NEPAL (KATHMANDU + POKHARA)

In May, we spent about a month in Nepal, where I shot + filmed for some awesome organizations, including my good friends at Portal Bikes and Epic Rides Nepal.  What an amazing trip!  Nepal blew me away.  I especially fell in love with the vast, rich history that you can feel in every alley and street in the Kathmandu.  We were welcomed by kind and thoughtful people and ate the most amazing food.  The trip was absolutely amazing, but the timing of it was a bit crazy: we had been living on the road January - beginning of April.  When we got back, we went under contract to buy our first house.  Then, our dog had surgery to remover cancer in her leg, which required daily vet visits for weeks.  We left for a month in Nepal in early May, and we closed on our house three days after we got back, packed everything up, and then moved house the next week.  It was a complete whirlwind of good things :)  

We had so many adventures in Kathmandu - when we arrived at the airport, there were three large pallets filled with crates of baby chicks, but not the mountain bike we had checked as baggage (don't worry, it came a few days later); we wrapped our bikes in glowing EL wire and zoomed through the alleyways at night; we gave a taxi driver wrong directions and ended up wandering around a spice market halfway across the city; we successfully got a welder and three trunks full of tools through customs; when we got attacked by monkeys at Pashupati Temple, I physically fought them off using my 70-200 2.8 lens as a bat; we drank delicious coffees on rooftops surrounded by fluttering prayer flags; I was surrounded by a group of young monks in training who watched over my shoulder as we filmed bike footage in the dense forests on the outskirts of town.

From my journal: Kathmandu feels OLD, and at the same time, oddly familiar: narrow alleys, low doorframes, lots of dark, rich wood, oxen on the sidewalk downtown lazily munching on corncobs from someone's hand.  A thousand bicycles weave in and out of traffic.  Our guesthouse is lovely - rattan woven floor mats, dark carved wooden beams, mosquito netting, just steps away from Patan Square where the butter lamps shimmer at night under a hazy full moon.  Everyone is kind, and the streets are elegant and charming and mazelike, with tiny birds chirping, and the scents of coconut rice, spices, diesel, incense, curries.

Check out the video I shot for Portal Bikes! 

[vimeo 100753829 w=1280 h=720]

hawaii & my 30th birthday.

So it's official.  I am now officially old... which is actually totally fine by me.  I had way more fun in my 20's than I did in my teens, and I had way more fun in my late 20's than I did in my early 20's, so I'm just going to go ahead and assume that my 30's will be off the freaking hook.Thanks to frequent flyer miles, we headed to Hawaii in March for my birthday, and stayed with one of our best friend from Buena Vista, who now lives on the big island.  I've been to the big island before but haven't spent a ton of time there until now.  We totally fell in love with it! Nowhere near as touristy as the other islands, and everything is so green and rural - there are tons of big plantations and family farms.  The whole island (Hilo included) is so laid-back, friendly, slow-paced, and quiet.  I loved it!

Yep, this is still Hawaii... the  view from the Keck Observatory on the top of Mauna Kea!

Hiking Hi'ilawe Falls in the Waipi'o Valley:

Now, the really awesome bit.  Here's what we did for the actual day of my birthday:

1) The night before, try to sleep a little bit.  Not very successful.

2) Get up around 1:30 / 2 am

3) Drive a few hours towards Hilo

4) Park and start hiking another few hours across crazy sharp lava flows in the dark

5) Find the point where lava is still actively flowing into the ocean

6) Sit and wait for the sun to come up

7) Drink champagne

8) Hike back, find a greasy breakfast joint, drive back, pass out around 1/2pm.

Please ignore the cheesy white shoes.  I didn't bring anything other than sandals, not realizing we were going to be doing so much epicness - so, on the drive down to Volcano, I stopped and bought the cheapest pair of closed-toed shoes I could find.  $4.99 at WalMart, baby!  Glad I did - that lava was SHARP.  One of the craziest parts of this whole hike was feeling the ground beneath my feet start to get warmer as we got closer to the active lava.  I knew we were getting really close when we could see steam coming up from these huge fissures in the ground.  Nope, my shoes didn't melt, but for a while I was sure they were going to.

Pretty epic, if I do say so myself :)

adventures in africa : part two (the girls' home)

We spent a sunny afternoon and warm evening at the girls' home, about a three hour drive from our home base in Naivasha.  Friends Vision sponsors many of the girls there, and it was so fun to get to know some of the kids who have had long-standing relationships with Jannah and Peris.  Many girls were a bit older than the kids at the safe house, and they got a kick out of hamming it up for the cameras - singing songs together, dancing, showing off, and just generally being goofy.  The girls' home is on the edge of a gorgeous, lush valley, and we got there just at the start of the golden hour when the light is absolutely perfect.Since these girls are a bit older, they had much more experience with English, and it was SO FUN to talk with them and get to know them.  We talked about favorite foods, favorite colors, and life in the States.  My absolute favorite part was asking what they wanted to be when they grew up, and these lovely young ladies have some serious plans for the future.  Doctor.  Lawyer.  Accountant.  Pilot.  Singer.  And  no part of me doubts that they can do it.

