The sound of footsteps and hiking poles making pockmarks in the dirt mixed with the chatter from the group that had just completed a 17.2 km. (10.7 mile) hike up into the Andes mountains. Congratulations were in order for another successful hike, except this was no ordinary mountaineering group. Seven of them cannot see.

In Santiago, Chile, a metropolis of 7.2 million people that sprawls out on the foothills of the Andes, there are plenty of mountaineering and hiking clubs that seek the joy of mountain trails. But one group, coordinated by the local Fight Against Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation (FUNDALURP in Spanish), provides an outlet for those who suffer from this group of genetic eye conditions that leads to incurable blindness.

The system used to guide the visually impaired consists of using a hiking pole held on one end by the guide in front and on the other end by the blind hiker. The guide must go along giving instructions about how to walk over obstacles as well as well as describe the scenery around them.

Daniela Carrasco is the  young, athletic and energetic law student that serves as the vice president to the foundation as well as coordinator of the group’s outings.  The group began last year and thanks in part to their Facebook page, have attracted more members for their monthly excursions.

Last weekend, I had the pleasure to meet Daniela and to accompany the group on a hike to the Waterfall of Apoquindo, traversing the natural park Aguas de Ramon. I’ve done the trek twice before and know the route requires a good dose of endurance to follow the winding trail to its refreshing end. The ten-hour hike involved crossing two streams and some dangerously inclined slopes, slippery from a lack of trail maintenance. The essential spirit of mountaineering shone through in the smiles, laughter and a profound sense of fun, all set to the backdrop of native peumo forests, beautiful blue skies and refreshing mountain air.

Although I didn’t guide anyone because I wanted to see how the system works, I am committed to go out with the group again and offer any assistance I can. The wonderful sensations of being in the mountains is for everyone and this group proves that not even a rocky trail is an obstacle for the visually impaired. Never underestimate the determination of the human spirit.

La Campana National Park is one such refuge, filled with trails, and situated at a mere two hours from Santiago. The park lies within the coastal mountain range and one can retrace the footsteps of Charles Darwin, who in 1834 visited the summit of Cerro La Campana from where  awe-inspiring panoramic vistas stretch from the Andes to the ocean. One side of La Campana also houses spectacular reserves of Chilean Wine Palm forests, some of the last palm forests of this threatened species.

This past weekend, I went with my girlfriend and some friends on a camping trip to La Campana. Aside from the a little rest & recreation from the concrete jungle, one of my objectives was to experience, learn about and explore the park’s vistas and photographic opportunities. It was a sort of scouting mission to figure out how and what to do on subsequent multi-day backpacking trips. After a two-hour bus ride from Santiago to Olmué, we arrived mid-afternoon at the Granizo sector from where the 7km. (4.35m) trail to the summit of Cerro La Campana begins. We pitched the tents and made camp, followed by a leisurely stroll through a nearby trail.

We woke up at 5am to get an early start on the trail, to elude the hottest hours of the day where temperatures easily reach 35°C (95°F) at midday. We left basecamp at 6am and began the progressively steep ascent, passing through the misty clouds that roll in from the Pacific Ocean and cover up the nearby towns’ skies.  Once we were high enough, we took in the spectacular views of the cloud-covered valleys on our way to the base of the rocky bell that gives the mountain its name. We arrived at the summit near 1pm and aside from the crass amount of graffiti covering almost every rocky surface in view, the panoramic vista was well worth the hike.  Definitely heading back to do more photographic work in that area.

What surprised me the most was how fast it took the top five runners to run through the city streets of smoggy Santiago. Leslie Encina came in first with 29:57 while the woman’s winner was renown Chilean marathon runner Erika Olivera came in at 34:17.  Olivera, gold medalist in the 1999 Pan American Games, commented that the timing for the event was inconvenient since 5pm is still quite warm and the pollution is worse than in the mornings, when marathons are usually run.

