In 2003, I spent a year living in Byron Bay, Australia. I had a student visa as I was taking a 9-month yoga teacher training course with Yoga Arts. I had not been back to Australia since then, so it was an incredible treat to spend a few days in Byron Bay recently.

It’s amazing how much we forget and how revisiting a place triggers memories. I’d say that the same happens with photographs. They have the power to elicit memories and details that we store in the back of our brains. Walking down Johnson street down to the beach, all sorts of memories resurfaced and it was incredibly inspiring to see this beautiful place where I use to live.

I am thinking that a trip to Australia is not complete without the sighting of at least one of their crazy indigenous marsupials. I was taken a much needed break from all the stairs on the path along Byron Bay’s waterfront in the Arakwal National Park when I heard a stirring to my left. It was totally serendipitous to stop where I did, right next to a wallaby!

This is the view as you walk down to the main beach in Byron Bay first thing the morning. The headlands, topped with the Byron Bay lighthouse, are part of what makes this place so incredibly scenic.

A morning walk along the beach and around the headlands leads me to the Easternmost point of Australia.

I am normally annoyed by graffiti. But I quite liked this drawing in the public bathrooms across the street from Fundies!

I’ve decided that it’s good to have a few loooong term projects. One is a collection of photos of dogs from around the world. Say hello to this Aussie terrier.

The view of Tallows Beach from the light house.

Fresh juice + Good design + Red = Leigh Loves

Ahhhh… New Zealand! I feel like I know so little about you. I totally ended up here on a whim, purchasing a last minute ticket from Australia to New Zealand about a month ago when I realized I could fly here for less than $250 round trip. I practically played “pin the plane on New Zealand” and picked Christchurch on a whim as a base for 4.5 days.

Eager to explore the South Island, I booked a trip to explore Banks Peninsula and the town of Akaroa. Banks Peninsula was formed millions of years ago by three huge volcanic eruptions. The result is a landmass with hundreds of fingerling bays and indented coastline.

The township of Akaroa was much sleepier than I’d imagined. Perhaps that is because whale watching, swimming with the dolphins, kayaking and any other water sport if very popular here, thus everyone was out on the water. Regardless, it was a cute spot to wander for a few hours and enjoy a book by the seaside.

This is a view over the Banks Peninsula and in one of those bays is the town of Akaroa.

The streets are dotted with cute little cottages and colorful front gardens.

Take a breath, stop for a while, read a book under this tree.

Who doesn’t love a crazy pink car?

I have other photos I took in Sydney on my one day power tour there last week, but this one pretty much sums it up…

1) It was a super gorgeous, hot and sunny day.

and

2) I did mostly touristy things such as: the Opera House, tinkering around the super cute stores and cafes at The Rocks, and shopping on George Street.

I also took the ferry to Manly beach and ate a “salad sandwich” beachside. Salad sandwiches are one of the things I’ve missed most about Australia. It’s a vege sandwich, yes… simple…no big deal, BUT! It has beets on it. Sounds gross, I know,  but they are delicious on a sandwich. They even put them on there burgers here, so this isn’t just a vegetarian thing.When I get around to making an international cookbook, this will definitely be in there!

I was only in Sydney for a day as I have turned this two week trip to Australia to photograph the gorgeous Katie’s wedding next weekend into a power sight-seeing trip. I can’t wait to get to Newcastle to see Katie and her fiancee Nick, but I’ve got a couple more stops to go…

When booking my ticket to Sydney last August, I purposefully decided to buy the one that had a 15 hour layover in Hong Kong coming and going, not because it was the cheapest, but because I love Asian stop-overs on long distance flights. Or rather, I love Asia.

I’d been to Hong Kong once before, en-route Bangkok back to the States and I knew it was an easy immigration (ie: no advanced visa needed) and a relatively quick train ride into the heart of the city, thus I was sold.

Unfortunately, my layover occurred mostly in the overnight hours, 7pm-10am, so I was a bit limited on how much of Hong Kong I could enjoy before it got too late for a girl with a camera to be trolling the streets safely. Thus, many of these photos are pretty tame and from around a mall and hotel area I visited. But they’ll give you a little insight into the very Chinese, yet Anglicized, Hong Kong.

I found it funny that seemingly EVERYTHING has a label with how often it is sanitized. The elevator buttons- every two hours. Bathrooms-constantly. They take pride in their stickers and public service announcements warning of H1N1 and the like.

High rises and clean architecture has been all I’ve seen so far.

Taxis outside of the W Hong Kong Hotel. They look a lot like the taxis in Japan.

Eat this, not that: I found this interestingly flavored bread and decided to pass on it. Bacon and Squid Ink? Hmmm?

I’ve been reminiscing lately as I go through old photos that I have on my computer from travels I’ve made before moving to Charleston, SC. Today’s feature… India! Actually, I think I was inspired to look at these photos after finding Seshu‘s mother-in-law’s recipe for Masala Chai on his website, tiffinbox.org. It sounds delicious!!!

I’ve traveled to India twice. The first time I was there for a month and attended the Maha Kumbh Mela festival, one of the largest gatherings of humanity ever. It was overwhelming an experience of a lifetime. The second time I visited India was in the interim between spending a year living and studying yoga in Australia and moving to Charleston.

This is one of my all time favorite photos from India. In fact, it is currently on display in the new studio. It makes me smile as I remember the family clamoring together for a photograph and they were so excited about it.

Kerala is an anomaly in India. this state has an incredibly high literacy rate, a wealth of Christians, freely elected Communism at times and is home to India’s only synagogue. Salman Rushdie’s book, Midnight’s Children, takes place here.

