Growing up, stories of El Paso were often the topics of road trips as my father drove us from Georgia to Texas to visit my family in Dallas/Forth Worth. My father attended the University of Texas, El Paso for a time, so stories of Juarez, the desert, and the big skies of west Texas were spoken fondly of as I sat and listened in childlike awe of a place I had never seen until much later on in life. Perhaps some of the details of life in a border town during the 70’s were omitted, but I can just imagine the shenanigans he got into. I wish I could go back and speak to him as an adult (RIP Pops) and hear the more mature versions of these stories. Hell, maybe they’d be the same stories and I’ve had this idea of what it could have been like in my head and it’s nothing more than that. Maybe it was far wilder than I imagine it was. Either way, the lure of El Paso has been in my head from a very young age despite not ever really spending much time there.
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Travel Diary: America Part 1 - Georgia
Scheduled to head back home in March 2020, for obvious reasons I didn’t get to take that trip. After 6 years, I made the trip back to the States to visit friends and family. That feeling of a mixture of familiarity and, contrastingly, feeling like an outsider at the same time is a strange dichotomy I forgot about and was instantly greeted as the wheels hit the runway. Living overseas obviously changes you, but in ways that I’m not sure I ever anticipated. It’s like watching a movie you’ve seen before. You’re not a part of it, but it’s all so familiar…. Until those things pop up that you’ve not experienced since you left. The sudden overwhelming sense of comprehension of everyone’s small talk, social cues, and nuance…. It’s a lot. But on the other side of that coin, not knowing how to carry yourself because of the sensory overload. Shifts in social interactions, world views, etc…It’s a mental obstacle course.
Read MoreTravel Diary : Indonesia
One of my favorite places on earth, Indonesia lures me back constantly with its beaches, rugged landscapes, underwater wonderlands, and general laid back lifestyle. This trip took me to Nusa Penida and Amed in Bali and the Derawan Islands in Indonesian Borneo.
Read MoreTravel Diary: Sydney
After two long years of not being able to travel internationally, we finally got a chance to hop on a plane, use the passport and revisit our home from before Saigon. Sydney holds so many memories, friends and, as we found out on this trip, new corners and neighbourhoods to explore.
Read MoreTravel Diary : Hoi An, Vietnam
As most of you know, I help run tours in Central Vietnam with Pics of Asia with one of my good friends, Etienne Bossot. Also, unless you’ve been living under a rock under another rock buried next to Jimmy Hoffa, you’d also know travel has been sketchy and inaccessible in Vietnam the past year or so. So, when I got a chance to finally get back to Hoi An, I told Etienne we had to go shoot one morning
Read MoreTravel Diary: Hanoi 2020
Since Saigon is going through its 3rd week of “Social Distancing Measures”, I’ve been going through the archives while redoing and updating my site (hint hint, go take a gander!). In the process, I came across these images from the last time I was in Hanoi last November. One of my favorite cities in Asia, Hanoi offers endless photo opportunities. Hopefully we can all get through this wave quickly and hit the road again for more adventures!
Read MoreFishing Villages in Central Vietnam
Recently, I had the opportunity to hop up to central Vietnam and jump on the tail end of one of our Central Vietnam photo tours. It’s always lovely to get to this part of the country and with Quinn joining too, a stellar day of shooting with friends was guaranteed. As a guest, I got to explore this little area a bit more than when I’m teaching, so it was a chance to see this place with some new eyes and a different approach. Not to mention seeing friends whom I haven’t seen since covid reared its ugly head. Okay, enough prattling, here’s a selection of some of my favorite frames.
Read MoreSerenity in Lak Lake, Vietnam
Over the Lunar New Year this year, my wife and I had the chance to head up to a location I first visited in 2007. Faint memories of the lake and the surrounding hills had me quite excited to see Lak Lake with new eyes and show my wife what I remembered as storybook countryside. Originally, we were going to stay for a few days and then head down to Con Dao, but covid took care of that, so we stayed put and turned 3 days into 10. With not much to do, I initially thought we may get bored, but that turned out to be the polar opposite of what ended up being such an amazing decompression from the city. Hikes, quiet mornings, mists rising over mountains and lakes…it was everything I remember and more. Largely off the radar, (well maybe not anymore), this little bit of paradise is the cure for what ails ya if the city life starts to be too much.
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