Regardless, a good time was had by the crowd, despite complaints from motorists about detours in traffic.  Here’s a selection of photos from the event:

Though his visit in Chile lasted only one full day and two half-days, the organizers of his visit jam-packed his schedule to take advantage of the presence of this global leader of the Society of Jesus. This meant visits to all the organizations founded and run by Jesuits, such as Un Techo Para Chile (a Habitat for Humanity-style NGO), Infocap (a community college for workers), and Hogar de Cristo (a shelter for various marginalized groups), all of which are pretty well-known institutions in their own right in Chile.

He gave various lectures throughout his visit and being originally from Spain, the public was able to relate to him on an intimate level without the need of a translator as often happens with most other global leaders. Interesting for me, however, was his experience of having spent over 40 years of his life in Asia, mostly living in Japan. Living among East Asian cultures left such an influence on the Superior General that he quoted Buddhist and even Sufi texts and poems in his talks.

Photographing the Superior General was interesting because I’d been told specifically to not be aggressive and paparazzi-like in creating the images. I was to give him a good amount of breathing space and be as respectful as possible, for the older guard of Jesuit priests might not like the official photographer firing off flash as if he were a rock star. In any case, I stayed at a good distance and used available light almost all the time that I spent photographing him.

Below, I’ve posted a brief selection of images, many of which will be appearing in the internal Chilean Jesuit magazine as well as jesuitas.cl.

As subtle as it may seem to the untrained eye, wildlife management is quite interesting once you learn to read the landscape and see where the work is being done. Entabeni employs Leonard Bruyns, an ecologist, to perform such tasks as transitioning fields of bankrupt bush to fields of edible grass for the various herbivores that live on the land. Bankrupt bush or slangbos (Seriphium plumosum), so called because of its difficulty in eradication thus scaring farmers for bankruptcy, is a stubborn plant that no animal will touch. Leonard is in the process of experimenting with various methods to get rid of it, ranging from the use of expensive and cheap pesticides, to placing salt licks for herbivores to trample it, to controlled burns and even manual removal of bankrupt bush and root systems. Obviously, the idea is to find the right balance between cost and efficiency.

However, the most pressing problem for Entabeni is the constant danger of poaching — of flora and fauna alike — and adopting security measures to prevent this from happening. Early on in the course, everyone was alerted to be on the lookout for unidentified aircraft, usually helicopters that may fly overhead. Since Entabeni features a luxurious golf course with a helicopter service, we quickly learned how to identify this local helicopter that occasionally flew by. But at any given time, the thump-thump sounds of distant helicopters caused us to perk up our ears and almost literally drop what we were doing to attempt to catch a glimpse of the aircraft.

Photo by Glenn Fleishman via Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/glennf/20342176

Most people associate poaching with large exotic game animals though there also exists poaching of plants, as well seen and felt in Entabeni, where the very rare Eugene Maris cycads faces constant threat of being cut down and smuggled away. The cycad is a group of plants whose ancestors date back to at least 250 million years and many of the world’s species of cycads are under serious threat of extinction. Unfortunately, we were only able to see a few cycads from afar with the class, so I have no pictures of these magnificent plants.

Meanwhile, rhinoceros poaching in southern Africa is a definite and real problem that has recently been on the rise lately after a time of relative submission. At the time of this writing, 209 rhinoceros have been killed in South Africa this year alone in the name of stealing the horn which is exceedingly valuable in its principal market of China for supposed medicinal and ritual uses. In neighboring Botswana, the current president Ian Khama and his father Seretse Khama, the ex-president, have long had a passion for conservation and have thus employed the military in all-out war against the illegal poaching of wildlife. Through the Botswana Defense Force, poaching has decreased, unlike in South Africa, where anti-poaching units are only part of a small solution to a much bigger problem. Conflicting legislature in South Africa also permits poachers to find legal loopholes in everything from legitimate hunting and purchase of wildlife to using diplomatic immunity as a way of smuggling out exotic wildlife.

Thus, there are a variety of anti-poaching methods including de-horning rhinos and publicizing it so that potential poachers will know it’s not worth it as well as hiring anti-poaching units and even the most basic option of just not having rhinos. As hard to believe as it may be, even de-horned rhinos have been poached, just to get that last bit of horn, revealing just how desperate the poaching industry is to attain them. Legally, anti-poaching units must present evidence of poaching activity if they find a poacher. What’s surprising is that the poacher cannot be shot or killed on site, as in countries like Kenya.

