At very short notice, we had the opportunity to spend a few days in Mumbai as a warm up for our Safari to the Tiger reserves later in March of this year. Adam had been down in Hyderabad since the start of the year and we thought this was a good opportunity to explore Mumbai as a prelude to one of our photographic city-break tours. Mumbai is a wonderful city which has as many contrasts, colours, foods and vibrance as any you could name. As you would expect, it has its beggars:
What impressed us most was the Dhobi Ghat or Washers' Area, the City's largest laundry. This is where almost all of the clothes in Mumbai get washed, ironed and repaired. It is a photographers' dream with colour, movement and children who get to wash themselves at the laundry! The workers here are very proud of their profession and while the rewards appear low to us (2 rupees to iron a shirt) it is a proper job for all of them. We always like to see people who are very good at what they do and give 100%.
The clothes are washed in a concrete cubicle. This is a small area where a man (and it seems to be a man's job) spends his time washing (read beating) the clothes against a patthar or concrete block. It is very hard work and the guys become very fit!
There are many fantastic people around, most of whom seemed very happy to have their portraits taken.
And the children are so beautiful. Seeing these children playing delightfully as their parents washed their hair in the open-air laundry lifted any thoughts of our financial depression. While we spent over an hour there, we could easily have spent a day. Next time ....
All these photographs were taken with a Canon G10. This is an excellent "compact" camera with has the advantage of taking RAW images. Really excellent. The only disadvantage is that it cannot burst, ie take a sequence of shots. So for both of us used to rattling off 5+ images at a time to get the 'perfect' portrait, this takes one shot at a time. Julie's 5D SLR battery had died so we were stuck with the G10.
Food ... simply amazing. We would recommend Trishna for fish, Kebab and Curries for Northern Indian food, Konkan Cafe for a lunch on Banana leaves and Leopold Cafe for breakfast. Not the cheapest meals Mumbai has to offer, but exceptionally good value by London standards and no Mumbai Belly!
Thank you Mumbai!
Julie and Adam
Mumbai - 3 February 2009
Xmas and New Year: The Falklands, South Georgia and Antarctica
Happy New Year!! Credit crunch aside, we wish everyone a happy and safe 2009 filled with great experiences and photo opportunities.
Our Christmas/New Year expedition to the Falklands, South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula was terrific. The highlights were very rough seas - what an adventure, great traveling companions and numerous safe landings with terrific wildlife and scenery of course. 
This expedition is about bytes and bytes of photographs: at times you are spoiled for choice and simply don't know where to look. Our first landing at West Point Island on the Falklands gave us an outstanding viewing of Black Browed Albatross with their very young chicks and in some cases eggs in the nests. What great birds, we typically see them at sea and this sighting on land was very, very special. 
At Gold Harbour, South Georgia on Boxing Day we sat unharassed by the usual Fur Seals (one of our traveling companions has a great idea, sushi related, to put to the Japanese and Norwegian whalers which would deal with these sweet looking, prevalent menaces as a quid pro quo to leaving alone the reducing whale population - 'scientific research' aside of course). Anyway, the absence of Fur Seals meant we could plonk ourselves on the beach and without moving, have uninterrupted viewings of the belching, manky eyed but nevertheless intriguing Elephant Seals a few feet away, Penguins behind us or peering at us inches away, from the other side of the lens, watch the various Penguins coming up from the sea onto the beach in front of us and then sea birds running on water, coming ashore and then displaying remarkably their dominance over a carcass. We just didn't know where to look! The sun was shining, our tans were coming along nicely (we were warmer than we are currrrrrently back in London, (bbbrrr)) and the mountain - beach - small iceberg scenery was truly breathtaking. It is probably the most enjoyable photographic few hours we have ever experienced - that's a bold statement I know but we'll stand by it. 
Neko Harbour at the Antarctic Peninsula on January 1st was equally magical. There are 125 or so glaciers around the harbour so it's very, very scenic and you know you are in Antarctica and not merely at a stunning ski resort. Having recovered from the New Year's Eve festivities (an on-deck barbecue with Russian pop music that would trump a barbie on Bondi beach any day) we said Hello 2009 with some special times at Neko: Gentoo penguins with days old chicks, blue glacial backdrops and a magical iceberg filled harbour and avalanching mountain setting. The session was capped off brilliantly when right at the end of our zodiac cruise back to the ship, via various icebergs looking for a resident Penguin or Leopard Seal, we scored with a Gentoo readying itself to dive off the ice. Whoa!!! We had to be quick but the Canon 5D Mark IIs burst brilliantly and we managed to get a series of our Gentoo at very close range from sea level before our ever-obliging zodiac driver called time and we headed back to the ship for hot showers, lunch and the pulling of anchor. Ooh yeah, and this was only January 1st!
We are thrilled with the image quality of the two new 5D Mark II bodies - more on these to follow in a later Blog, but with one exception, (a programme dial which is too easily knocked), they get a big thumbs up from us.
So we are back in London and within two weeks we will have our trip report and 25 or so photos loaded onto this website. Let us know what you think. And for those of you interested in our next trip to Antarctica, we are working up our ideas for an even better 3rd trip, probably for Xmas 2010 so once again, please register your interest early as capacity on our favoured small ships is limited and six clients missed out on this year's trip....
Happy New Year and happy traveling.