Many girls needed updated photos for Friends Vision's sponsorship program - instead of your standard basic snapshots, we giggled with these girls through portrait mini-sessions in the late-afternoon sunshine.  As with the kids at the safe house, many of the girls were quite perplexed by my light blonde hair, wanting to braid it and stroke it.  One girl looked at me questioningly, and said, "Um, your hair is very...bright!"  A perfect description :)

On the drive to the girls' home.

Check out this glorious light!

Serious model face.

Africa's Next Top Model: Kenya edition :)

All this modeling is hard work sometimes.

A little behind the scenes action:

We were able to leave another donated camera and laptop, complete with office software and educational programs.  Here, the girls are trying out Rosetta Stone:

If you're interested in sponsoring one of these amazing kiddos (and please do!) you can connect with Friends Vision here.

adventures in africa : part one (naivasha)

Although I returned from Africa several months ago, I have had THE hardest time figuring out how to update you all, and what to possibly say - the first, most logical problem being the sheer number of images to sort through.  It's rare for me to have my camera attached to my hand for almost a month straight.  After shooting a wedding, I usually end up with a few thousand images - and that's just from one day of shooting.  Yikes.  The second and larger problem is that Kenya, and all of the lovely people I met while I was there, have come to mean so much to me, and it's something that I'm having a hard time expressing.  I'm sure you expect to hear that this trip was life-changing, and, well, it was - but that's so cliche and doesn't come anywhere near expressing what I felt and experienced while I was there.  If you haven't yet checked out the video I put together, click here.I was talking with Jannah, the director of Friends Vision, as we were driving through Naivasha, where Friends Vision is based.  Naivasha's in the heart of the Rift Valley, also called the "Cradle of Life"; it's where "Lucy", one of the earliest human ancestors, was found.  Traffic regularly slows down for herds of zebras, and giraffes awkwardly, casually, munch on the acacia trees by the power lines on the side of the highway.

"There are so many people who come here for the first time, and say that they have a strange sense of finally coming home." Jannah said.  And it was true - Naivasha is so beautiful, and teeming with life and color, and although I had no direct history with the place, I felt oddly familiar and comfortable as we drove down Longonot Pass and dropped into the valley.  I felt a strange sense of belonging, like Africa was already a part of me.  I wondered if there was any way this could be an ancient, ancestral, hardwired part of my DNA.  Being there feels like being present for the beginning of time, in the best possible way.

The Great Rift Valley:

Lake Naivasha.

The view of Lake Naivasha from our "home":

Naivasha was our "home base" and where we spent much of our time.  It's a small, bustling, rainbow-colored town, and I adore it.  We spent a lot of time with the sweet kiddos at a safe house - a center for kids who are dealing with custody issues, or who are removed from their homes for their safety, or who simply get lost and have trouble finding their way home.  The kids stay there for anywhere from a few days to a few months until their issues are dealt with in one way or another, and most of them are on the younger side.  For their privacy, we won't be posting any images of their faces online - but trust me, they are all absolutely precious, wonderful, beautiful kids.  We brought a few of our donated digital cameras, and taught the kids some basic photography lessons.  They paid such close attention, and the detailed questions they asked about cameras and photography made me realize they were really getting it as the weeks went on. It made my heart swell to watch photography "click" for some of them (no pun intended) - at first, they would all just stand in a line, grab the camera when it was their turn, stand in the same spot at the front of the line, snap a photo of anything in front of them, then hand the camera to the next kid in line.  Towards the end of the week, we worked out a system where each kid would get the camera for a few minutes, and would run around the grounds, carefully taking photos of their favorite things, posing for each other, setting up scenes with stuffed animals, and noticing details around them.  Yay!

Waiting patiently in line to use the cameras:

The team sorting some of the donations we brought with us - clothes, accessories, and toys galore!

Many of the clothes and toys that were donated went to the kids at the Safe House.  As portrait photographers, we thought it would be fun to play dress-up with a few of the girls and take some portraits.  We ran this by the director of the Safe House, and she and the kids took it a step further and came up with an even better idea.  Everyone - the boys and the girls - got dressed up in new outfits, and the girls all had their nails and makeup done by the staff at the Safe House.  We dragged the school chairs out into the courtyard, and put on a fashion show!  The boys walked down the runway one by one as the girls giggled and screamed and clapped.  Then the girls went one by one, strutting down the runway and striking poses for us, the "paparazzi".  Then we shot quick portraits of each child, all dressed up for the camera, then we all had a giant jumprope and dance party.  Literally one of the best, happiest days of my life.  A few days later, we were able to have the pictures printed at a shop in town, and we brought prints back to the Safe House so each kid could have a copy of their portrait!  We were able to leave the Safe House with several donated cameras and a laptop, stocked with office software and educational programs like Rosetta Stone in several languages.

Judy, the wonderful director, checking out the prints:

To those of you who donated clothes, toys, or cameras - THANK YOU.  More to come soon!