spring2life take2

¢ Mélanie Giard

One of my dearest images of my project in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, made it in wall-size into the water council meeting in Marseille. Besides the natural photographer’s pride the fact made me smile, that this image was created with a (nowadays meagre) Minolta 7D on a 6Mpix sensor. Now imagine how large the newest and best Nikon’s files would allow to be blown up…

When seeing Tyler Monson’s “Portland Public Toilet” and Carl Weese’s “Public Accomodations”, I immediately remembered my encounter with the “future of the bathroom” in Colombo last year. Enjoy!

And be reminded: you can click on every image to enlarge it.

When visiting one of the rainwater harvesting project sites, questions came up of how to supply those parcels with water, where there is only a hut with a thatched roof – in these places usually the most needy people live. After some discussion back and forth an archaic solution was brought up and displayed in a similarly archaic way: by drawing it with a stick in the sand.

On another topic: Tyler Monson has given me notice about a glitch in the post “More Things Green”: green the image was indeed, too green. I’ll correct this. Thanks, Tyler!

This image might make a nice complement for “Tidiness”, here, albeit not as clear in its meaning.

Approaching Lady Manning Bridge, built by the British in common wealthy colonial times to connect Batticaloa town with Kallady, one has to pass a number of military checkposts, indicated by the camouflage tin sheets. Fortunately enough the lady’s back provided a shield for my camera which would have otherwise drawn unnecessary attention from the soldiers onto it. My friend had to learn this the hard way in Colombo, when security staff on the boardwalk outside of the American Embassy’s wall noticed him looking through the viewfinder… We were happy that they were content to get a photocopy of his passport.

of the road. The president, then freshly re-inaugurated? Would Sri Lanka be a Muslim state, he probably would have to fear for his accumulated riches.

This blog is somewhat deprived of words at the moment, and I felt somewhat sorry for this.

But discovering that some of the blogs I do cherish most are without words – give or take a quote and/or a heading, a filename, a date – I concluded that there’s no need to feel sorry. If my workload shifts, words may come again, but at the moment there are none.

Enjoy the images anyway – and don’t forget: You can see all of them large just by clicking on ‘em.

Waiting for some others shopping is not a problem as long as I have a camera with me – even when I can’t do things along my own schedule and my pace, sometimes the images just flow in, like here in Kattankudi.

No words friday – comments still enabled, Thomas

Around noon, when students leave school and usually are not too hard pressed to arrive at home, a foreigner with a big camera is a welcome event that usually leads to a lot of grimaces and giggling and curious chimping about the outcome of the picture-taking activities.

This is the just finished assembly hall in the small town of Oddaimavadi in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka, about 20km north of Batticaloa. As this is a mainly Muslim village, the hall but also the superiors’ offices are painted and decorated green. Immediately the german translation of Liza’s lesson in ‘My Fair Lady’ came to my mind: In German, instead of ‘The Rain In Spain’ she has to rehearse ‘Es grünt so grün’, meaning ‘it greens so green’. Colorwise it’s almost overkill.

Sometimes the differing nuances are already in the captured frame, so here again I needed only minimal adjusting in bibble5.

An image that I felt a spontaneous affection for when reviewing. And for me it fell exactly in the frame, no corner or side that I’d like to crop away.

Another variety of a food stall in one of the Batticaloa side roads. Even shops that don’t sell alcohol try to put up fencings and grates to protect their goods.

Found on Batticaloa Main Street, a place where at the moment the rainwater has flooded many shops. Have a look here at a BBC image collection. The number of refugees in makeshift camps meanwhile exceeds 320.000. But as both the number of TV cameras and the economic value are low, the world doesn’t even have a look.

5 years after Tsunami, the beach promenade of Batticaloa is all new and shiny. The only thing lacking are the tourists, who come only in smallest numbers, as infrastructure is still limited.

Update: As my hoster has copied this blog to a new machine with a different IP, som inconsistencies in posts and comments can happen. Withing maximum one week all changes in the DNS should have been propagated, until then I will try to keep the blogs in sync.

if such a playground is here in the right place. At least my kids would probably prefer to climb on trees, wade in creeks, run through the fields, play hide and seek in the bushes.

But taking into account that this area was probably only recently de-mined, it makes perfect sense. Don’t worry, profits in mine production were and are high, and supporting humanitarian organisations is a wonderful activity to deflect from the moneymaking and warfaring – on all sides.

Rural Reality in the village of Periyapullumalai, Sri Lanka, quite far away from our (made in China) style of life.

Enjoy.

Wordless Friday, okay?

It was only when the boys got distracted by viewing the images on the screen of my friend’s camera, that the little girl, easily the youngest of the group, was allowed to pose for the camera.

Next month’s wallpapers are available as usual from here. I found this scenery in one of the smaller alleys of Galle Fort, the former Dutch fortress that had secured that strategic port.

Nowadays instead of sailors the tourists are welcome guests, but in the monsoon time of last November we walked pretty much alone there. Definitely a kind of situation I cherish.

Found in Batticaloa downtown. Sometimes all the shapes seem to fall right into place.

Maybe the most unexpected encounter during my traveling through Sri Lanka where those caskets on the platform of Batticaloa train station. As the east coast companies offer substantial lower prices for finishing and decorating, it pays for Colombo funeral parlors to send the casks on two 12h+ train transports to Batticaloa. In comparison to the casks, the full metal cash box looked much more as it would belong to there.

Found in the evening in Kattankudi (where these sad images are from). Being a Muslim traders’ town, Kattankudi is buzzing with activity until late at night, totally different to Tamil Batticaloa, where shops close usually before 20:00 hours.

Sometimes, like here, the horizon has to be in the middle. And, another deviation from standard rules, only the lower half of the brightness scale was used. While the latter might need some modification for printing, viewed on a computer screen it seems just right.

Oh yes, and these fisherman are a recurring theme for me. Every image is different, so I never got bored visiting them early morning on the beach.

Oh yes, and as bigger is better, at least when viewing photographs on a screen, just click on the image to see it larger.

The end of the civil war in May 2009 not only brought a drastic increase of security and freedom to move in the streets for the people of Batticaloa, but also, only one year later, a largely disproportionate number of new banks as well as investment companies trying to make their luck in this up to then forgotten region of Sri Lanka. I can only hope that the land owners are wary enough and check the oh so clever proposals. And just have a look to the 1:1 crop (when clicked on) of the main image: No shoes, paddles, and kids that help to earn the family income. That is more the normality of life on the east coast.

The Neccder billboard to the right, admonishing to protect the wetlands, is just a nice descant, a reminder of yesteryear.

Sometimes a scenery like this flies by, and I am glad that my feelings made me frame and record this scenery as it presented itself. Something in me just said “this works”.

Jewelry business was not flourishing too much during the civil war – not only due to the lack of money, but also because the Tamil Liberation Army had forbidden the dowry system. The dowry system was and is very problematic for the status of women in the society: The necessity to provide a huge dowry often makes baby girls less welcome. And as a better education makes a young woman suitable for grooms with an equal status, additionally to the costs of the education the expenses for an even higher dowry have to be taken into account.

I was not astonished when Tamil friends admitted, that “this was one good thing” the LTTE had tried to introduce.

