Chris Sorensen | Sri Lanka

Photo © Chris Sorensen-All Rights Reserved

I've seldom featured work of Sri Lanka on The Travel Photographer Blog, and I wonder whether it's because professional travel photographers are not interested/active in this magnificent country, or if it's eclipsed by India.

So I'm glad to have found the work of Chris Sorensen whose website has a nice gallery of Sri Lanka. I've traveled more or less through all its western coast for about 2 weeks, and the gallery reminded my of its beauty. It also reminded me of photo shoot with the traditional stilt fishermen in the southern tip of the island. This is an ancient method of catching fish, quite primitive and one which give poor results, but it's a virtual icon of Sri Lanka...and the fishermen, although probably unable to make a living from it, do earn money from tourists and photographers.

A long pole is stuck in the seabed, not too far from the shore, and another shorter pole is tied to it in order to create a perch for the fisherman, who can stay there for hours catching fish during the incoming surf. I recall wading in the surf, waiting for the sunset to provide the right background to these fishermen.

Chris Sorensen is a portrait & travel photographer based in Hong Kong (another escapee from the corporate world!), and took up photography full time. He was the Grand Prize winner of the 2013 PDN Faces photo competition and a Finalist in the 2013 Kuala Lumpur International Photo Awards. His work was also awarded Honorable Mentions in the Portraiture and Fine Art categories of the 2011 International Photography Awards, as well as Honorable Mentions in the Portraiture, Lifestyle, and Fine Art categories of the 2010 International Photography Awards. His photographs appeared in

Condé Nast Traveller (UK), Monocle, AFAR, Hemispheres, Hong Kong Tatler, The Financial Times, Australian Art Collector, SILKROAD, Belle,PDN, Die Weltwoche, Veckans Aff ärer, The Phoenix, Hospitality Design, Philips, Eurosport Asia, and Gansevoort Hotels.

In Focus | National Geographic Photo Contest 2012

Photo © Ulrich Lambert/National Geographic Photo Contest

In Focus, the photography blog of The Atlantic, has just announced this year's National Geographic photo contest. I prefer featuring In Focus than the National Geographic's because its images are much larger (up to 1280 px).

The contest received more than 22,000 entries from over 150 countries, and In Focus showcased the winners from the three categories of People, Places, and Nature, with the captions provided by the photographers. 

Readers of this blog know my antipathy for photography contests, but I always keep an eye on two; TPOTY (The Travel Photographer Of The Year) and The National Geographic, which I think are the most legitimate of all the contests out there.

I took a look at the submissions and the results, and since this blog is all about my pontifications, I won't disappoint you. My favorite to have won the overall contest, in my judgment, should've been Ulrich Lambert's Sri Lanka's traditional stilt fishermen, which was made in Midigama, a surfer's paradise at the southern tip of the island.

Ethan Knight: Faith

Photo © Ethan Knight-All Rights Reserved

Ethan Knight is a documentary photographer and a film maker whose work focuses on the impact of war and poverty on marginalized societies. Currently based in Auckland, New Zealand, his work has been published by The New York Times, the National Geographic, the Wall Street Journal, Lonely Planet Images, Australian Geographic and New Zealand Geographic amongst other publications. He also worked with NGOs such as UNHCR, ICRC, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Ethan suggested I viewed his Northern Sri Lanka/Jaffna gallery of images, especially those of the Festival of Murugan, The Tamil god of war, but I went further and viewed his entire Faith Gallery in which he features about 34 monitor-sized images of photographs made in Jerusalem, in Sri Lanka and Kenya.

I thought his most powerful images in the Faith gallery were those of the Thaipusam religious festival, especially those of devotees rolling on the ground for 2 kilometers to the entrance of a temple, and self-inflicting wounds to their bodies in the hope of redemption.

After doing so, you may wish to recuperate from the graphic images by viewing Ethan's photographs of the New Zealand Fashion Week 2011.