On a slightly different note, shooting dogs!

Me and my friend Ricardo Oliveira had been thinking this for some time but only now we had the opportunity to take his award winning Saluki dogs for some photos. The plan was quite simple and obvious, putting the dogs doing what they do best: running, and because it’s a desert breed having the dogs running at big sand dunes seemed a setting way too perfect miss, allowing me to get out my comfort zone and practice some fast moving subjects.

In the end everyone was happy and all of us had a great time!

• Daxlore Salukis
  

2012 has started (almost a month ago, I know) and with a new year there’s new, interesting projects. Some are still incubating in my mind or are being planned as I a write this (more on this in the near future), but others already alive and kicking.

Those who follow my social streams more closely may have noticed that I have a project running since the first day of the year: a project 366 (in a regular year would be a project 365), taking a photo a day, every day of the year. I decided to repeat my 2009 project, but this time in slightly different terms, now the rules are:

1. Only mobile photos! 2009′s project was taken with any camera I had, this year I’ll be making things a bit harder and only snapshots are allowed. This has already led me to funny situations where I have a couple of DSLR’s hanging on my shoulders but I’m taking a snapshot with my phone.
2. This time won’t be available entirely on my Flickr account, what I learned from the 2009 project is that it adds too much noise to your photo stream. Since it’s a mobile driven project the perfect place for it is my snapshots photoblog at  Tumblr, you can find the project photos under the #project366 tag. Some of its photos may end up at my Flickr photostream and I’m some blog posts with some of my favorite stuff of the project may appear on a non regular basis.

I honestly don’t know why it took me two years to repeat this, a photo project is a great way to add discipline to your photography and create a sense of mission, but probably Rita‘s last year project got me excited to repeat mine this year. I also be be doing some smaller sub-projects throughout the year, like weekly or monthly theme projects, Rita had the “Heart Friday” but that’s too girly for me.

Have you started or are about to start your own photo project for 2012? Share it here! My friend Nuno has started his own project at his G+ account.

Related articles

• Project 365/2011 (Andar de Levante)
• Project 365/2012 (Andar de Levante)
• Picking a picture project for 2012 (Pixiq)
• Ten cool photography projects for 2012 (Pixiq)

Apparently it makes little sense to end my Myanmar posts with the Burmese word for hello, it makes more sense to close the series with the memories that will last longer. Not the temples or monasteries, not the rural landscapes or busy cities but having people saying hello every 5 minutes, or even less. Having people genuinely curious about you, mostly without any second intentions to sell whatsoever. Genuinely willing to so show you and share their country with you.

And smiling, always smiling, a smile that warms you inside.

“Mingalaba” is the first word word a foreigner learns, usually the only one, and learns it quickly, by listening repeatedly right from day one and always followed with a big smile. It doesn’t take long for a serious European get in the spirit and announce himself with a cheerful hello (a quite useful technique for street photography).

I enjoyed almost all places I been throughout the years, but I hope to say “Mingalaba!” once again sometime in the future.

Don’t forget to browse the gallery with all Myanmar photos and the other posts of this series.

Although you can easily find Hindu temples or Muslim mosques the religion drives that part of Asia is Buddhism, being the chosen faith of nearly 90% of the Burmese people. And you can find it everywhere: from majestic temples, Buddha statues and pagodas scattered through the landscape.

Like the gold and red arches of Mahamuni Temple at Mandalay, along with Shwedagon and the Golden Rock one of the three . Or the many, many other less important or less impressive places found elsewhere.

Don’t forget to check the rest of my Myanmar posts or browse all the Myanmar photos.

New year, new photos, new projects. Time also to put the past year in perspective, and with that in mind comes the obvious compilation of my 2011 work, in my case this ain’t exactly a “best of” or a “personal favorites” post, is something in between, some of the photos that represent something in the past year: for being the best, the most popular or just have a cool story behind.

Myanmar

Photographically speaking 2011 was a great year with a clear best moment: having been almost a month at Myanmar in a very intense trip almost exclusively around photography, but also with other smaller trips and smaller things just around the corner.

But although Myanmar was only about monks was certainly mostly about people. It’s a paradise for street photography: and exotic and colorful country, huge cultural diversity (you can see Myanmar as the country where China meets India) and one of the warmest and kindest peoples of the world.

Ireland

My other trip of the year outside Portugal and Spain, when you go 22 days to Myanmar and 9 to Ireland there aren’t much vacation days left to travel.

