global gGalleryFileNameList, gmmList, gISOList, gfstopList, gTitleList, gCaptionList1, gCaptionList2, gShutterList, gCategoryList
on initPhotoInfo2
set gCaptionList1 to list("An abandoned ubosot - the building in a Buddhist temple complex used for ordination - in Thailand's Chiangmai Province. Actually, it's highly unusual to find a religious building in such a ruined state like this. The setting, in the middle of rice fields, was so evocative that I returned to it one dawn in November, when it was surrounded by a fresh rice crop, glistening in the morning dew. ", "A New Mexican albanil (adobe mason) restoring an adobe wall near Santa Fe. People immediately at work are rarely distracted by photographers, and so not usually self-conscious. In any kind of manual work, there is always some moment, some gesture that stands out. The thing is to wait and watch for this.", "From across a river bank, this African buffalo was motionless and uninteresting until it final decided that it had had enough of the attentions of a small group of egrets, and turned rapidly. I had been waiting for something to happen - in the event I had had the long lens trained on the buffalo for about ten minutes. A standard feature of wildlife photography is that most large animals spend most of the time doing very little.", "A square in Aix-en-Provence, France. What makes the shot is the animated gesture of the man sitting at the café table. This was just a matter of reacting quickly enough. Framing the shot so that the couple are to one side rather than in the middle of the picture makes them just a part of the scene.", "I spent three months photographing the Akha, a hill-tribe in the area of the Golden Triangle, across Thailand, Burma and Laos, most of the time in one village. The traditional dress, particularly of the women and girls, was a major reason for choosing this tribe. This is a 14-year old Akha girl from the village of Maw La Akha in Chiangrai Province. Over her decorated head-dress, she wears a plain cloth mantle - protective wear when working in the fields around the village.", "A young hill-tribe girl runs past male totem figures guarding the entrance to an Akha village in the north of Thailand. These figures, often with strong phallic representation, are renewed each year. Those of previous years are left untouched, to rot into the undergrowth. I was living in the village, so knew it well, and on this misty morning I was looking for views of these totems. Silhouettes against a setting that recedes into mist are a natural in these circumstances.", "A meandering tributary in the northern Amazon. I had hired a light aircraft for a day, and we were exploring. The shape of the river, set among pristine rain forest, made such a clean image that it has been used many times by publishers, including the cover of a Time-Life book - in fact, it was this shot that gave me my start in photography.", "We had arrived well before dawn at the west entrance to Angkor Wat - incidentally, the largest religious monument on earth - but the sky was completely thick with clouds. This was the middle of the monsoon, and I could hope for very little in the way of good lighting. But once again, the day had its surprises. For a very short time, before sunrise, the lower edge of the nearest cloud bank cleared, and a strange, deep red glow threw the towers of the temple into silhouette.", "The ninth-to-thirteenth century temples at Angkor are probably the most evocative ruins in the world, particularly in a Romantic sense. I hated the idea of posing anyone to give that 'Lost Civilization' look, but I did want something like that. I was rewarded one day as a villager happened to walk through the face-tower of this temple. This is the kind of image with which an art director closes a magazine story or book - and it was.", "Bear and Rabbit Rocks, Monument Valley, Arizona. I chose sunrise as the best time to show the silhouettes of these formations, and used a long-focus lens to isolate and abstract them. The rabbit is more easily recognizable than the bear. Forecasting the exact position on the horizon where the sun appears is often difficult - it rises at an angle, except in the tropics. So I set the tripod on a nearby road, and kept the car engine running so I could quickly relocate the camera if needed.", "Market photography is one of the standards when traveling, because of all the life and activity. One thing I like to do is to get right into crowds with a wide-angle lens, to catch the sense of being there. It needs, as here, a fairly small aperture.", "Just before the monsoon starts in the dry northeast of Thailand, the villages perform a kind of rain-making ceremony by firing homemade rockets into the sky. Part of the proceedings is an intense and drunken celebration. After a day of drinking, these teenagers were in a world of their own, and had covered themselves with blue dye. There was a wildness about them that I liked, but at the moment I took this picture, I was seconds away from being decorated in blue myself!", "Panning the camera to follow a moving subject, and using an intentionally slow shutter speed, can turn even the most prosaic image into a graceful design. By choosing a dark background - a group of trees - I was able to keep this seagull outlined clearly even through a one-second exposure. This kind of shot is always something of an experiment.", "Top-hatted stock brokers in the City of London. These used to be a fairly common sight, then one by one dropped away. In any case, they were so recognizable that I decided this time to experiment by using a very slow shutter speed, hand-held very loosely, to give a sense of the rush and energy of the financial district.", "A game of boules in the fishing port of Cassis, Provence. Again, a matter of timing - catching the ball in frame and in mid-air, with the man in an interesting stance. I took a number of shots - one per throw - and this was the best.", "Shooting at movie special effects studio Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), I had to do a series of shots showing how each