Unfortunately, the poaching business is also a dirty trade for the poachers on the ground, since many of them are paid a mere fraction of what the horn is valued on the market and most of them accept this easy money because they have families to support and children to feed. The middlemen and the bosses are the key players in this illicit trade, though as long as they can send out dispensable men to the field, taking them out proves to be almost impossible.

As you may be able to tell, I’m quite interested in this topic and have begun research for use in future photojournalistic endeavors. I believe it’s a story that needs to be told and gotten out to the public. If every country in Africa that houses rhinos needs to have a hard-handed military approach like Botswana, I’d be for it.

Rhinos quickly became my favorite animal after spending time in the bush with these majestic animals. And after watching a presentation on poaching with graphic images of dead rhinos lying in pools of blood and orphaned baby rhinos standing next to their dead mothers, I felt a strong call to know more about this topic and see where I could contribute to the cause of saving these threatened animals.  I don’t want these wonderful beasts to meet the same fate of so many other animals that have met extinction. I don’t want the children of future generations to ask, “Daddy, what were rhinos like?”

I flew out from Santiago, passed through Brazil, and arrived in Johannesburg roughly 10 hours before the group of thirteen students and my dad joined me at a hostel near the airport. This was my first trip out of the Americas and into Africa, flying to the other side of the pond, Southern Hemisphere-style. I’d been trying to get up to speed on the region, from daily readings of the Mail and Guardian newspaper to watching any films about South African history, culture or science that I could get my hands on.

Though I was arriving at 7am and would have to wait all day for the rendezvous with the group, I was “fortunate” enough to have South African Airways lose my luggage and buy me some time while speaking with the lost baggage department to figure out how to recuperate it. At least all I had lost was clothes and some non-essentials since I always fly with my photography and computer equipment in carry-on.  After a brief conversation with the lost luggage people, they assured me that it was probably just placed in transit to another destination; they would find it within a few hours and then bring it out to my hostel in the afternoon, which they did.

I went to the hostel, ate lunch, and did some research online before laying down for a brief nap. The next moment, I hear my dad’s voice and realize that I’d taken much more than a quick power nap, as my alarm clock had gone off and I hadn’t heard it. I met the students, we ordered pizza and all off to bed for the 8:00 departure the next day.

The van drive to Entabeni Nature Guide Training school took roughly three hours drive time but we included a detour to a mall in Pretoria for people to stock up on batteries, snacks, and any other essential items.  The landscape began changing from urban to rural as soon as we left Pretoria, evolving into wild dry stretches of bushvelt. There was also a stop at Kranskop where my dad and I noshed on some obligatory hot weather ice cream.

Soon, we arrived at the entrance gates to the school where we met up with Lee Gutteridge, the man of the hour, the principal instructor of the school, and a legendary great guy all around. The van pulled into the driveway of the small camp, where eight olive-coloured tents are set up in pairs on raised wooden platforms. Small branches about two meters tall act as a flimsy looking fence to keep out the wildlife and a cement and stone platform in the middle of the camp serves as the place to make small bonfires. Tents were assigned and duffel bags and backpacks were stowed away. Chef Peter, aka Cheffy, greeted us with the first of many delicious meals.

With the group gathered around the campfire platform, Lee laid out the rules and the plans, well peppered with a deadpan humour which confused the most gullible of the students. I began to understand how my father and Lee get along so well; their joy in confounding gullible students with their playful sense of humour conveys a key lesson from great instructors: don’t believe everything you hear and learn to think for yourself!

We had a game drive planned for the afternoon, consisting of driving around on old but well-built Toyota Landcruisers that had three large rows of seats for nine passengers behind the driver. The group now included my father’s two doctoral candidate students, as well as one of the three instructors that would rotate in taking us out and teaching. I hopped in the vehicle with Lee and my dad and we set out.

