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A few pictures from the last few years of going to places I wasn’t supposed to be – hope you enjoy them
Bojangles Bar, Alice Springs, Australia, 31st March 2007. Great place – barrel of monkey nuts at the door, pick a pile up, crack ’em open on the tables, then brush the shells onto the wooden floor. Webcam interweb link from the DJ box and live radio hook-up, not great if you’re there with someone other than your partner, or you should be at work/home sick. Highly recommended – four fantastic drunken days spent there on our outback walkabout.
(the teddy bear is mine, and he’s called ‘mudhead’)
It’s pretty wild on a Friday night, as is Alice itself – rough town, loved it.
Tourism Afghan style. The kiosk at Band-e-Amir lake, Hazarajat, central Afghanistan, 8th October 2008. This is now the country’s first National Park.
Bog standard point and shoot mate. The earlier shots are on a Sony Cybershot, the later ones a Nikon Coolpix P50. Most of them are in the “auto” mode too. Flickr and picnic are my best friends, allthough a lot of those Afghan skys are pretty blue as they are. I’m more into recording where I’ve been than getting a nice artful shot (another way of saying I’m not a very good photographer :roll: ), these are just snapshots really.
I have toyed with the idea of picking up a decent digital SLR, but can’t be arsed. I have an old Pentax K-1000 and a Canon AT-1 and have shot some pretty decent stuff on film in Nepal and Tibet with each respectively, I’ll scan them in at some point and stick them on here.
If anyone can recommend a compact digital (not SLR) which can go wide angle below 18mm I’d be very much obliged to know who makes them.
La Serena, Chile, 31st May 2007. The magazine FHM has a regular feature called “Who the hell are you?” in it where readers send in group and portrait photos. The difference with these and ordinary snaps is that in the background some random stranger is in the shot, either acting a dick, or just generally sticking their mug in where it’s not wanted. Some of the results are hilarious.
Me and the missus were sat having a beer outside a little bar in the middle of the beautiful little Chilean seaside town of La Serena (The Serene); I picked up the camera to capture the occasion and this old bird waddled past, looking at me like I’d just murdered her firstborn child. The funniest thing is, she’s a ringer (minus the hair colour) for my own mother-in-law! I very nearly sent this one in, but the wife wouldn’t let me. :(
Pack ponies head up the trail towards the Annapurna Sanctuary, Nepal, 4th November 2005
The view of the New Zealand PRT and Bamiyan airstrip from atop the City of Screams (Shar-e-Golghola), Bamiyan, Afghanistan, 10th October 2008. Two days after I took this picture an Afghan de-miner was blown in half by unexploded ordnance just about 20 feet away from this tower. Scary.
@ROB wrote:
This is inspiring m to go through some old photos.
Looking forward to them.
Central Baghdad, 27th June, 2006
The danger of Iraq night operations and tired drivers. This was my team’s rear car after they hit a concrete bollard and rolled when the driver fell asleep at the wheel. The expat was wearing his seatbelt in the front passenger seat, hence why he walked away with nothing worse than a sore head and neck.
The driver very nearly died and the guard in the back compound fractured his leg. A quick roadside triage, patch-up jobs, cross-deck of the casualties, weapons and equipment, a photo to record the damage for the boss, and a bug-out to the BIAP before the vultures came out to give us the good news (this all happened about 3am in a very unsavoury part of town). The US Army medics met us at the gate and saved the life of the driver whose breathing was fading fast. They were brilliant. I was back out working the same patch the next night – crazy times.
I made it compulsory in my team, I still say the biggest threat to life even in a place like Iraq was by road accident. Our first company expat fatality was due to one – no seatbelt. I had to retrieve his body in 40C of heat, he’d been dead for about two hours and was in a right fucking mess. Soft tissue and armoured car is not a good mix when they meet at high speed over and over.
After this incident in the above photo happened, anyone I caught without one on in my crew was moved out of the team, no arguing. In my present job they are compulsory for the clients but not us, but I still wear it – obviously when immediately arriving at or leaving dodgy venues I take it off in case the shit hits the fan and I need to move fast.
At home I wear it 100% as well, but I’m the kind of guy who checks out fire escapes in cinemas and shopping malls, and who watches the trolley dollys on every flight and reads the safety manual etc, it kind of becomes ingrained in you. My missus fluctuates between annoyance and feeling reassured that somebody is thinking about this shit. It’s important – because when the plane goes down it’s Mister-too-cool-for-school-I’m-reading-the-paper-while-the-safety-demo-is-on, is also guaranteed to be the one who will be risking everyone’s life by flapping like a stupid twat and fighting for the door he entered the cabin through and not the nearest exit to him.