One of our pumps, built during the last project, was not correctly fixed with some kind of anchors in the sand. It still provides clean water, but is now uncomfortably low for usage. The lady however was still glad to have it, as carrying water cans is impossible for her.

Found in one of the side streets of Batticaloa. In contrast to the blue sky of this image, taken in November last year, Batticaloa and surroundings suffered from torrential rainfalls, cutting off traffic and transports and forcing tenthousands to leave their homes, and many to stay in provisional shelters. Since some days only the situation has improved, and now the damage gets calculated. I hope to receive some images of the situation within the next days.

The American Dream is somewhat faded, but still alive here in Batticaloa.

Some things, it seems, haven’t changed since the British left Sri Lanka in 1948, the stationmaster’s bell among them.

Sometimes the Hindu shrines are very inconspicuous, like this one. The only signs of reverence are the white blossoms, better visible after clicking on the 1:1 crop to the right.

The winter monsoon time also provided some dry hours with a clean, deep blue sky, creating an image impression that reminded me very much of scenes photographed in the U.S., getting the best, deeply saturated colors out of Kodachrome, then often at the expense of the shadow areas.

At least the ads for Kodachrome are still intact in Batticaloa, unfortunately I had no opportunity to ask when they sold their last roll of it.

The Online Photographer today’s post dealt with the different “sweet spots” of the cameras. The image of the dead gecko certainly profited from a broader sweet spot of the camera used: Not wanting to destroy the nuances with a flash, high ISO as well as image stabilisation was necessary due to the unavailability of a tripod.

The result I think is convincing, enough detail becomes visible when you click on the 1:1 crop to the right. The ants of course show motion blur, but the image is not meant as a documentary, and so this in my eyes adds to the message.

As near the equator the length of the days is approx. 12 hours during the whole year, at least part of the business life in Sri Lanka have to happen during the dark hours. Since the end of the civil war it is possible again to go out shopping in the evening, something that was either too dangerous or even forbidden for long periods of time.

Found in Koduvamadu. You can find it here on google maps. Yes, it’s probably in the middle of nowhere. The amount of attention as well as improvements might be proportional to the geographical situation.

Continuing yesterday’s fences with a door.

After Friday’s tragic post it was hard for me to find an adequate topic for today.
The fences in Sri Lanka are continously fascinating me (therefore there’s already a gallery of them), and this last visit I found not only those dangerously looking fencepost-tops, made from palmyrah stalks, but also a young palmyrah plant, showcasing this perfect star-shaped leaf, which’s caulis later can be used for the fencing.

And as always – click on the images to see them much larger! This should work throughout the whole blog and also the galleries.

Roughly like in the lead picture must have been the situation that LTTE killers found when they entered Kattankudi’s Meer Jumma Mosque during prayer time on August 3rd, 1990: Devotees prostrate in their friday prayers in front of them. And then they opened fire and threw hand grenades, killing 103 in this and the neighbouring Husseinia Mosque.

I have to admit that I was speechless and it took me hours to re-gain composure, and now selecting those images with the bullet marks again makes me shudder.

So why did I decide to publish these: I am convinced that truth has to be told and that peace can only be achieved when injustice is recognized by all sides, the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions of South Africa being seminal examples for this. The problem in Sri Lanka is, that this does not happen. When I spoke with members of the Muslim community after the visit to the Mosque, I saw a lot of unstilled bitterness.

In the tsunami of 2004, Saintamaruthu had lost its health care center, leaving thousands of citizens without local medical facilities. Overcoming a sequence of difficulties, setbacks and delays, by donations of the GFK and the citizens of Nuremberg and the management of UN-Habitat, a new health care center was erected and now is serving its purpose. When I visited the site, the weekly breastfeeding promotion consultation hours took place – with visible demand.

Again found in Batticaloa. Networking and Operating System support is really competent, and a broad range of software is available, too.

Found in one of the main roads of Batticaloa

Not far from last post’s school I found this mural/collection of ads on the remaining walls of a house destroyed in 2006′s tsunami. I like the lead image for its repeating patterns and their blending into the wall. The image to the right fascinates too because of that whole universe that opens up behind the corner and the stairs.

The Al-Wahidhiyyah Arabic College in Kalmunai is a small privately funded school for boys. Like the Christian Parochial Schools, nowadays rare in Europe, this school teaches along the official government curriculum, but gives special religious lessons. The boys were interested to use the little English they knew, and really open and friendly. I hope they keep this attitude and not only learn the words of the surahs, but also their deep and in many aspects very tolerant and open essence.

Update: I was thinking about Aaron Vincent Elkaim’s photographic essay about remnants of Jewish life in Morocco. Definitely worth seeing, not only for the photography but also the context and content.

Well, on New Year’s Evening, a widely thrown out net could be a suitable starting point for a long, personal reflection about the coming year. And with that image I wish all of you, around the world, a Happy and Healthy New Year!

Koduvamadu/Periyapullumalai, Sri Lanka, 2010. See also here, 2009.

Summarizing what is all our work about in one picture: Providing clean drinking water to families who couldn’t afford up to now. See also here, here, or here – many of the posts in the Batticaloa category target this subject.

These images are exemplary for the joy I have in photography afterwards. When visiting beneficiary families to inspect the rainwater harvesting tanks, photographs first of all serve documentary purposes. Making images for another purpose has to remain subordinate, especially when there are some 30 more places to visit. But during the talking with the families about their experiences, wishes and recommendations, opportunities for “the other” photography sneak in. And the quality of these images I can only evaluate at home, when there is sufficient time. And sometimes there are images that I really enjoy.

I could have known that Dec. 24th would need a post prepared well in advance. So here is, for the given reason, the image of a mother with her son in the village of Koduvamadu, a place where our project has built rainwater harvesting tanks. I like the open and optimistic smile of the lady, despite her difficult situation. Well suited as image for this day.

A Merry Christmas to you all. May love and peace be with you.

Christmas without doubt is the most child centered event in the western culture. This fact of course makes it an easy target for economic exploitation, something which evokes grimmer feelings the elder I grow. But this increasing distance in age and the experience with my own kids also grows genuine interest in kids’ lives and in their prospects. Securing our common future begins with respect even for the small kids. And when we take their lifespan as criterion, some decisions and some lifestyle just disqualifies itself.

When evaluating possible project sites for rainwater harvesting tanks, we were visiting several villages. For a very simple reason the women were most interested in these units: They are the ones who toil and sweat when the traditional well provides no water during the two annual dry seasons, and they suffer with their kids and elders when they fall sick with infections due to dirty drinking water.
So when we had meetings, the women sat in the first rows, and they spoke first.

As we are nearing Christmas (C-4 to quote Earl), I decided to switch subject.

Found next to Beira Lake, in the center of Colombo.

Colombo, Duplication Rd.

I found those two matching garage doors not far from each other in the small town of Oddaimavadi on the east coast of Sri Lanka.

Found in the southern town of Galle in Sri Lanka. As it was the very begin of the tourist season, the beach still belonged to the locals.

Galle, Sri Lanka. The shutter did actuate itself.

Note the excellent pelvis move of the gentleman in white. Only seconds before he had somewhat posed when descending from the bus, but then the driver got annoyed. You can listen to some seconds of the original sound here:

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Colombo mural, Duplication Rd.