type of effect was created. This is a blue screen, used to separate an object or person from the background, so that they can later be inserted in another scene - a standard movie procedure. This is the model car featured in the film Back To The Future, and for authenticity, I used the blue screen myself to isolate the image of the car.", "The owner of an innovative and successful noodle restaurant in London was making a cookery book, and wanted some unique photographs of his creations. I suggested making a series of digital compositions. I spent two days shooting de-constructed dishes - all the ingredients separately, and then spent much longer at my computer re-assembling them. Each image had a theme which reflected some aspect of the dish; for this Char Su Ramen, it was 'classic formality'.", "The fishing port of Iconi and the volcanic crater N'gouni, on Grande Comore, principal island of the Comoros, in the Mozambique Channel. In fact, the entire island is an old, collapsed volcano; these small coastal craters and the blue Indian Ocean are a natural spectacle. I used a small helicopter early in the morning, when the weather was certain to be clear - photographer heaven.", "This scene looks a good deal more pleasant and romantic than it really was. This Burmese woman is cooling lime for road construction by pouring buckets of water over it. The lime of course, is caustic, and the fumes are none too pleasant. What attracted me, nevertheless, was the natural grace of the woman's movements.", "A cyclo driver in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, takes an afternoon nap - a respite from the hard and badly paid work of carrying people and goods all over the city. The scene, and the light playing on it, seemed to sum up an old-fashioned afternoon on the tropics.", "Sunrise over Holy Island and Lindisfarne Castle, in the northeast of England. The light in the early morning was so calm and delicate that it couldn't fail to turn this view into something special. I stood at the end of the stone jetty and found a fisherman about to go out in his dinghy.", "Devil Dancer on Corpus Christi Day in a small town in Venezuela. This is a unique religious event, which happens on one day a year in this one place. People dressed as devils dance in the square and come to the church for blessing - one of those odd rituals that blends animism with major religion, in this case Roman Catholicism. The colors make it an easy spectacle to shoot, but I liked this quiet moment between dances, when I could concentrate on just one man.", "Dith Pran, whose role Haing Ngor played in the movie 'The Killing Fields', returns home for the first time since the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge. Many of his family died during the regime, including his parents, and I was with him in Cambodia for a magazine. This was the moment when he met his sister and the remaining family for the first time in fifteen years. I was extremely uncomfortable to be shooting this, but it was why we were all there - Dith Pran included.", "Dozmary Pool on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, where Sir Bedivere is supposed to have flung King Arthur's sword Excalibur. I was shooting a story on Camelot, and the locations needed to look evocative. When I arrived it was pouring rain, and the small lake looked no more than a muddy cattle pond, with not even a tree in sight. The next morning before dawn was the same. Miraculously, however, just as the sun came up, the clouds parted momentarily, and I got my shot.", "Elephants from the Shangoni herd in South Africa's Kruger National Park flee from the advance of a helicopter. The pilot is separating animals for capture under a relocation program.", "A flock of flamingoes over coastal mangroves in Florida's Everglades. I had hired a Cessna for the end of the day, so that the setting sun would give the maximum contrast of lighting to the mangroves. We had to circle several times to get just the right juxtaposition of birds and swamp - this was exactly what I was looking for, with the birds highlighted against a channel.", "In Athens, I spent a day with the Evzones - the Palace Guards. Their uniform includes a skirt called a foustanella. Each morning time is spent preparing it for parade. The combination of this effeminate skirt and the tough soldiers who wear it is marvelously incongruous. After tugging and pulling at the skirt, the corporal inspecting this guard stood back to take a last look. I like the juxtaposition of a disembodied head concentrating on a tiny skirt worn on muscular legs.", "I was having breakfast on the terrace of a hotel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, when I saw these fishermen working their nets on the Mekong River just below. I'd never seen this exact way of hauling nets, and the whole complicated structure was tailor-made for a silhouette against the reflection of the rising sun. I cropped in tightly with a telephoto lens to avoid the distractions of the rest of the river and the opposite bank.", "A sad small event: on a hot summer's day, what was Ontario's oldest church goes up in flames. The fire department was on the scene in minutes, but to no avail. What actually impressed me was how fast the fire took hold. There was just a little smoke to begin with, but within several minutes the fire was raging out of control. The shape of the doorway shows that this is a church, so it made for a more effective image to close right in.", "Flamingoes take flight in unison from the mangrove swamps of Rio Lagartos, a major breeding ground in the Mexican Yucatan. They get their intense color from their diet of shellfish. The moment of take-off, when the birds go from ungainly to aerodynamic in a few seconds, is fantastic, but difficult to catch. Because they are extremely wary, it took nearly two hours moving around the flocks in a boat, to finally capture this image.", "As Vietnam slowly opened its doors, I went several times, on each occasion trying to go somewhere different and unvisited. Deep in the Mekong Delta, I found this spectacular