The beautiful yet simple geometric lines of the Emin Mosque and Minaret, Turpan, Xinjiang, China, 22nd September 2006. One of the most impressive buildings I’ve seen on my travels.
Three generations of Sheikhs, Qurnah, Iraq, 24th September 2004. I was working on the Sheikh liaison team during this period in Qurnah, a town situated on the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, near the ancient (now disappeared) marshlands.
Our job was to get out among the local tribes and meet with the Sheikhs, forming friendly relations and offering work to a very impoverished area. The reason? We were providing close protection and static security to a multinational team building a 400KV powerline from Basra to Kut. You don’t start any endeavour in this part of Iraq without involving and consulting the local people. If we hadn’t made the effort, the powerline would have lasted one night before it was stripped and disappeared, plus we could even have been attacked by the same people.
The old Sheikh in the picture was a funny old bugger, canny as fuck, this is one of his sons and his grandson. There was an ongoing feud between this old fella and another Sheikh further north, there had been fatalities and two attempts were made on him personally before we met him. Don’t know what became of him and his huge family, but I’ve a notion he’s still there fighting away. A true Arab character, straight out of a Boys’ Adventure book.
This is his meeting room – the best room in the house, so you can see how different an Iraqi Shia Sheikh is to say a Saudi Arabian one, really grinding poverty. The pictures are of him at the top and the Shia martyrs below, including Hussain and Imam Ali
The painted face of Hussain is ubiquitous in southern Iraq, especially re-painted over friezes of Saddam Hussein. I even saw my first Hussain poster in Kabul today, in the back window of a passing car. That wouldn’t have happened in the time of the Taliban.
@ROB wrote:
That image of the Emin Mosque is really striking.
Keep em coming!
Second that. I love the natural geometry of that mosque. Who needs freakin’ starchitects when people were doing it more beautifully hundreds of years ago.
Re: seatbelts – I’m glad to hear you run a smart crew then. A good friend from college’s dad was high up in the DEA in Miami and for some reason never wore them. Died in a car accident when my friend fell asleep at the wheel. My cop cousin-in-law says that it’s not required on his force but he is one of the smarter ones and straps in. Cause of most cop deaths in my area? Car accidents. Maybe it’s a cop thing.
Nice homemade haircuts on these two young scamps. The Tashilhunpo Monastery, Shigatse, Tibet, 18th October 2006
flip, have you seen Kekexili: Mountain Patrol ? Seems like a movie you’d enjoy. It’s set in Tibet.
@vagabond22 wrote:
flip, have you seen Kekexili: Mountain Patrol ? Seems like a movie you’d enjoy. It’s set in Tibet.
Looks good mate, thanks for the heads up :)
South West Kabul from the City Walls on Sher Derwaza, Afghanistan, 9th August 2008.
This area includes the Darulaman Road – heavily destroyed in the mujahideen internecine war before the Taliban took power. The park area is the Tomb of Babur – first of the Indian Moghal Emperors (Kabul was his favourite city). The C-shaped building in the right middle-distance is Habibia Boys High School. Further away and hidden under the smog is the Russian Embassy and Darulaman Palace.
@Lee – You like Disney films too? How about musicals?
Gilbert and Sullivan for you buddy?
It was for our clients. Iraq is tribal, and the Marsh Arabs probably with the most pronounced tribal areas and customs. You don’t just go in there and build an electricity powerline through their territory without offering them friendship and financial incentives. Saddam screwed these people for decades, so they were pretty suspicious of us being there initially.
The clients asked our company to deal with befriending the locals and gave us funding to set up the team, which was just me and a mate and an Iraqi team of drivers, ‘terps and shooters for CP. My old mate was a lot more experienced than me and being an ex-schoolteacher had a way with people, I concentrated on the security of our small team and the movements we made into completely new areas. I had to liaise with our boss to get extra CP cover in dodgy areas, hence why there’s more than two white faces in some of the photos of us out doing the job.
So, we paid each of the shiekhs along the route of the powerline with client money to provide their own village men as guards and some local labour was also used to help with the build, although most were subsistence farmers and unskilled in electrical construction. The actual nuts and bolts of building the thing was the task for both a Turkish (starting from the north at Kut) and an Indian (south from Basra) company. The Turks were fast and efficient, the Indians…well, were Indian; two Indian workers died falling off pylons as their harnesses weren’t being used. There were accidents galore, I was doing a lot of first aid patching up split heads and mangled fingers.