Found near Thurstan Rd. (if the GPS coordinates are correct) and on Galle Rd., Colombo.

Lack of colonial knowledge makes me wonder about the connection between authorized vehicles and barefoot staff.

R. A. de Mel Mawatha, Colombo. Those oversized billboards already at home create a feeling of them being somewhat out of place. In places like Colombo, this becomes overwhelming.

Found in Jayawardane Mawatha, Colombo.

Just taking up the relationship between religion and money, started in the comment section of yesterday’s post: Despite of the strong influence of the Buddhist religion in Sri Lanka, the originally christian custom of giving wrapped presents for christmas has gained strong foothold here as well. Just think of the christmassy decorated tusks here. F.Y.I. tusks are an important religious symbol in Buddhist Sri Lanka, you find many of them in the Tooth Temple in Kandy.

But in the end, it’s all about money. Very simple.

The Jesus sticker on the wall in yesterday’s image sparked a short conversation with Martina about the presence of private religious symbols in the streets of different countries. Carl Weese from time to time shows such shrines in the U.S., mostly in suburban gardens, if I remember correctly.

Despite being a Buddhist country, where the religion plays a major role in politics (and most of the time an unhealthy one, unfortunately), symbols and shrines of all religions can be seen in the street. Those two I found in Duplication Road, separated by only a small distance.

Both trees I found in Duplication Road, Colombo 3.

Strange enough, in my previous visits, Colombo seemed in a photographic sense very unattractive to me. Not that I am searching those blue sky touristic images, but the dust and noise (and grime) had always left me quite desolate and more or less unable to see. This time it was different, and whilst the lack of project burdens and responsibilities may play a role in this – being there as an NGO expert is somewhat different from being managing lead partner of a international cooperation project – I think my mindset has changed in the 18 months since my last visit: Having read Robert Adams, having looked at many photographs of Minor White et. al. (which had seemed ‘difficult’ to me beforehand) and having developed a less ‘cramped’ attitude of seeing and replaced thinking with knowing maybe were the key factors here. Technically I have not changed much, same camera, same software, same lenses. Oh, regarding the latter there was a change: I need less. The 16-80 mm-e became sufficient for 90% of the images, to be replaced with a fast prime only when it became really dark. Super wide angle and long tele zoom have been left mostly unused in the bag.

Found during a morning stroll through the streets of Colombo.

Not really christmassy, this year’s december wallpaper shows monsoon clouds over the beach of the Bay of Bengal. But then, it is tightly connected with christmas, as the houses in the area were given to the victims to the tsunami of Dec. 26th, 2004.

In this resettlement area of Thiraimadu, Batticaloa, funds of the City of Munich were used to give houses to 42 women headed families that hat lost family members and posessions in the Tsunami. It was a joy to learn that those families do well, and especially that they care very much for the education of their children, even if the available funds for daily life are minimal. At least for them the terror of the tsunami was to a small bit compensated by the donations of Munich’s citizens.

On the way to the airport our car had to wait quite often in traffic jams, and freed of all duties and preparatory thoughts now, I used these opportunities to capture roadside sceneries.

During framing those I had not much opportunities to deliberate about composition – it was more immediate reacting – but reviewing the images I was fascinated of some of the color arrangements, positions of people or the amount of small details like in the first of today’s images.

Writing this, I am sitting already in the airport on my way to home. These were intense weeks, less so in the photographic sense, but full of discussions on how to tune the setup of the new water supply project in order to achieve best acceptance and sense of ownership of the beneficiaries. There are many things to take into account, not the least the difficult mindset of people that had been pushed around for many years during the civil war in Sri Lanka.

For some time I will be posting some more pictures from Sri Lanka, but there will be an abrupt change when I do the switch to images from Germany – snow and temperatures below 0° C will give a different impression.

Without any double-butted alloy frames, rock-shoxx suspension forks or Rohloff gear-shifts, those men transport loads of more than 50kg of firewood on their (India-made) bicycles over paths that would make nice competition dirt tracks on the northern hemisphere. And if necessary they cross flooded parts of roads, where only the really sturdy vehicles will go. Kudos!

Again a field visit today, meeting the people of a small village in the Valachenai area, north of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. When traveling back, this bus crossed our way.

The assembly took place in the classroom of the local school, and especially the women – in the middle the chairwoman of the Woman Rural Development Society – actively participated in the discussion, as this project plans to release them from hour-long walks to get water during the dry season.

Yesterday I did a field trip with my colleagues from Sri Lanka, checking the rainwater harvesting tanks they have set up in the current project. Of the beneficiaries usually the husbands were working in the paddy fields, while the women and kids were at home. One lady was busily repairing her universal tool, used mainly for cutting mangos from the trees, and she agreed having her portrait taken.

It was not raining when I took these images in one of the fish markets of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Unfortunately now it is – just natural, it’s monsoon time – and even more unfortunately is that my room has so many leakages in the ceiling that I barely know how to position my bed to find a dry place to sleep. The moskito net is unusable due to its position, the luggage already closed so that I can leave the room reasonable quickly if the situation deteriorates.

Checking the image files, I found a matching scenery for yesterday´s timber trader, this time from Colombo.

Found in Oddamavadia, east coast of Sri Lanka. Same time, same moskitoes, fleeing.

Found these today during our travel from Colombo to the east coast of Sri Lanka, and was captivated by forms and colors.

To post these I have to sit fully dressed on the balcony of our guesthouse, while the monsoon rains pattern on the roof and the moskitoes are agressively searching for fresh blood. Short post, for a given reason.

Well, I dropped the idea to fill the next posts with pres. Rajapakse’s pictures – too depressing. Those street sceneries I found in the town of Galle, on the southern end of the island. People here really can have a sense for harmonic colors.

To take up the topic that I’ve started with a project contribution on Martin Storz’s Public Eye Blog: Yesterday was the inauguration ceremony for Sri Lanka’s president Mahinda Rajapakse. There are some doubts about the elections and their preliminaries, and whilst many of the people in Colombo welcome his presidency in the light of him having ended 30+ years of a bloody civil war, concerns about the way this country now is governed by the Rajapakse family remain. For more details just have a look at the wikipedia. Optically his inauguration was impressive, to say the least. Thousands of his portraits were distributed throughout the city of Colombo, together with flags of Sri Lanka, – a personality cult hitherto unknown in this country – and chains of lights now illuminate his posters at night (and I didn’t bring a tripod!).

Today’s images are only a starter, I have yet to decide if I make up a small gallery of the best of the rest, or if I serve them one-by-one.

Update: I just had to learn that the English Wikipedia, unlike the German Version, does describe Pres. Rajapakse in an almost exclusively positive way, highlighting his achievments in fighting the worlds no. 1 terrorists. This should ring a bell with you… Maybe better also look at the pages of Amnesty International and Reporters without Borders.

To take up Martina’s last comment

: Yes, Colombo takes up many European, or better Western, patterns. Though being an officially Buddhist country, without a separation of state and religion as we know it, especially the business parts of other relgions, like Christmas here, get incorporated and playfully put on stage. Of course this shopping mall is more for the well-offs, but as everywhere, they set the trends. The Sri Lankan influence however is clearly visible in the shapes of the decoration: tusks, as they are venerated for example in the temple in Kandy.