ShutterspeedTravel
Canon "error 99" - 11 December 2008
On our recent trip to Botswana one of the Canon 1Ds Mark II started behaving oddly. When trying to take a sequence of shots the camera would freeze and up would come the message "error 99". This was rather tedious when shooting pictures of Lions cubs playing in front of us! At one stage we thought it may be the heat, but were not sure.
Botswana 2008
This year's Botswana's trip had a number of surprises. On arrival at Savuti we found the Savuti Channel flowing. This is a first for something like 24 years. Simply astonishing. So instead of seeing dusty elephants coming down to the small waterholes in droves, we found wading lions (and apparently swimming Cheetah), trying to get to their usual side of the Channel, and a variety of diverse wildlife not ordinarily seen at Savuti. And then at Duba, we had magnificent lightning storms, a lazy and uncoordinated Duba lion pride but lots of dusty elephants! All in all, the diversity of wildlife was outstanding - we have updated this site with our trip report and some of the hundreds of photographs taken.
Finland: bears, wolves, mushrooms and berries! - 31 August 2008
Friday morning before the Bank Holiday weekend saw us meeting up in Heathrow Terminal 1 to catch the Finnair flight to Helsinki. A couple of hours at Helsinki airport allowed us to have a light dinner before the flight up to Kajaani. We were picked up and asked if we wanted a good night's sleep or straight to one of the hides. We looked at each other, grinned and all agreed we were there to see bears so straight to the hide please. Just after midnight in pitch dark we made ourselves comfortable in the hide and settled down for a few hours sleep.
Next morning we sat looking into the mist at about 4.30am and suddenly saw a bear appearing from the trees straight across from us. 
High ISOs and we were snapping away .... then someone spotted something else ... although we continued snapping at the bear. Then we recognised the other animal. It was a wolf! Then another bear appeared from the left and we had to make some choices. The light was getting better and the sun was clearing the mist away and we had a fantastic first morning in the wilds of Finland. 
After about 8am the bears disappeared to go back to sleep and we were getting hungry. We were picked up and taken back to base camp where we had a great Finnish breakfast before heading for bed at about 10am! Up for a 4pm dinner (meatballs, cheese and and some great juices) and then taken to another hide. This evening proved to be madly busy. Bears were appearing left and right and more wolves! We were snapping away and all of us managed to get some great images. As the sun was setting the bears were walking right up to our hide and one looked right in. Scary! As we tried to sleep in our sleeping bags we would hear the bears splashing in the water but it was too dark to get any shots by then. 
Next morning Adam was up first at 4.30am and whispered "everyone up ... bears". It was still quite dark but right in front of the hide a bear was 'posing' then suddenly something spooked him and he raced across a shallow lake spray flying all over the place. More bears appeared and we managed to get some more shots as the light improved. Most of the time the bears were tolerant of each other and indeed of the wolves. Sometimes they would get aggressive and there would be some growling and teeth baring!
By 8.30am the bears had disappeared and we walked up to the road to be picked up for another fine breakfast. We were not so tired this time so we spent a little time photographing the mushrooms and berries which littered the forest floor around the cottage.
For our last evening we returned to the hide we were in on the first morning. More bear action all evening and we managed to get more shots than we expected. Lots of great bears until the light faded at about 9pm. Back to base for the luxury of sleeping in a bed! The base camp is an old logging cottage which is right by a beautiful lake. There was a sauna following which a few of the Finns jumped into the lake. We all wimped out and had hot showers!
A 4.15am wake-up call on our last day to get us back to Kajaani airport for our early morning flight. On the way home we managed to spend a few hours in Helsinki, tried the excellent tram system, fed some seagulls in the harbour until we were told off and then a spot of lunch before the flight home.
A plug for Finnair which was really excellent. No trouble with our rather extensive (and expensive) handluggage!
Great trip, short but lots of action. We will be returning in June 2009.
Julie and Adam
Recovering pictures from corrupted flash cards - 30 August 2008
As we arrived back from Finland earlier this week (blog report soon to appear) I tripped up and fell flat on my face. Never mind the cuts, bruises or my face ... I dropped the camera bag! That evening we were downloading our cards and Julie's Sandisk extreme III 16Gb card showed NO photos on it. Not at all good. Two possible causes: first my having dropped it and secondly that most of the shots were taken on a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II and then the card was taken out and put into a Canon 5D. This seems to break the index and corrupt the card.
Julie tried to recover the images using Lexar's image rescue program which has serviced us well in the past. This took ages to review the card, (we're talking hours), and then told us it could recover only 135 images. This was hopeless as we knew that there were hundreds of bear and wolf shots on the card.
Quick research suggested that Sandisk's RescuePRO might do the trick. $34 later it was on our main Mac. Within an hour it had recovered 719 images from the card. That is 584 more than using Lexar's program. 
Lessons for us:
1. It was a short trip to Finland so we had opted not to back-up the photos as we went along. Never again.
2. Swapping cards between two different models of camera is not advisable.
Clearly, RescuePRO highly recommended!
Adam
India expedition 2009 - 8 August 2008
In March 2009 we will be returning to India for another Tiger special. But there will be more, temples, villages and fantastic opportunities for people shots. You will be able to find a description of the trip on the top left of our home page.
Why india? Rather then what we say, this is what the French scholar Romaine Rolland said: "If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India!"
We will visit four reserves, three specifically to maximise the chances of photographing and watching one of these:
If you want any further details, give us a call or send an email ... we cannot wait!
Julie and Adam