My wife Leah and I are leaving today for a month long trip to Ghana. Leah will be working at a hospital during the weekdays in Kumasi, so we will have the weekends and one whole week at the end of the trip to explore Ghana. While Leah is working I will be finishing up some editing and designing all of my wedding albums from the 2009 wedding season. I will not be reachable by phone until we return on November 15th but I will have regular (if not daily) access to email – so if you have questions or if you would like to get in touch with me about photographing a wedding in 2010, send me an email or use my contact form. I should mention that in the last few days I have booked two weddings for the fall of 2010, so if you are thinking about getting in touch with me about a wedding, you should do so soon.
We took another trip to Africa about two and a half years ago – that time we went to Swaziland, which is on the other side of the continent from Ghana in the south east. We also took side trips to South Africa and Mozambique during that trip. I am excited for the experiences we will have there and the pictures I will bring home. I took some time in the last few days to look through some of the pictures I took from our previous trip. I picked out a few of my favorites and I have decided to offer a print sale to offset some of our travel costs.
The image above left is probably my favorite from the trip – it is a wall of a public market covered with layers of torn political posters. The prominent faces are a good starting point for a history lesson of Mozambique. The middle image above is from Milwane Game Park in Swaziland – I took many pictures of animals there but I liked this picture of the Baboon that we did not see better than all of them. The picture above right is of a mural at the Phophonyane Lodge in Swaziland. The picture below is also from the Milwane Game Park. It was getting dark and starting to rain, so I took it hand held at a very high ISO setting, but I like the low-fi look of it and it still prints well in large sizes.
I am offering matted prints of these four images at a very reasonable price in two sizes – $50 for 8″x10″ prints and $150 for 11″x14″ prints. Prints are available for sale online; I will be taking orders until I return on November 14th for these. I also included the option to purchase one of these prints and another print to be named later from my current trip at a discount. All prints from this sale will be shipped out in the first week of December, in time for holiday gifts.
I plan on spending a fair amount of my time in Ghana working on personal photographs. I have a few ideas of things that I want to shoot at this point, but I am sure that I will be surprised as well. On my trip to Swaziland I was able to make some photographs for Young Heroes Swaziland, an organization that supports extended families caring for AIDS orphans in rural Swaziland. It was an incredible eye opening experience for me and Young Heroes use these photographs to raise awareness for their work. When I overhauled my website last winter I removed all of my non wedding work, so I have re-posted a slideshow of the portraits I made of the Young Heroes orphans and their grandparents, aunts and uncles. Click on the strip of pictures below to play the slideshow.
I hope to post pictures from our travels in Ghana to this blog while we are there; check back soon!