Seen on Duplication Road, Colombo.

Walking the streets of Colombo – something the better-off people in Colombo would always try to avoid – led me into a bounty of sceneries, and even a shy guy like me, who doesn’t want to bother people with his camera out of respect for their privacy, found more than enough food for his lens.

Some of the street scenes reminded me of Carl Weese’s recent cyclus “Two walls”. And the weariness after a sleep-deprived night between Europe and Asia did not stop me, maybe focused my visual sense even more.

Since quite some time I had planned to revisit older images. Yesterday’s train delay, that made me spend a very uncomfortable time in an even more uncomfortable train station at night, finally gave me the opportunity to do this. Besides some tagging in bibble5 (which is not yet as comfortable as I’d wish it to be), I drew out the images for the new gallery “Batticaloa Fences”, which you find here.

And while going through them, I again felt my affection for the place and the images, still strong after the year+ that has passed since then. Regarding the photographs it is based on the strong graphics and textures that some of them have, but also on the content, the situation you must live in to protect your property with flattened oil barrels or fragments of asbestos sheets .

what an amount of books sofobomo yielded this year! i did go through only a small part up to now and already found quite a number of really precious, extraordinary ones. so on top of the personal success of having really created my book, analyzed in part what it meant to me and what it taught me, there is so much food for reading, seeing, reflecting that i am truly overwhelmed. a lot of my free time the next days i will spend going through those books.

the image above, taken in the newly built house of a tsunami victim in batticaloa, left me somewhat speechless in its tight vicinity of the lord of mercy and a war instrument. strange, in many aspects.

to describe traffic in sri lanka along european criteria, there is just one word: insane. even for a seasoned driver, not shy of left-hand driving, it is so much better to have a careful sri lanka driver and a working seat belt.

and when you have the lorry so close in front of you, it is definitely a reassurance that it is “fully insured”

a matching door for the fence blinds shown yesterday, this door is one of the rare cases where the recycling/upgrading path left the original structure well visible and self-contingent, not mixing in or adding other components.

the fence, too, is a case of recycling: the net was beyond repair and unsuitable to catch fishes any more. it still is, however, fit to keep the hen in the garden. together with the pine twigs and the cones optically it makes up for a fine structure.

in sri lanka, plots are usually at least fenced with barbed wire. only the wealthy ones can afford real walls, often topped with bottle bottom fragments. To protect the owners from the curious views of the bypassers, the street side of the fences is usually equipped with blinds.

traditionally they were made from palmyrah leaves, but these degenerate within some years, and now people use metal sheets, rarely new. even old oil barrels, cut and bent straight, are used for this purpose. these materials now offer a wide variety of textures and colors.

finally my sofobomo 09 theme has found me: the fishermen of batticaloa. since 2005 i try to spend the early morning hours of my missions to batticaloa on the beach, and over the time i got more and more acquainted with them. since quite some time i planned either a small exhibition or a pod-book on this topic, so using it for sofobomo is just natural.

the next evenings i will spend with bibble5 – the preview 2.1a really rocks – and scribus. my laptop is not too well suited for heavy image editing, this is one more reason to use bibble instead of lightzone. to compile the book should be not too difficult, as the framework is ready: a blurb book is going to be the print target. now it’s high time for doing the final selection.

trincomalee internally displaced persons again, in front of their shed. one of the boys is sick, born with a hole in the cardiac septum.

basic healthcare in sri lanka is free, and in some aspects of really high quality and excellent quality/circumstances ratio. however an operation in this case has to be paid extra, and the 4000 us$ the family is not (and will not be in the near future) able to afford.

for cases like this there is the sri lanka president’s fund. doesn’t sound like a really democratic solution, more like a holdover from good old monarchy, where the sovereign distributes alms, eh? and, the family is not able to apply. they are not educated, they speak the wrong language, they don’t know where to apply.

why they are smiling on this picture? they got a new toilet, and that is a big improvement.

some people are not born poor, but made poor. the idps that now live in navallady, batticaloa, in the former tsunami buffer zone (no permanent house should have been there, the former residents were all resettled) had their homes in the trincomalee district. the civil war came, they were driven out of their houses in the combat- or security zone and now live under most primitive conditions in sheds made of tarpaulins, corrugated tin sheets and leaves. you count the toothbrushes? 8 people live here, in a hut maybe 3,5×5 m².

and i learned a lot about gender budgeting, too (it pays to travel with the boss, who is a psychiatrist by education): if there is a male head of family, there will be: a mobile phone, a tv set (to watch cricket), a small motobike…

but the number of male-headed families is small. the usual story reads more like “lost husband in the conflict, lost the son, fleeing, now living with the small kids here until knowbody knows when, little support, fear, discrimination (by army/police)”. I spare you the details. It is simply incredible.

taking up the topic of my recent post “eyes”, just a bullet list of what it means to be poor in batticaloa, sri lanka (but feel free to put in any other place):

• the husband (if present) works as a day labourer, earning barely enough to feed the family
• the kids leave school early to add to the family’s income
• you live on your own plot, but twice a year it gets flooded and turns into a swamp. so the romance showing up in the lead shot is just a temporary one
• your daughter carries the daily laundry quite a distance. to wed her, you should save for a dowry, but don’t know from where to take it
• your plot of maybe 100m² houses well and toilet pit, not a really healthy arrangement
• when you are not in a specially affected group like the tsunami victims, you probable are poor and stay poor

by careful usage of funds, our project could increase the number of donated toilets, and some families in puthur, batticaloa, now have decent hygienic facilities. to help them to help themselves, the beneficiaries were paid in installments and themselves contracted the work. this also created a good sense of ownership – and kept the costs really low. and the toilet now is the most solid structure on the plot, much better then the house…

fortunately enough, un-habitat’s programme “cities without slums” will tackle this situation in order to achieve a structural improvement.

sometimes when the eyes open, gestalt reveals itself. though i am sweating for many of my pictures, on quite some occasions i just recognize, see. and sometimes, i also like the framing and don’t feel the necessity to crop or modify otherwise. rare moments that i really cherish.

no words at the moment – time presses. i hope the picture speaks for itself

photographing in exotic locations usually means meeting people only once in a lifetime. photographing the not-so-well-off means that you even can’t just send a picture or two as email, and even when they write down their address – in the present case i couldn’t read it as i don’t know tamil.

but in this case i was happy: i had the opportunity to meet the fisherman of this post again and present them a print of the photo where he was posing 5 seconds for me.

it was a joy for him and for me. of course, some others now also want their portrait taken…

let the beauty of the flags speak for itself. the flag doesn’t bother who is raising it and why.

even this much abused national symbols keep their relevance, the more so when all those malpractioners are gone.

some of our youngest beneficiaries: their families received rainwater harvesting tanks or toilets through our project. we are targeting especially the poor families, among them so many woman headed families, having lost the husband/father in the tsunami or the war.

the stories you get to hear there are sad, sometimes hard to bear: one woman had lost her husband in the tsunami and 18 months later her son under unknown circumstances due to the war. the death toll of that conflict is now well over 70.000, and besides an end of the fighting on the battlefield no reconciliation is in sight, instead acts of violence and vengeance may deepen the trench between the ethnics. politics has messed up completely here, the reasons you can easily find on both sides.

