel out of place as Vimeo has so many extremely talented videomakers uploading absolutely magical videos. Have a look at my ‘likes’ on Vimeo and you shall see some amazing stunning work by people like Tom @ Timescapes and Mike Fletcher.
The first of my video editing attempts but definitely not the last. Now that I have experienced how much fun video shooting and editing is I wish I had shot a lot more on my previous trip and will surely shoot a lot on upcoming adventures!
Shooting video with the Canon 5D Mk II
Finally; I want to share some of my experience with shooting video on the Canon 5D Mk II on an actual production. During a corporate shoot in Malaysia and on Borneo in June 09 with Michael Rastrup from Danish Tv2 and Georg from Livingfilms.com we used my 5D Mk II quite a bit for the video as it soon became apparent the quality blew the JVC proHD camera away. Here’s a few of my experiences:
It is fun! It is an incredible amount of fun to be a still photographer and suddenly finding yourself shooting video on your still camera! I loved it!
Can’t do both simultaneously. Video shooting is incredibly time consuming and it is hard to try and do landscape photography at the same time.
The firmware allowing complete manual control of video shooting had just been released and I installed it on day 2 of shooting. It is absolutely essential, giving you complete control of exposure and aperture during video shooting.
Mounted on a great Sachtler tripod with a fluid head you forget it’s a still camera. The 5D Mk II becomes a video camera – but a good video tripod is essential for any sort of shooting and panning. The 5D is really terrible to handhold while shooting video, impossible to keep steady.
We were a bit perplexed at first trying to get footage from the 5D to co-exist in Final Cut with footage from the JVC. The 5D footage kept skipping. 5D shoots at 30 frames, cannot be changed, JVC shoots at 25 or 50 frames. We ended up using MPEG streamclip to convert all 5D footage to 25 frames and that solved the problem. There are rumours of an upcoming firmware for the 5D allowing us to shoot at 24 and 25fps also – highly needed!
Internal microphone is useless and the mini-jack microphone line input probably not a lot better. You really need a separate recorder I think. We actually recorded the audio on the JVC as that had XLR inputs and a headphone monitoring option, essential.
Shallow DOF created by 35mm sensor and shooting at f/4.0 is amazing on video! We shot some awesome close ups and over the shoulder shots.
High iso rocks! We shot indoors in offices, blinds closed, just a tiny spotlight and got beautiful results.
Shooting video eats the battery quickly as is to be expected and I only had one battery, this was back when Canon could not produce batteries. Re-charging at every chance possible was essential.
I can’t show the footage so you will just have to take my word for it – video on a 5D shot at 17mm from the back of a jeep driving through a palm plantation looks mindblowing! 17mm looks amazing on video as well as stills.
Oh one final tip, mostly for myself, try not to walk into tripod while you shoot (something I did several times)!
Perhaps inspired by my recent CAKE09 tale from Marble Bar, perhaps the reason is something else entirely (really who needs a reason to promote the hottest town in Australia!) – Western Australian photographers David Bettini and Merv French have declared this Wednesday Marble Bar promotion day and asked me to join in the fun! Fellow CAKE09 members and Australia photographers Casey Smith and Rod Thomas are also part of our Marble Bar is Hot day! So step inside, kick back and enjoy Marble Bar in Western Australia. I even dug up a few old slides (yes I have been to Marble Bar twice!) for this special day.
It is time for another travel story from the CAKE adventures of Rod Thomas, Casey Smith and yours truly.
“There is no caravan park?” says Casey. So begins our stay in Marble Bar and the long overdue follow up to Cake Crew meets Camel Man. We have driven through the entire outback Western Australia mining town of Marble Bar. Took a few seconds. Met about 2 other people. Saw no caravan park. Will we be bush camping tonight under the Marble Bar sky as seen on the right?