This sadhu performs religious sacrifices to his own body in exchange for alms. He lies on a bed of thorns and has limes sewn to his body. Ouch.

Ah, to explore the labyrinth of Varanasi again….

The Maha Kumbh Mela is a massive Hindu event held on an auspicious date every 12 years. On certain dates, bathing in the confluence of the Jamuna, Saraswati and Ganges river will cleans your karma and restore you to a clean slate. This is looking down on the crowd of 12+ million on the main bathing date.

Here’s the recipe for Masala Chai from Seshu’s, tiffinbox.org

(This recipe is copied and pasted directly from his blog)

My mother-in-law, Saraswathi, is visiting us over the weekend. So I asked her to write down her recipe to make two cups of masala chai.

Ingredients:

2 cups of Water
1 cup of either 1% or 2% milk
2 table spoons of loose or Powdered tea leaves (Darjeeling/Assam/Sri Lankan work)
1/4 table spoon of ginger or ginger powder
1/4 table spoon of black pepper
2 small sticks of cardamom
Sugar (to taste)

Boil 2 cups of water with one cup of milk
Add 2 table spoons of the tea leaves
Add the ginger, the black pepper and cardamom
Boil & Stir for 10 minutes (the tea should turn to a shade of rusty brown)
Pour the tea into a vessel using a strainer

Put the remaining tea leaves in a vessel, add a little water and boil again. Go ahead and strain this as well and add it to the original mix (this makes it nice and strong).

Sweeten your cup up to taste and enjoy!

I’m channelling my inner Mapplethorpe. (In flower photography only, not all the other interesting aspects of his life.)

Question: Which do you like better… color or b&w?

For anyone who knows me, you know that travel is part of my identity. It started innocently, with trips around the 48 continental US states with my family growing up and at some point it turned into an international obsession. I took the rite of passage trip to Europe after college, with a backpack and Eurorail pass in tow. Over the new millennium, I traveled through the Middle East and experienced Ramadan, Christmas and Hanukkah, right in the heartland of each of these religions. This was back when Bin Laden was still in his planning stages and I was blissfully unaware. I think the defining trip that changed things for me was a 3-month trip to India and SE Asia, where a friend and I had obtained sponsorship from Nikon and were hired to write about traveling with a digital camera, which was new stuff back in 2001!

For me, foreign travel is like being on a sabbatical, where my sole focus is to take in the sights and culture and to document my journey with photos and words. Being focused on capturing and processing the experience as I go is incredibly invigorating. Leaving behind the cell phone and day-to-day worries and insignificances is the icing on the cake.

This is a long introduction to say that I am reminiscing about my trip to SE Asia, a year ago this time. My original plan was to meet up with Ida Becker and her U Truth Project. When at the last minute, that didn’t work out, I found myself with a plane ticket, plans made and an opportunity to travel solo for 3 weeks. I took it. It was the longest time I’d ever spent traveling alone and it became very introspective to say the least as 2009 had been a defining year in many aspects of my life.

I recently read about Vicente Wolf, a modern designer, photographer and traveler, who takes 7 weeks during December/January to travel each year. It’s a slower time for his business and he uses the time and travel to be reinvigorated, explore and refresh those creative juices. I love that! I want to make travel an annual recalibration process for me. There’s nothing like 3 weeks of being alone in foreign countries to get back to the roots of who you really are.

Looking back on my photos, I am reminded once again of their power to bring back a flood of memories. I was so incredibly wired when we landed in Tokyo, where a missed connection meant I got to stay there for the night. I wanted to see and do as much as I could in my less than 24 hours there: take photographs, eat sushi, exchange dollars for yen, scour the 7/11 for crazy foods and packaging. I was on a creative high and I couldn’t sleep.

This is one of my favorite photos from my brief time in Japan. Japan was very clean and direct, just like this photo.

Cliche shot from the plane? Perhaps, but it’s also very iconic to me. We’d just flown past Mt. Fuji.

Just looking at this gets me excited thinking about all the possible places to go.

This is a kind of a depressing shot of my hotel room in Narita, Japan, but it reminds me of exactly how I felt. Up in the middle of the night, 3am and can’t sleep, excited but also a little lonely as I had no one to share it with.

I got a fresh batch of Moab Entrada 17×22 paper in recently. It is my favorite paper to print on. It’s a matte, heavyweight (300g) paper and you can print on both sides, if you want to cut it up and make postcards or something like that. I love this paper as it allows for great color saturation and I’ve got my Epson 4000 & Mac calibrated to print on it beautifully! (I also happen to love Moab, Utah, which I always think of when I use this paper.)

In the studio, I have a couple of wire lines that I use to hang my prints up, kind of like how you hang the washing on a line. Having some of my favorite shots printed and hung was a bit of an eye-opener for me. I instantly recognized that I had a certain aesthetic, which I’ll talk about in a future post.

What having a fresh pack of paper to print on caused me to do was to go through my photos to see what I’d like to print. There are some shots from a recent bridal portrait session I was really excited about and then there were my photos from my trip to SE Asia that I took last December that I decided to peruse. I have yet to do much with these photos, in terms of printing them, showing them off, blasting slides hows of them all over my iPhone, Facebook page, etc. There’s part of me that feels badly that I haven’t done much with them, until now.

It goes back to the post on editing that I wrote a few weeks back, about how time makes you view your photos differently. Nine months on, I look back on these photos and I can almost feel exactly what I felt when I took them. I skipped quickly through some shots from Hanoi, as my experience there was gray, dreary and I was all alone at Christmas time. Blah. But the shots from Luang Prabang, Laos, I love! Seeing as I have already posted photos from Laos here and here, I wanted to put up a few different shots for today. Enjoy!