since my first official visit to batticaloa and kalmunai, fishermen were the subject of numerous shots, from beach overviews up to portraits, details of their catch and their tools. this time i brought two small albums as tokens of my gratitude for their acceptance of my photography.

trying to find the essence of the pictures, i am reviewing the raw files several times, judging back and forth which picture to pick and which to reject, also modifying details here and there.yesterdays posting included the scenery with the two men walking, which i had already posted here. the new version crops out the sky, and i like it much better now as for one thing the sky was a bit too rosy, but also because the lack of sky now gives a stronger impression of a vast and powerful ocean.

catching the small fish, and only small numbers, is hard work, tearing on muscles and gear. the sharp corals brought by the waves to the shore constantly tear holes into the net. a good part of the morning this fisherman spent repairing the net.

he had a helper, and after having tried one spot and repaired the net, off they went along the beach to another spot where the net was thrown again. half a kilo of small fishes after one hour is definitely not sufficient to feed even a single person, so at this time of the year most of the men go to work as labourers.

no dessert for me after a working dinner, instead 10 min. break and a very short walk on the beach. the colors here were wonderful, the beach certainly attractive for tourists. however i was told that people here in kalmunai would not feel at ease with tourists as conflicts with muslim traditions and teachings would be preprogrammed.

the kids, and the boys especially, meanwhile do enjoy their life, and a stranger on the beach is definitely a reason to say hello and try one’s language skills.

late in the day the light was soft and the green regained its power after the blazing sunlight. the combination of the red rocks and the plants was very soothing, calming and inviting for a rest.

this is my first try with the beta of the new bibble5. its region feature allowed to keep the shadows in the center away from pure black while the environment was darkened half an f-stop to compensate the effect of ‘exposing to the right’. this way the picture is less noisy an richer in tonalities in comparison to a shot where big parts are in the left half of the histogram.

the old bibble4 id did like because of its speed already, but the lack of region functions meant that selective editing had to be done in gimp afterwards (i am an all-linux guy), and therefore lightzone was the tool of choice for low iso shots – for high iso its denoising algorithms simply are not state of the art.

this is what i am in sri lanka for: bringing locally adapted low cost technology to improve drinking water supply of the people in need, mainly the poor, low caste, incomplete families. the pump you see here consists of material available in the local hardware store, mainly pvc and metal pipes (pvc to avoid corrosion), a glass marble as vent, tire cutouts as gaskets. our partner emas int. has set up a well drilling school to teach this technology. self-employment at least for some is the way to improve their living conditions, others simply profit from the fail-safe and long-lasting technology.

early morning, shortly after sunrise at the beach. half a dozen fishermen are there, but due to the rough sea beach fishery is impossible. one of them tries with a hand net, half an hour of work results in a handful of really small fishes of maybe zero market value. i decided to leave but was gestured to stay, to wait for that single one boat they own that can go deep sea fishing because it has an outboard motor. and then it comes and brings home the catch: a sailfish that makes 8 us$/kg at the market.

after shortly posing for me, the men went off to clean the fish, so i guessed. but no – a motobike was waiting, and 50m away from me – too far for my standard zoom – the fisherman takes the rear seat, and with the fish on his shoulder they head for the market. this would have been *the* shot.

one of the rare occasions i could break out of that usual mission cycle of visiting one rainwater harvesting tank or well or toilet after the other, and just take 7 minutes on the road, for a moment concentrating only on shape, graphics structure. not that i would take this monitoring not seriously, it is just that my attention is suddenly grabbed by some details.

and i had to learn the hard way that procrastinating means loss. i cannot come back there for reasons of time and transport – i do have the position thanks to a small gps logger i always have in my pocket – so i try to snap whatever is interesting immediately and without too much fiddling.

the harvest then only begins after returning home, and fighting the jet lag through staying up until late gives the opportunity to go through the collections. diamonds i rarely find, but even rust can be rewarding.

what you see here are fence blinds, attached to the fence posts to give a little privacy on the 250m² plots, where a big part of the life happens in the garden.

sometimes i am just too shy. the owner of this food stall greeted me, as do most of the people you meet on the early morning streets in batticaloa, but for one reason or the other i refrained from asking if i could make a picture and went into a side street. only after 50m i changed my mind and went back, asked and of course was allowed to photograph (the term shooting is not appropriate in batticaloa as there is too much real shooting happening). and so i got my etude in rusty colors.

not that the impression comes up that ranting about the present situation in sri lanka is my one and only preoccupation. whenever possible i try to find beauty, and so i did here in this ruins of the emperors of a kingdom long forgotten. on the top of a monolitic, magmatic rock, to be reached only by really steep chairs, there was once a palace, inhabitated by emperors – unfortunately entrapped in politics, power, murder. it seems i can’t flee this topic…

as they are dead and gone now, now it can be quite peaceful up there. with the sinking sun however the ak-47 of sri lankan soldiers dominate the climate for the night again.

my colleage in batticaloa told me this about his life (he’s only 37). roughly 30 years this conflict between ltte and the sinhalese majority now scars the life, public as well as private. when he was 17 he had to flee his village, living 3 months in the jungle, because his life was in danger both from government and ltte – a potential terrorist or a forced recruit don’t face a really high expectancy of life.

so you can only speculate what life awaits those boys.

i stand corrected. while my blog entry had claimed that 4 had been killed by a bomb explosion in batticaloa, it were in fact two, a bystanding riksha driver one of them. it doesn’t make the act less atrocious, to be explained only through a completele contorted logic inherent to terrorism. terrorism has been means of fight of the ‘liberation tigers of tamil eelam’, ltte, for decades. the war they fought stemmed from the deliberate discrimination of their ethnic minority. this fact however is no justification for acts of terror.

it is only that especially the present sri lanka government, at the moment winning the war against the ltte on the battlefield, has no plan for piece, no idea of how to reconcile the minorities in the country. instead it relies on war aggrandizing propaganda, whilst big parts of the country submerge under acts of violence, corruption, vengeance.

the acts of torture reported to me are utterly barbarous, similarly the behaviour of the gangs of the former war lords who are now in regional politics. the principle of legal certainty is widely absent in this country, instead abductions, the usage of masked squealers, violence against members of the press are present in everyday life. this is the country that many people chose to go to for holidays.

Update: Thomas in his comment was kind enough to avoid any mentioning of photographic merits of the pictures shown. And there are simply none. they are simple snaps of what presented itself to the eye, the first even taken inside the car through the windshield. getting out and taking the picture in presence of the police posts nearby was regarded as too dangerous. in sri lanka you can get arrested for less, and even if the danger for a foreigner is probably smal, my local colleagues have to fear at least questioning, getting into the files of the government and its organs for suspicious behavior. and you can vanish for less there.

two more from the beach. the waves are so high at the moment that the traditional paddled outrigger fishery from the beach has to pause. no fishery means no income, so some of the men take their hand net and throw it from the shore. catch is low however.

the day i met them they merely got two handful of fish in the morning, definitely not sufficient to nourish a family. poverty in the city is often combining an acceptable income with bad living conditions, but here in the villages the lack of incomes is what hurts the people the most, and this is the situation where sometimes the children have to add to the family income instead of attending school.

i am on my way again, back to colombo. if things go well we’ll have a stopover in sigiriya, which i think i well deserve after 7 full days of working/traveling/working. this bicycle i discovered on the beach in batticaloa. it would be never considered roadworthy in europe, but here is an undisputed means of transport for man and loads.

those traces i discovered on the beach recently – rarely have seen such a strict evidence of encounter and afterwards going it’s way.