Karijini National Park in the beautiful Pilbara region of Western Australia is home to incredible landscapes and gorgeous gorges’ (trying to be funny here!) that are some of the most photographed sites in Western Australia. The gorges of Karijini are incredible, beautiful and tremendous fun to climb around in but for photography I am going against the grain and prefer the topside. The gorges are cramped, walled in, claustrophobic and below the horizon. Not my style, not my love. I seek dimensionless wide open spaces with a huge sky where I can dream myself into a magical universe with no limits! So here is a slice of Karijini but not quite as most would know it!
A little short on time again; I shall let the images say whatever they have to say this week and just present a slideshow of three topside images from Karijini:
Taking in a magical sunset after hiking through the bush and then a great 1 kilometre climb to the top of Mount Vigors with great Phil from RemTrek: highly recommended. The view from up here is extraordinary offering a stunning 360 unimpeded view of Karijini. We got great clouds and light on this day and I was high on the whole climb up and down and during the shooting. Magical experience. The climb down and walk through the bush in pitch black conditions lit only by torch light and a million stars is a truly otherworldly experience.
On our last day in Karijini a big cloud system moved in and dumped rain on us later in the day. I have already blogged about this brilliant morning here, and present another image of the same morning. I can never get enough of dramatic skies like this one and if you look closely there’s still a touch of rainbow left here.
A short glimpse into my version of ‘the other’ Karijini. If you have been fortunate enough to visit, what is your favourite spot at Karijini National Park?
I am completely taken aback by wide open desolate spaces. The bigger, wider, more open, more desolate the better and it really does take my breath away. It is hard to describe this feeling I get from it but it is the sense of space, the openness and having no boundaries at all. Once I have accumulated a collection large and good enough I hope to share this love through exhibitions and books dedicated to Wide Open Spaces.
The image I wish to present today is from Namibia, from driving through the gravel desert in Namibia. Namibians has a nice expression for this – “Gramadulas” – basically meaning outback or middle of nowhere! You will not find a more barren vast area and I loved every second of this magnificent place. I am however somewhat curious if anyone but me likes this sort of stuff. Into the Wild does not really apply here as there is not a thing here and that is what makes it great. It is more appropriately Into The Nothingness!
PS. I am posting slightly less and shorter than normal. Becoming a nomad and starting a new life is hard work and takes up a lot of time; leaving not as much time presently as I would like for blogging. Spare time needed!
“It’s caught me in it’s spotlight. It’s alright it’s alright the moonlight”. A Thin Lizzy hit although I tend to better remember the great Smashing Pumpkins cover. Be thankful that my new version – Shooting in the Moonlight – only exists by my pen (well keyboard) not my voice!
Shooting images in the Moonlight lit only by a full moon is something I wanted to do for a while. You have to get away from most light pollution (cities etc) and find yourself somewhere nice and dark so you can capture a glorious night sky featuring magical stars and a nice moonlit landscape. In April I found myself camping in the Namibian Veld (Afrikaans for bush) on a night with a full moon and wanted to experiment with Shooting in the Moonlight. This is basically what I ended up with after a few tests:
This is in pitch darkness lit entirely by the moon. The image itself is fairly boring but it serves as an example of how a full moon can easily light up a landscape and create a great otherworldly light along with a massive amount of beautiful stars! This image was a 25 second exposure at f/4.0 iso 1250, a full moon is bright but not exactly the burning midday sun. You do need very long exposures and high iso to capture this. A 25 second exposure is too much actually, the earth has already rotated enough to create small star trails, so a faster lens would come in very handy here.
Now that I look at the image I really should have walked up the hill and put some nice rocks close up in the foreground! My mind was frozen as it gets so cold in the veld after sunset. Ah, always great things to learn and improve on. Come next opportunity I hope to have a winning moonlit shot to show you or at least an improved one! Anyone wishing to share some moonlit shooting experiences, please do comment. Take me out to the black!
Moonlit video: For some out of this world time lapse images featuring magical stars and light, this brilliant video by Tom @ Timescapes is pure genius.