Having read David duChemin’s Safari Monograph e-book before the trip, I fought off the urge to fire away haphazardly when I saw animals that were new to me. It was a challenge but I succeeded; taking only a few badly composed, boring photographs of blue bearded wildebeest hindquarters as they galloped away. It turned out to be one of the most amazing game drives, sighting giraffes, white rhinoceros, zebras, and to top it all off, glorious male lions along with the rest of the pride.

Entabeni and its bushveld environment slowly became a new friend as we discovered and experienced her days and nights, learning about everything from bird calls to geologic formation to reading the tracks and signs of wildlife. Her days gave us sightings of the most incredible wildlife, including ever-comical warthogs, zebras, rhinos, crocodiles,  lions, cheetahs, elephants, hippos, antelope of all sizes and species, innumerable birds, and magnificent views of Hanglip Mountain. Her nights gave us astronomy classes under the Southern Cross, radiant scorpions under UV light, suspenseful night game drives, entertaining campfire banter and a whole host of calls from lions, jackals, nightjars, and the occasional wildebeest sounding out his alternate name: gnu.

In the first week, a three-day first aid course instructed by Andrew Miller of Systematic Medical and Response Training certified us all to perform CPR and basic wilderness first aid in case something happened while out. Gory images and video complimented Andrew’s nauseatingly detailed accounts of mishaps involving the bush and its wildlife while accomplishing a didactic message that there are no accidents, only breaches in safety.

The days began with oatmeal porridge at 6:00, although I personally preferred getting up at 5:30 to build a small fire in the chilly mornings for my campmates and to snap any cool sunrise shots. Next, game drives and lectures started out at 6:30, coming back to camp for brunch at 10:30. I had the most incredible sensation that the days were absolutely jam-packed with activity since by noon, it was possible to have seen an assortment of wildlife or learned how to identify a Common Duiker track, leaving a good amount of time to see and experience other things. After the first weeks, it was a contradiction in time, with the days slipping away while at the same time dragging out, hour by hour as we crammed more and more bush experience into our heads.

By the second week, the students began their research on various topics, ranging from giraffe spot identification to checking up on oxpecker nest placements to setting up camera traps on aardvark holes to see who was using them, as well as measuring elephant damage to the flora in their habitat. On a few occasions, I accompanied a film crew from the African Natural History Unit out on drives, including a very lekker* trip to watch the sunrise from atop the upper escarpment of Hanglip Mountain.

Lectures from various experts rounded out the massive amount of information handed out by Lee and his knowledgeable instructors. Jonathan Leeming, aka the Scorpion Guy, gave a talk about scorpions and included a show-and-tell with an option to hold a live scorpion. There was also an excursion out to three different caves, including one with a warthog-sized entrance hole and one with an underground pool for the group to take a quick dip in.

The student group gelled together quite nicely, with almost no conflicts and no overt expressions of culture shock or desperate homesickness. Minimal injuries were sustained including a fall from a tree and a scrape from a rock while caving, but all was well.

I discovered the bushveld bears a resemblance to Patagonia, though by no means in terms of the flora and fauna or climate and weather conditions. My two years in Patagonia infected me with a lifelong chronic illness whose only remedy is to return to the vast yellow pampas and the immense blue skies of the Chilean and Argentinean Patagonia as much as possible. The hard asphalt roads and city noise of the city is no match for a land that lulls you to sleep with jackal songs in the night and the only background noise is the wind rustling up the leaves.  Oh bushveld, how I miss thee. A brief self-check of signs and symptoms revealed to me a similar infection from the bushveld, with its amazing biodiversity and indomitable spirit. I would have to come back at least a couple of times in my life, perhaps even having to move there for a time period.

This past weekend, I was on assignment in Angol, Chile for AmeriCares, the US-based humanitarian organization. It was the final visit to the field hospital that AmeriCares donated to the city of Angol, thanks to the financial support of the GE Foundation and MetLife. The assignment consisted of documenting the six modular tents that house the maternity and pediatric ward of the town’s public hospital which was left heavily damaged after the massive earthquake on February 27th.