^*in kalmunai, on the east coast of sri lanka. the lady is a newly trained gis specialist and is holding a mobile phone as one symbol for her bridging traditions and the “modern” world. kalmunai is a town where islam values are held very high – in general it is a really patriarchal society. having managed to aquire above average education and balancing it with her life of a mother is what i admire in her.

^* gis is shorthand notation for geographical information system

peaceful, isn’t it? unfortunately the morning wasn’t. a claymore mine exploded next to the police station in batticaloa, killed 4 and injured a dozen, 4 school students among them. on the beach we only heard a muted ‘booff’. what a discrepancy between those sceneries.

Update: just replaced the lead image with a lightzone version. the much i like bibble for its speed, lightzone is incredible in its possibility to enhance low contrast structures. even in the thumbnail you can easily spot the difference.

getting up early and trying to meet again the fishermen i had portrayed in an earlier visit, i found the beach empty, with a force 5 wind making all beach based fishery impossible. so i resorted to collecting small details, of which this fence part is one.

the fact that is a piece of asbestos sheet is interesting in this context, as the sri lanka government still sticks to the opinion that this material does no harm to humans. probably a case of successfull lobby policy.

this is why am here. it is good to know that the support we try to bring really reaches the people in need. and when content meets form, out of beauty happiness can rise. sorry for being pathetic, this is an unstaged shot right out of today morning’s site visit, and maybe the jet lag also has its effect.

ok, kids pics always go to the heart, but i can’t help to like it. we can talk about the lighting situation, backlight/striplight in both situations, reduced color sets also which almost leave out a part of the spectrum, so a lot of my ingredients for a good picture are there.

colombo does nothing for me. it is too chaotic, too loud and too depressing, the numerous checkpoints with young ak-47 equipped soldiers not really adding to a comfortable feeling. the galle face hotel in a certain way is a resort from reality, incompletely (and that is good) reviving colonial spirit. were it not for official appointments and meeting friends, i would not bother to come to colombo. the title of the blog entry is a quote from an overjoyous guest.

in a way beeing there is like this empty cup of espresso of the lead shot: convincing at the very moment, slowly disappearing in its apparition, inviting to be repeated in reasonable intervals. i am already longing for the east coast.

the headline is a quote of sadruddin aga khan after his visit to the galle face hotel.

i had planned to post this before leaving to nanjing, china, for the world urban forum. but as quite so often the workload plus time for the kids and my wife consumed all reserves i had calculated and now i am in nanjing, after 28 hours traveling. so for today be it this shot, it has a good relationship with traveling.

before you are afraid that this turns into a monothematic blog of kid pics – these are the last ones i’d like to show from kalmunai. sri lanka again experiences a wave of violence, and the east coast i visited 3 weeks ago is now more or less a no-go-area for foreigners.

those kids have grown up in the civil war, and whilst kalmunai itself has not been in the center of real war-like actions, road block everywhere and killings in the villages have always been present since more than 25 years.

whilst i am from a technical point of view not fully content with the picture above – the aspired sharpness is missing, probable due to improper focusing – the scenery is still captivating even in the review. doing it again however i would take care to include all the foreleg of the brown ox.

i myself prefer this picture even over the shot to the right, which is more classic in the usage of the reflection…

early morning hours are my most prolific time of the day. the fishermen, the outrigger boat, all these picture were created from 6 to 8 am. the light is soft at that time but does not have that orange cast of the sunset hours.

and the public is definitely different – only at that time you see the students in a light suitable for portraits. at noon, when they return, the harsh sunlight is everything else but pleasing.

those two kids are living in the battlefield of 2004′s tsunami, there school, now rebuilt, is also in the zone of massive destruction. they seem to push aside their remembrance of that mayhem. but the smile in their faces can be misleading: talking with social workers shows the whole bandwith of psychological injuries, and the skin that has grown over these is still very thin.

those singers traditionally woke up the people during ramadam, early in the morning to allow a good breakfast as the basis for a whole day of fasting. now this custom is forgotten in most places, but still the singers are invited for some festivities.

the high iso possibilities of my sony a700 are always reason for joy: iso 2500 and only minimal noise (see the full filesize on flickr).

for me as living in the european alps, beeing at the seaside and watching the fishermen means alway a bounty of photographic opportunities. golden early morning light made those fishes an interesting pattern of metallic glistening hydrodynamically highly efficients bodies

the outrigger boats are a fascinosum by themselves. while the shape is a classical dugout canoe, the hull nowadays is made from fiberglass. however those planks to increase freeboard are not integral part of the modern hull but are still separately mounted on top of the traditional log-boat shape.

the recitations of the muezzin woke me up after a short night, but i was grateful for this invitation to start the new day early. my hotel was next to the beach – the tsunami at that time had not done much damage as the structure was new and sturdy concrete – so after 10 minutes i was out in the golden light. walking around, not yet decided on what to concentrate, i suddenly saw a scenery that reminded my very much of hemingways “the old man and the sea”.

the presence of me photographing probably made the crowd surrounding the swordfish even bigger, and before negotiating the price they wanted group photos to be taken.

for roughly 170 US$ the trader made the deal, and soon after one of the fishermen came up and chopped away the non-marketable parts, leaving only the torso to be iced and kept for transport.

the crows were already waiting for the remainders of this beautiful animal, one of the fastest in the sea. ironically, while prices especially of the red-tipped-fin subspecies are high up for assumed aphrodisiac effects, in europe the meat would not be allowed to the market: swordfish collect great amounts of cadmium and quicksilver, and the older and bigger the specimen, the higher the concentration of the toxics

before the winter monsoon rains start, the usual catch for the outrigger boats is small. bigger boats with outboard motors then are the only ones that bring home what they catch by long lines.

even then the catch is small. only 5 small thunas for one early morning of fishing is barely sufficient, given that you have to pay the high fuel price also.

the images were converted in bibble – on the laptop this is a good choice because of the more effective cpu usage than with lightzone – and slightly desaturated to work out the silver color of the fish.

finding a time to go for a photowalk to the beach at sunrise was difficult during the last mission – jet lag, early appointments, changes of the venue and so on. in the end, i had to take the last morning – and ended up without visible sunrise due to the clouds.

not wanting to return without any picture, i overcame my shyness and asked the fishermen by gesture if they would allow me to take their pictures. and indeed this was not a problem, but the display of the camera broke the ice and we all had fun time.

so what did i learn from this morning: procrastination is not necessarily evil, but will demand more flexibility. to overcome shyness is not that difficult but also a question of self-esteem. having decided to bring an album with the portraits for my next visit makes the whole thing a much less one-sided affair.

62 years, sick, shaking with probably fever, unhcr provided temporary shelter even almost 4 years after the tsunami, because there is no money to rebuild the house. living on approx. 60 US$ a month which is not much with fuel prices comparable to europe. health care is provided for free, but that also means that not much can be provided for a poor man.

