Portuguese folk dancing in Belem Lisbon Portugal
Tag: Park
The magic of photographing the Shetland Islands of Scotland
In 2011, I left my flat in Edinburgh and headed to the far north of Scotland to Lerwick in the Shetland Isles to cover the 2011 Tall Ships Race. I stayed in Lerwick several weeks and was also working on a feature for the Scots Magazine on the Neolithic culture of the islands.
Sadly, my meagre budget did not allow for extensive travels and much of the work I shot there was subsequently lost. However, luckily, I had edited and backed up quite a lot of the select images and still have quite a nice portfolio.
The story I did on the Iron Age pub of sorts at Jarlshof got published (with a different byline) in The Daily Record and OK! magazine and has sold in one or two other places as stock. Not much else from my Shetland portfolio was published aside from news images from the 2011 Tall Ships Race (in The Daily Telegraph and The Scotsman).
Although by then my Canon 550D was incapable of long telephoto shots (and I lacked one anyway), I could shoot at around 300mm with a slight sensor crop and so I tried to get pictures of birds and other animals in their habitat.
Again, most of these have never been published. If you would like to use them in your project, then please contact me for details on how to license my images.
While the conditions can sometimes be harsh so far north and in the summer, the sun goes down about 3AM, I enjoyed working there and the combination of good light (sometimes!) and great subject matter made it a magical experience.
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Great environmental portrait in the Everest Himalaya of Nepal
I shot this environmental portrait with my trusty Voigtlander Bessa T and a 25mm f4 Skopar lens. Thanks to the subject, Pemba Sherpa, I managed to pull off a successful trek to strengthen a story on climate change in the Himalayas which I was shooting for Hollandse Hoogte Photo Agency.
Pemba is a great character of the Everest Himalaya of Nepal and I hope that this portrait does him some justice.
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Everest mono project on the Sherpas being edited
In the years 2005-2008, I spent quite a lot of time working in the Everest Himalaya of Nepal. Returning with a large portfolio of work on 10MP Nikon DSLR and also many on 35mm film and a couple of digital compacts.
I recently found some time to scan in many of the 35mm frames and have also been re-editing the digital captures as well. I hope to have finished this mammoth editing task in the coming months, mostly for a book project.
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Tibetan Dropka nomads portrait in Namche Bazaar in the Everest region of Nepal
This is one of my favourite portraits from my travels in the Khumbu Himalaya ( Everest region ) of Nepal. These Tibetan Dropka nomads bring cheap Chinese goods to sell to Sherpas over the Nangpa pass and sometimes establish temporary markets to sell their wares. Mostly, they come from the Tibetan village of Ting Ri in Chinese-occupied Tibet. Although a separate ethnic group from the Sherpas, they do share their religion and some customs. Perhaps less so with the Chinese controlling the frontier than when Tibet was an independent country, the Sherpas and the Dropka sometimes marry. The arduous journeys undertaken by these nomads make them the highest traders on Earth and the Dropka of Ting Ri have for around a century been the backbone of many a Himalayan mountaineering expedition, especially the British attempts on Mount Everest from Tibet before it was climbed by Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953. Notoriously light-fingered, these nomads are the biggest tinkers I’ve ever encountered and I would often see them during many of the treks I did in the spectacular Khumbu Himalaya of Nepal. The image above is part of a photo essay on the Sherpas I am in the process of re-editing.
You can now find this image and others from this blog plus many more from my stock archive on my new high res stock image database.
Jonathan William Mitchell Writer / Photojournalist Blog 