floating market, in one of the poorest and least-developed provinces, Soc Trang Province.", "Gangs of street-children - gamines - live rough on the streets of Bogota and other cities. Abandoned by their parents, they live by petty crime. I was doing a story on them, and this was the residence for one group.", "Traveling up the Tapanahoni River in Surinam, I saw this girl fishing from a dugout moored at the water's edge. It was dusk and the last of the evening sun caught her fishing line. I didn't expect to be able to take a sharp, unshaken picture from our rocking canoe, since I needed to use a long telephoto, but I tried anyway. I had time to shoot only two frames, at a speed too slow for a hand-held 400mm lens, but this one worked.", "The face of one of Thailand's most famous Buddha images, cast entirely in gold and weighing 5 tons. I used a 400mm lens at its closest focusing distance to get this highly concentrated view.", "A light aircraft below the one I was in gave me the essential scale for an aerial view of the Grand Canyon. I used a wide-angle lens to show as much of the canyon as possible and to keep the image of the other aircraft as small as possible. This is a variation on the time-honored technique of including people in a large landscape for scale. The shot was timed for the moment the white Cessna crossed the shadow of a cliff, so it would stand out clearly.", "Of all the pictures that I've taken of the Grand Canyon, this is the one that, for me, works best. It works because of its simplicity: a stack of distinct planes, and a limited but balanced range of colors. It was taken from the South Rim with a 400mm lens looking into the sun. To avoid flare, I was careful to shield the front of the lens with my hand (the camera was mounted on a tripod).", "From the air, the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park presents a remarkable palette of colors. They are due to the temperature of the water, heated by magma below the surface, which sustains terraces of brightly colored algae. The only problem with this wonderful view from the air is that every photographer who flies over takes a similar shot - I have trouble identifying which shot is mine from the several versions regularly published in books.", "Rough seas and a storm created a scene that looks more extreme than the actual conditions would suggest - no more than a miserable summer's day on the south coast of Wales. I liked the complete lack of color, and enhanced the effect by under-exposing slightly and by adding a neutral graduated filter to deepen the sky.", "Haing Ngor with the remains of Khmer Rouge victims at a killing field near the temples at Angkor, in Cambodia. Ngor, who won an Oscar for his part in the film The Killing Fields, himself suffered an ordeal of imprisonment and torture under the Pol Pot regime. He was murdered in Los Angeles in 1996.", "A worker on a pearl farm inspects half or 'blister' pearls, which are cultured onto the shell rather than in the tissue. To make the image as graphically strong as possible, I opted for an overhead view, from a conveniently located bridge.", "Hippos are photogenic under all circumstances, but the arrival of this Red-billed Oxpecker (Buphagus erythorhynchus) added a new level of interest. Both were enjoying an afternoon in Lake Manyara, Tanzania.", "One of the very, very few pockets of temperate rainforest is here in Olympic National Park, in the state of Washington. The Hoh Rainforest is drenched in green and in rain in equal proportions, and looks more primeval than any rainforest I've seen in the Amazon or Borneo. I used a wide-angle lens on a large-format camera to get the maximum detail of the ferns and leaves, and found a view that is all forest - no sky or anything else.", "Hunting dogs, Mikumi, in Tanzania. These animals are now quite rare, so we were very happy to come across a pack. Shooting from a Land Rover from 20 or 30 yards away, I was able to get a number of photographs over a period of about quarter of an hour.", "Spotted Hyenas fighting over the remains of a carcass in the Serengeti. As with most wildlife photography in savannah grasslands like this, the usual method is to photograph from the top of a vehicle - actually standing up inside and looking out of a hatch. It's then mainly a matter of having a driver and guide who know their business and can get you to the right spot. A very long lens is essential so as not to distract the animals. ", "In a longhouse far upriver in Sarawak, Malaysia, an Iban man rests after a day's work. What attracted to me about the image was that because of the extreme contrast between light and shade it took a few seconds to recognize - it's not too obvious.", "In Tsukiji market in Tokyo - the world's largest fish market - a pre-dawn inspection of frozen tuna before the daily auction. A prime fish can easily fetch the equivalent of more than US $1000, so the inspectors work hard. The artificial lighting, the mist from the frozen carbon dioxide and the unearthly shapes of the headless and tailless tuna combined to make a very peculiar scene. I used a moderate telephoto lens from this angle to show the orderly ranks of the fish.", "In an experiment, I used a couple of rolls of false-color infra-red film (with a suitable filter: orange) in a flight over the Mazaruni River in Guyana. The violent red is typical of healthy vegetation on this special emulsion, invented originally for camouflage detection and forestry surveys.", "In the crater of Ngorongoro, in the African Rift Valley, a jackal makes off along the water's edge of Lake Magadi with the leg of a flamingo, probably killed by a hyena earlier in the day. ", "On its way to the front, a Cambodian army tank drives by the ancient temples at Angkor. To make the most of it, I stepped out into the road and squatted down, shooting with a medium telephoto lens. As if on cue, the driver hit the accelerator, and produced a cloud of exhaust fumes. I wasn't sure if this was for my benefit or because he thought it might be fun to run me down. In any case, I shot quickly and stepped back.")