(through our project he got pipe water access. it is not much, for sure, but many don’t have even this.)

being a tamil, he will not walk through the muslim parts of the city after dark (nor do the muslims go to tamil areas). he feels lucky if there is no further confrontation between those ethnic/religious groups as it has happened too many times in the past.

my own needs, fears and wishes look so surreal when confronted with this situation. fortunately my own abilities to make pictures fade away are not below average.
the age of 62 certainly feels different in the g8.

out of our project work: our ngo partner emas, which has 25 years of experience in running well drilling schools in bolivia, has created an awareness programme for students in batticaloa about ways to improve drinking water quality by simple means, among them solar desinfection. trainers went to more than 40 schools with 2000+ students.

another euphemism: idp. in the case of this man (and up to 200.000 others only in the eastern region of sri lanka) the government had decided that in order to have a free firing range against the tamil insurgents, everybody had to leave their villages.

so they were living in corrugated tin sheet buildings while everything they had was at the mercy of the army, the insurgents and the wild elephants. there is not much left now, as you can imagine. but idp sounds correct, nice.

this conflict is with 25 years and over 70.000 killed one of the longest and bloodiest in asia. silently, almost forgotten, as there are not states fighting against each other but “only” army and insurgents.

the violations of human rights are incountable, usage of child soldiers for example, to name only the worst. and both sides are equally abominable: the government for racist actions, under-cover-killings, the other side for forced recruition or using even kids as shields, again only to name examples.

with the looming defeat of the military arm of the insurgents, it now gets even worse. while the government deliberately arrests tamils in colombo (see these news on bbc), the rebels take up to 200.000 people hostage against the progress of the army. 200.000 kids, men, women of whom even the united nations have no information of where they are and in what status…

aah, did i ever say that sri lanka could be a paradise?

the non-availability of clean drinking water clearly is one indicator of poverty. in this area of batticaloa, sri lanka, the soil does not provide drinking water from wells through the whole year. as the next permanent well is 5 km away, the typical wedding present for a couple residing in this area consists of a bicycle and a set of water cans.

through European Union funded project activities, ferrocement rainwater harvesting tanks now will complement the traditional dug wells and alleviate the household chores, freeing valuable time especially for the women.

thanks to the help of the unhcr, these civil war refugees are offloaded again next to the remainders of their village that they had to leave 2 years ago when the sri lanka government had decided to “liberate” the east coast. aah, it’s so easy: the government decides to displace, and the international community does not have many options but to assist so that government’s actions don’t result in a humanitarian catastrophy. so the refugees come to camps, and when government allows, the UN can bring them back to what war has left from their belongings. and when this picture looks as if a lorry had just dumped a load, well, it was almost like that.

after having lived in a shelter, one family one room, cooking outside, platform to lift the beddings above the water that in rainy seasons is on floor level, most of the refugees are glad to go back. so they queue up under a glazing sun in the transport area, bear the screening by the army and the special task forces and then get transported back in buses, their belongings brought after inspection for weaponry on some tractors.

and there is no question that the unhcr does a good job here. after returning with a tarpaulin kit as a first measure of protection, shelter building groups will come and assist the refugees in repairing damaged houses or set up provisional ones. quick impact projects afterward may come to their support and may create new means of earning a livelyhood.

but all this poverty is not a result of a natural catastrophe, but results from the inability of government and insurgents to negotiate a peaceful solution for the conflict. this is the shame.

martin doonan posted some days ago about blog action day and this years topic of global poverty. as poverty is what i am constantly confronted with when on mission in sri lanka – and what guides my actions, too – i gladly took up his reminder and registered. so you will see in the following days many pictures around this matter.

those fishermen in batticaloa i visit regularly since 2005, just see here, here or here. many of those lost relatives and all their belongings in 2004′s tsunami. the curve of their net and their silhouettes are an ongoing fascination for me

the man in this portrait is actually a beneficiary of our project, and i hope to get more details about him soon. up to then take this as an expressive face with trails of deepest injuries.

the local heroes in sri lanka are a sad affair: that ‘martyrs day’ poster is from eprlf, eelam people’s revolutionary liberation front. this group now fights together with the sri lanka government against the ltte, liberation tigers of tamil eelam. and doleful heroes they (and many of the others) are: yesterday 3 young tamil men were found on the coast, hands bound and shot to death. this is a fight of so many groups against each other, on the side of the goverment or against it, among themselves or against an (imaginative) enemy.

i was trying to seek beauty here, wander with open eyes and a quiet mind, but this sad reality does not let me go. everywhere, and even more in every talk you have with a local, that tragic reality of especially the life of the tamils here is present

less words this time. punctum – i have decided to get barthes’ book to understand better what he tries to express.

above you have the black and white version of the batticaloa lighthouse picture. in my eyes it has a more detached quality than the color version here which is just so …natural and vivid. maybe it’s my mood that i savour more in the black and white version.

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some days ago i discovered the landscapist blog. what an amount of food for thought, in a way almost intimidating. man & nature # 19 ~ reading a photograph grabbed my attention, and even my illiteracy regarding barthes’ punctum thesis did not stop me from at least trying to follow.

later on, going through my pictures again, i was pondering this idea of the punctum again, trying to find a connection to my own body of work. the picture above maybe comes close – do you discover the punctum?

maybe i should read the original of this theorem. the landscapists interpretation at least seems to be flawed in the sense of ignoring the cultural roots of all our interpretational skills, and my image of the vesak lanterns is an example for this. from perceiving the subject, the odd combination of barbed wire and colorful lanterns, you don’t get the point of the picture even if you know where it was taken and what vesak is – one of the most important buddhist holidays in sri lanka – and this point cannot be photographed or included by omission, but it has to do with some further knowledge.

the picture was taken on the east coast of sri lanka, in a region where tamil villages mix with muslim ones. without influence of racist politicians, all these ethnics and religions coexist with the buddhists, and those are the absolute minority in this region, almost non-existent outside of army and police. an army, which is at war since 30 years with the tamils who form the majority on the east coast. hence the barbed wire. punctum.

but maybe i got this whole idea wrong…

nice pat on the back yesterday: in my flickr account i found a mail from a journalist of tamilweek.com, notifying that they had – in accordance with the creative commons license i put on my pictures and blog – taken my blog entries and compiled them to a news feature named portraits from kalmunai. What I found appealing and a positive experience is the fact that they did not clandestinely copy and paste, which is something that so many authors experience nowadays, but behaved like high-standard journalists from the good old days in the midst of the snake pit internet.

content-wise i made my rants about the political situation there heard, now i just wait for the miracle that this has some effect.

what a boost for my ego: last monday the ‘sueddeutsche zeitung’ (1.35 mio readers) has printed the picture above together with a report about the results of munich’s activities in eastern sri lanka.

