Tag Archives: travel

Ethiopia in January (A Gallery)

Okay, so it wasn’t frosty, but the nights were a little chilly, I swear. I am uploading some not-so-recent travelogues to the the world wide interweb, and realized this trip to Western Ethiopia from January 2011 had some amusing images. I have made quite a few trips out there since but this was the first time I landed in the farther reaches of Illubabor, as well as covering Jimma pretty well. There is a lot of promise for wet-processed coffee in the West, which was traditionally sold as low grade, undifferentiated dry-process coffee. With the new work we are doing there, farmers are receiving premiums far beyond what they ever could get for natural coffees of a commercial level, and much of this is based on the fantastic work of Technoserve to provide business advice, agricultural assistance, and market support to these cooperatives. -Tom

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Travel Photography by HDR

I have been taking photos in multiple exposure and HDR modes for at least a year.  It’s not only about handing over the results to an algorithm.  It was about changing the role of myself as the picture-taker and whomever was on the other end of the lens as the subject.  They resist being known (as if an image could know). I free myself from the presumption of knowing.  How could I anyway?  The speed is recorded.  It’s a failure in so many ways, as traditional photographic content, ethnography, and landscape.  There’s more but I won’t go on.  These are from Ethiopia Jan-Feb 2014.

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Billboards Blank Space

I take pictures of blank or available billboards. Maybe it is boredom. Maybe it is that they occupy an already empty space between here and there. I know that, as ones eye is drawn to advertising when there is little else to look at, I find it a relief when the canvas is empty, when there is nothing there to draw your interest, no matter how slight. There’s some assurance there, that there will always be blankness. These are culled from the last 2 months, so I imagine going back a few years there are many hundreds along the same lines.

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