Some locals, being Iraqis i.e. extremely racist, didn’t like the fact there were Indians doing jobs they thought they could do (they couldn’t), so we had to liaise with local shiekhs, our clients (an American company) and the Indians to settle the situation. A lot of it was nothing to do with with PSC type work. A compromise was reached using locals with angle-grinders and labourers to clear away the old powerline debris. Our clients also hired local cranes when they weren’t that necessary.
Crowds of locals would turn up every day with an assortment of power tools after that, looking for work. Again, to keep the peace I gave out the odd bit of rudimentary medical care to injured workers and plenty of food to the hordes of kids at every site, we supplied water but had to guard it too. It was all very jovial, but there was real desperation for work too, so it could have changed in an instant, or perhaps that was my eternal security brain overreacting. I never let my guard down and the cars were always within 50m in case it turned ugly – but it never did, so I guess we did a good job. In fact it worked perfectly, we didn’t have one security incident in the 6-7 months we spent there.
The project TFRIE (Task Force Restore Iraq Electricity) from Basra to Kut was the first large reconstruction project to be finished after the initial war ended, and Bush even mentoned that fact in one of his White House addresses on Iraq in the early days.
The only bad part was once the project was finished and the 400KV line was up and running from Hartha (north Basra) up to Baghdad, we had to hand over the security of the line to the nascent Iraqi government (under the aegis of the CPA) and the EPSS (Electricity Police), who promptly got rid of the local work and settled into the corrupt regime typical of the place.
The shiekh liaison team moved onto the next TRFRIE project in our area from Rumailah to Nasiriyah, the photo above is from that time, but after that was wrapped up in late 2004 the team was disbanded. It was a pity because it was a cool time driving out into the wilderness, and relatively safe work. I moved briefly back to the CP teams in Basra, then onto “Operation Certain Death” on the convoys in Baghdad.
@flipflop wrote:
If anyone can recommend a compact digital (not SLR) which can go wide angle below 18mm I’d be very much obliged to know who makes them.
Was reading about the Lumix GF1 which goes to 20mm – widest I have heard of in compacts. It has interchangable lenses too (they’re going after the market that lies between compact users and DSLR users).
But it ain’t cheap. $900
I bought one….. :oops:
I’m hiding it from the missus as I play around with it (that sounds wrong I know, but I love my gadgets). I bought it with two lenses, but still waiting out on delivery of the 20mm pancake. Fooking nice little camera, I am in there at Oldham this saturday for the match.
:P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P
There’s an adaptor so you can fit most Four Thirds lenses, kind of makes the thing look unbalanced, but gives you the same range as any DSLR. Cosmic.
Anyway, back to the old amateur snapshots, I’ve hundreds left.
Croc country – Hidden Valley (Mirima) National Park, Kununurra, Northern Territory, Australia, 27th February 2007
Hey, a cheap way to mess around with Filters is Ebay.
I picked up a brand new UV filter for $3 last month. It wasn’t the greatest quality, obviously, but it lets you play around for cheap and see if you like the effects enough to upgrade to better quality filters. I also got a polariser for $12.
People look down their nose at cheap stuff, but they’re wankers. The WORST lens and filter you can buy today is better than anything Ansel Adams or Max Dupain ever worked with.
Fuck I buy everything from gadgets to clothes on the bay of dread. There’s a specialist little camera shop in Brighton run by a couple of nerdy but nice photo junkies, they have everything at bog cheap prices – I bought virtually all my film camera stuff there – 2 x Pentax K1000, and my favourite Canon AT-1 and a ton of lenses & accessories. They stock second-hand DSLR, but they’ve yet to catch up with the leading curve of the digital age, but just going there and seeing their stuff is wicked. Best thing is what’s inside their heads, you can ask these guys anything about the stuff and they’ll have an answer – photographic memories (hooot).
The lenses that come with this new camera haven’t much in the way of filters etc yet, but I’ll probably buy the adaptor for the bigger lenses and see what’s about. I also found a tutorial online that lets you “cheat” the effects of ND Grad filters on photoshop.
Here y’are: http://www.photoradar.com/techniques/video/how-to-fake-a-graduated-nd-filter
At the foot of Franz Josef Glacier, South Island, New Zealand, 4th May 2007
@_JohnnyF_ wrote:
what does the writing say? can anyone translate?
1. Lamb Doner – SML £3.80 LRG £4.80 X-LRG £5.80
2. Chicken Doner – SML £3.80 LRG £4.80 X-LRG £5.80
3. Lamb Shish – SML £4.00 LRG £6.00 X-LRG £7.50
4. Chicken Shish – SML £4.00 LRG £6.00 X-LRG £8.00
8. Mixed Kebab – £8.00
9. Moqtada’s Kofte Special – 72 virgins
@flipflop wrote:
@_JohnnyF_ wrote:
what does the writing say? can anyone translate?