It was my third time heading to Angol, a town of roughly 50,000 nestled beside the Nahuelbuta National Park. On the first visit, the earthquake damage was apparent simply walking down any of the central streets; rubble piled on sidewalks in front of buildings and houses that had cracks running throughout the walls. It had the air of a town that had been shook fiercely and even over a month after the earthquake, still found rubble to expel from collapsed structures. My job then was to document the technicians from BluMed, the company that fabricates the field hospital, who directed a small team of Chilean military recruits in the rapid deployment of the tents.

The second visit occurred a couple of months later and Angol started to regain its lively small-town bustle as the capital of the Malleco province. Life was seemingly back to normal despite large fenced off areas and new construction sites to replace fallen buildings. Much to the surprise of myself and Claudia (my lovely assistant and fiancée), the pizza place we had enjoyed on the first visit had been demolished and only a zinc-plate fence hid an empty property space between its neighbors. We had eaten at a place marked unsafe and ready for demolition… and lived to tell about it! This visit was about documenting the hospital for its inauguration while important local figures met with AmeriCares staff to discuss the present and future of the donation.

This visit aimed at photographing, filming, interviewing and gathering multimedia material of the field hospital running in almost full capacity. A few pieces of equipment were still being shipped, but overall, babies were being born, doctors were caring for patients and one tent had even been transformed into an Intensive Care Unit.

Below, a short selection of images taken in Angol’s field hospital dedicated to maternity and pediatric wards and an ICU.

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Alas, I didn’t head out to La Tirana this year, instead I decided to cover the events at the National Sanctuary in Maipu, a borough of Santiago. But I wanted to challenge myself so it wouldn’t be as easy as grabbing the Canon 5D with her inseparable lens, the venerable 24-70mm f/2.8 L.

The challenge was set: Photograph the two days of festivities using only one lens and one body.

Nah, I wanted to go back to my photo roots, where I began with an old black brick of a Minolta x700 film camera and the standard 50mm lens that it came with. So much excellent work has been done with a 50mm field of view that I wouldn’t be able to secretly complain in my head that I didn’t have the right gear. In fact, David duChemin‘s motto came to mind: “Gear is good, vision is better.”

Problem is: I don’t have a 50mm prime lens at the moment. So I grabbed my 28mm f/1.8 and stuck it on my trusty ol’ Canon 40D, giving me an effective field of view of 44.8mm, close enough to 50.

The challenge was set: Photograph the two days of festivities using only one lens and one body. A call to basics set out to provoke my eye as well as any habits — good or bad — that may have developed from years of reliance on zooms. This is a brief selection from the two days of documentation.

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One of the key messages within this ebook really strikes a chord with me as I plan my South Africa trip. Expectations play a part in any voyage and especially affect photographers as we by nature are visual people and are constantly seeing, creating and manipulating images in our heads before the actual click of the camera.  No matter where one goes, there is always a preconceived idea of what the place will look like and quite often we’ve got a stock of images in our heads that spring to mind as we prepare shot lists or sketches. David notes that our visual rolodexes can’t be ignored and must therefore be confronted. You’ll have to read it to find out how to do that.

…a photograph goes from mediocre to good to great depending on the strength of the layers of impact.

The other important lesson David presents is probably the most succinct way I’ve heard of describing the methodology of analyzing an image; he calls it “Layers of Impact.”  He writes, “a photograph goes from mediocre to good to great depending on the strength of the layers of impact.” Drawing from many photographers’ inability to go beyond meaningless superlatives (“Awesome! Great photo!”), he suggests a condensed way of looking at images and drawing out the Whys and Hows of image deconstruction.

It’s quite a useful way of putting it and it sure is more practical than the semesters of art history filled with semiotics, Marxist and feminist theory that I studied in college. In conclusion, at exactly a month away from my first trip to South Africa, David’s advice about expectations and creating better imagery through layers of impact comes at no better time. As I’ve noted in my other reviews of Craft & Vision’s growing library of great ebooks, there’s no better bang for the buck than these mini-passports into the minds of David duChemin and his creative cronies. Click here to visit Craft And Vision.