[edit:]regarding the ego: of course the whole project is a gratification per se: being able to dedicate your energy to the improvement of the life circumstances of victims of such a large scale disaster is a value by itself. it’s only that i am not always an ideal selfless person-

therefore you will understand my disappointment about the fact that my authorship wasn’t mentioned… well, joy and sorrow always take turns.

giving the pictures on the todo-list more attention – for lack of new convincing shots, that is – i found this one again and after in-depth inspection i am astonished again about the fine rendering of colors and details at iso 1600. This is really a great achievement and well worth last years investment in a new camera body. and in this context the new nikon d700 with its suspected low noise at high iso is really attractive. poor me who has invested quite some money in sony mount lenses… sony unfortunately seems to go the ‘more megapixel’ way which will definitely not make me buy a new camera body, and if it’s only for the reason that all my postprocessing can just handle the present 12 million pixels per picture and will slow down to unusability with the 24 million pixels the new sony will offer.

acknowledging the fact that 99% of the views on my images come through the internet at resolutions of ~ 1 million pixels, and for the rare prints and exhibitions the resolution of my camera’s sensor is sufficient, just more megapixels is simply not attractive at all. ’nuff said.

if there is a single one photographic situation that i do like most, it’s backlight in all its variations. it gives so much opportunity for drama, for hiding distracting things, for abstracting from a world full of diverting colors into the essence of shapes and silhouettes. in the picture above as well as in the prior “kalmunai fishermen” the beauty of form is intensified.

in grey past a.k.a. my film days, backlight was always difficult, specifically when shooting slides. in my experience, dslrs are well suited for backlight especially in situations where you can easily chimp or bracket. and my sony a700 seems to keep a lot of highlight information in its raw files for discovery with a suitable tool, lightzone in my case.

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this image is a mystery to me. i regard it very highly (otherwise i wouldn’t show it), but flickr seems to have a differing opinion, or better no opinion at all of it. all the pictures i put on flickr get views, comments even without promoting them, but this one: not a single view in the three days since it has been uploaded.

so i do hope i can blame it on flickr…

saturday mornings visit to schönram bog was a success in terms of recreation, but not so much in terms of pictures. the frog concerto was good to hear but impossible to visualize and overall i was too late for the early morning mist that gives that bog such an impressive ghostly atmosphere – sunrise is at 5:15 at the moment and the 30 minutes of driving were enough for the sun to develop sufficient strength to quickly dissolve the remainders of the fog. it seems that i have to encourage my ‘go’ a little more – see paul lesters blog on the joy of waiting.

anyway, from my last mission to sri lanka there are some pictures left that i regard as worthy to be shown. like this one. it was taken with a 20 year old minolta zoom at iso 1600, and i am all over astonished again when i search for traces of image degradation that could be attested to this high sensivity.

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“no damage here after the tsunami”. i was astonished, as this area was flat, not far from the beach, but our companion from the municipal administration repeated it. so i started asking for explanations and after some minutes it turned out: people here had been poor before the tsunami, the loss of their huts didn’t count as damage worth accounting. to make this very clear: our company was not a hard-hearted bureaucrat but quite the contrary, father of two and very emphatic. and he understood my helpless laughter after i had understood his explanation.

and the people living here are still poor – their open pit latrine, barely 10m away from the open well illustrates the whole situation. it was this place together with the reading in the city profile that we decided to dedicate the surplus of the donated money to the building of toilets as a very first and basic item that might help the people to improve the circumstances of living here.

their unbroken sense for beauty, for order in certain places, for harmonic colors sometimes shining through made a great impression on me. my photography there, more documenting, more often than not under pressure of time, was rarely up to these moments so my framing of the top image was poor, much too wide, and cropping turned out to be the only solution to rescue this image.

since the tsunami of december 2004 those women live with their families in temporary shelters: that means huts with corrugated tin sheets as roof, maybe one and a half rooms, cooking outside, toilets and washing facilites shared with a big number of other families. while this may look bearable under warm and sunny conditions, in the 4+ months of monsoon it becomes a total mess – a deep swamp everywhere, seasoned with the threats of cyclones.

when foreigners on an official mission become visible, now there are sounds of protests. and it hurts me that we could not offer some more houses to be constructed from our funds, as apparently their own state prefers to spend the money on a war they cannot win: sri lanka spends 2.4% of their gdp (est. 2004, compare with 1.5% in germany) for their army, plus the (unknown to me) amount the need for police and special task forces, let alone their losses of the agonizing economy due to the civil war of more than 25 years.

oh, and did i tell you that this country could be a paradise on earth?

the tsunami devastated Sri Lanka more than 3.5 years ago. it’s traces can still be seen in the faces of the people. that man to the right, probably 15 years younger than me, lives and works next to the place he lost his family, barely 50m away from the shoreline. conversation was difficult, so he silently offered me a glass of tea and we stood there closemouthed in a place where i was already short after tsunami, covered in the smell of decaying corpses under collapsed houses.

the west and south of sri lanka got rebuilt pretty fast and well, as this is where the singhalese majority leaves. the east with the muslims and tamils was always neglected and still is. or could you imagine a city of 100.000+ inhabitants not having a single loader and truck? hospitals not sporting a toilet for the men’s ward? and still a number of tsunami affected families live in temporary shelters. as do the sometimes 180.000+ internally displaced persons (an excellent euphemism for war refugees) alone in this region. those war refugees get no compensation, in the camps they wait to be allowed returning to the shattered remainders of their villages after one or the other army was there. and racism shows its ugly face everywhere, making tamils fight muslims, tamils kill tamils, singalese fight tamils without end.

first post after 17 days. not that i had given up photography or was just lazy. no, i was simply without network connect – thanks to my administration which didn’t bother to come up with a gprs connection for my mobile (only applied for it 5 months ago) – in eastern sri lanka on a business trip. and business kept me busy so i couldn’t go to one of the internet cafes. ok, the first days i was too busy but then incidents started so i didn’t want to go any more. that whole sri lanka could be heaven on earth without that bloody war (pun intended) and not enough that singhalese and tamils fight since 25 years, now also the muslims and the tamils use kalashnikov bullets as arguments. it makes a difference reading about this in the newspaper or walking into a 16 year old chap without uniform but with a gun. ok, he was friendly “what’s your name, where do you come from…” but probably due to my white skin, which is giving me an edge down there. in the 11 days i spent in batticaloa, probably 10 people were killed in the neighbouring towns, for political reasons.

you see from this burst of words how upset and fed up i am.

photography-wise it still has to be evaluated: 20 gig of raw files, but mostly of official events. at least i took my chance to sometimes get up really early (sunrise is at 5:45) and go to the fishermen at the beach, here in kalmunai.

the east coast of sri lanka is a wonderful place – now that the fighting has stopped for the moment. i spent way too little time there. the co-workers in our post-tsunami project have become friends over the time, and their hospitality ist still overwhelming. due to the workload it was only in the early morning that i could sneak out for an hour trying to take some pictures.

these wooden sustainers on a construction site carry the formwork for a concrete ceiling. the look so fragile compared with the woodwork they use for this purpose here in europe, but wood is an expensive commodity over here (no commercial woods) and, in the end, the mere number make them strong

working through my archives i found this picture taken 2005 on a tsunami evaluation trip waiting in Colombo for the transfer to the east coast.

this photo on .

fishermen at the beach of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Silently they were watching the surface of the sea, but suddenly the started gesticulating and shouting, then discussing the best strategy for a catch with their muscular driven boats.

sudden high waves splashing into the pool gave an additional thrill to the kids bathing in there.

cloudy skies, sometimes the waves came through. off season the place was not crowded and gave enough opportunities to enjoy the play of the waves.

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Galle Falle Hotel, Colombo, originally uploaded by springm.

View through the lobby to the entrance

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