1. Lamb Doner – SML £3.80 LRG £4.80 X-LRG £5.80
2. Chicken Doner – SML £3.80 LRG £4.80 X-LRG £5.80
3. Lamb Shish – SML £4.00 LRG £6.00 X-LRG £7.50
4. Chicken Shish – SML £4.00 LRG £6.00 X-LRG £8.00
8. Mixed Kebab – £8.00
9. Moqtada’s Kofte Special – 72 virgins
I don’t want to know what kind of spices mix the Kofte is made of :)
@flipflop wrote:
Band-e-Amir, Hazarajat, Central Afghanistan, 8th October 2008
you could film westerns there :D
Strange place – big Han Chinese glass and concrete city in the middle of some of the remotest desert in the world. Loads of mobile phone toting Chinese suits cheek ‘n’ jowl with traditional Uighurs and their hand carts. Kashgar and Turpan were better – at least they had some old town and culture left. Urumqi is worth the visit for the overland journey alone though.
Port of Bridgetown, Barbados, 5th December 2008. My wife’s cousin is an engineer on the cruise liners – he was in dock while we were holidaying on the island so we got to see around the tub, the engine rooms are fucking amazing, and this was the view from one of the bar decks. It ain’t all about slumming it rat fans!
I’d prefer to travel, but nowadays I’m pretty much a homeboy – two excellent reasons for that: starting a family very soon & hopefully hitting uni next year for a full-time masters degree.
I don’t miss the dangerous stuff at all, at this point in my life I have no interest in returning to it, although I can walk back into my old job and the financial incentive will always be there :evil:
The Bell Tower, Xian, China, 2nd November 2006
I downloaded a free app on my HTC Wildfire phone and tried it out while down on Hove seafront last week. It’s called ‘FxCamera’ and I shot these on the ‘ToyCam’ mode, which is supposed to emulate a toy camera, whatever that is. It’s android’s answer to the (better IMO) iPhone’s hipstamatic app.
The camera on my HTC is shite, much as you’d expect with a camera phone, but I love the look of phots on this app. I’ll be mucking about with this all the time now
Band-e-Amir lake, central Afghanistan, 8th October 2008
Umm Qasr, Southern Iraq, 9th September 2005. The view from the back in low profile modus operandi, to the guys on this checkpoint we should be just another local car going about its business. That was the plan anyway, but it was a double-edged sword in execution. On one hand you sail through most C/Ps without much hassle, but when the shit hit the fan, as it often did, you might look like a hostile, and you’re in soft skin. Still, I preferred this way of doing it to the high profile armoured/aggressive method.
Pleasure cruisers for the tourists at Milford Sound, South Island, New Zealand, 8th May 2007
The Chini Bagh Hotel restaurant, Kashgar, Xinjiang, China, 29th September 2006. ‘Chini Bagh’ means Chinese Garden, and this building was one of the most far flung and exotic outposts of the Great Game. It is the old British Consulate, and the former Russian Consulate was up the road aways and is a hotel now itself (the name escapes me). Inside is your typical British Colonial decor, plaster corniches everywhere, a lovely old place it is.
The old town of Kashgar is full of old alleyways and dark passages, you could just imagine Her Majesty’s agents in mufti scurrying about the place dodging hairy-arsed Russian spies; then you enter into the bright, prosaic light of modern, Han Chinese Kashi, and the magic disappears in Soviet-era ‘architecture’ quicker than you can say “Red Guards”. Go before the rest of it disappears.
@flipflop wrote:
Port Suez, Egypt, 27th December 2010
Way cool guv. How did you land a job on a ship?
The Drum Tower, Xian, China, 2nd November 2006
Some phots from my last transit – March 2011. Nae botha, but a non-secured tanker got attacked 9NM behind us one evening when we were near Oman. A Turkish warship picked up the mayday call and deployed a helo, which fired warning shots and the pirates did one. We saw nothing of it, as it was as black as a witch’s tit out there, but listening in to a terrified watch officer begging for help on the radio was eye-opening.
Cheers
Some do, some don’t. It can work both ways, you can spook other vessels if you sail without lights or AIS, and if they’re a coalition warship then it can be twitchy.
The coalition etc don’t recommend it, there are so many pirate mother ships in the IO now that you could easily get mistaken for one.
It makes star-gazing easier mind :wink:
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