Ireland was a kind if trip I love: road trip with nothing more than our car and the roads to drive, and there are few roads more beautiful to drive than an road along Ireland’s rugged west coast. I have a soft spot for dramatic coastlines.

At home

All of the action throughout the year happened at home, in my home town or in short trips at Portugal or Spain. And that’s perfectly OK, Lisbon is one of the most photogenic cities in the world and Portugal and Spain have a huge variety of landscapes and sceneries to choose, from lost stone villages in snowy mountains to dry Mediterranean plains.

One of the most rewarding moments was following my family harvesting wine grapes, shooting them while I wasn’t  carrying big buckets full of grapes.

As the posting schedule of my Burma photos was approaching the Christmas season it started to become obvious in my head that I had to do a children’s post for Christmas day!

One of the best things of leaving the “western world” and traveling to developing countries is that people don’t frown upon to people with a camera. Photographers aren’t  terrorists or sexual offenders, but just regular people. Maybe not regular people, because everyone’s so curious about you, but kids get even more than adults, first innocently looking as if you’re some kind of alien and then, sometimes in large groups, surrounding you with such excitement and frenzy that it’s almost impossible to take a picture with everyone trying reach the front spot. And if a child is too small to stand in front of the camera there’s always a grown up with a helping hand to carry them, as adults aren’t that different from kids.

In the end everyone end up his picture taken and, in what probably is the best thing in street photography, happy as the photos are shared with the temporary models.

Check the rest of the photos in my Myanmar album and the other posts of this series.

Despite having large cities like Yangon or Mandalay, Myanmar still is a very rural country where half of it’s population works on agriculture or fishing. So it’s no wonder that even in the most visited places people still managed to do their best at getting the most of of what Earth has to give. Either plowing the fields oustide one of the many temples of Bagan or fishing at Inle lake, life goes on regardless tourists and travellers nearby.

Browse all the photos in the Myanmar album and the rest of this series.

I’m not a full time photographer (yet…), on regular workdays I’m an IT consultant and one of my favorite buzzwords has to be kaizen, a japanese term that roughly means constant improvement.
My plan for my site, and this blog, never was to see it as a finished work, I would rather regularly adjust both to my needs through time. Some of those changes were released silently in the last months, while others are worthy of some kind of announcement.

Two of the central areas of my site never pleased me completely and finally I made them closer to what I want:
Galleries were confusing, not intuitive. I made them more simple, minimalist, with a simple navigation and much closer to the look of the rest of the site. Gone are the thumbnail bar and the lightbox, now there’s a thumbnail and fullscreen options, that made the galleries look less gallery-ish and more presentation-ish, closer to what I want that part of the site to be: a showcase of my work. More important than the new look is having a completely new set of photos to look at or, finally, being able to buy stuff.
Archive was also confusing so I tried to tweak the navigation and layout to make navigation much easier and finally be one of the key parts of this site, along with Gallery and this blog.

Obviously the plans don’t end here, I’ll try to have closer integration between Archive and this blog, regularly update the Galleries and much more. But for now back to what’s really important: photos!

What have I been doing lately? Besides processing a large batch of Myanmar photos, being part of global change protests or just going back to the countryside?

Not much, just the return to the routine, to everyday’s life. But meanwhile I seize every opportunity for some street shooting.

I love “scape photography”: landscape, cityscape or seascape photography! Some places absolutely overwhelm you just for being there, and you can stand and look for hours.

But the thing is Myanmar it’s all about people, capturing close portraits and subtle moments of people in their everyday life, young and old. There’s no way the mind can be diverted to scenery, there’s too much going on at eye level. But for everything there’s always an exception, and at Myanmar the exception is called Bagan.

Bagan was the Burmese capital between from the 9th  century until the Mongol invasion in the end of 13th century, when slowly came it’s decline. What’s makes it so special? Like all Burmese towns of that time, and still some smaller villages today, all construction is made of wood, from the most humble house to the royal palaces. All but religious buildings, the only ones made with stone or bricks and the only ones that survived throughout the centuries. And what you get to day is a surreal landscape, a vast plain with trees and farmlands scattered with pagodas, more than two thousand, roughly half of the five thousand that once existed here.

Nothing beats climbing one of the many pagodas and enjoy what use to be the capital of an empire.

Browse all Myanmar photos here!