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The first few days of my assignment in Vietnam was spent in district 1 of Ho Chi Minh City (3 nights at one of the A&EM hotels). The hotel was just a 2 minute walk from city’s main market – Ben Thanh Market.

Two mornings in a row I wandered around amongst the produce and seafood aisles watching and photographing the shopkeepers prepare for the day. I didn’t realize how nice it was to be in the market early until I returned in the afternoon to find it a mad house with hardly room to move, let alone compose photographs without being a nuisance. The Vietnamese seemed to enjoy watching this very curious white boy with the big camera, and were kind enough to let me obsess over their critters.

Of the photographs I took one of those mornings the macros catch my eye most.

Part of the work I’m doing in Vietnam for the World Wildlife Fund includes documenting the booming furniture manufacturing industry. In the last two weeks we have toured four very large scale manufacturing plants and I’ve seen more deck chairs than I could have imagined.

All these chairs are made of wood– some of which has been harvested locally in Vietnam but a higher percentage is imported for processing. With such a demand for wood there is an obvious concern that the forests are going to pay the price for our patio furniture.

Thankfully WWF and others are working with the furniture industry to help find the best solutions to responsible wood sourcing. One such program led by WWF is a worldwide partnership organization called the Global Forest and Trade Network. “The goal is to create a new market for environmentally responsible forest products.” Several of the furniture companies we’ve visited have been active members of the Vietnam branch of this program.

Another well known program is the The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). The FSC is an international organization that “brings people together to find solutions which promote responsible stewardship of the world’s forests.”

A big part of responsible forest management is tracking the wood through the entire process from a tree in Uruguay, to Vietnam for processing, to a retailer in Europe. For my part I was able to document the documentation at Dai Thanh furniture manufacturing company here in Vietnam. Dai Thanh was clearly keeping track of their wood, and seperating any ‘non-FSC’ wood from their mostly FSC certified products.

I’ve made a quick edit from the tour of the Dai Thanh processing plant to illustrate this process for you.

It’s true!

Iliamna Lake is home to one of two known freshwater seal colonies in the world. The only other documented seals living in freshwater are in Lake Baikal, Russia.

Update: Since posting I’ve found reference to two other unique seals living in freshwater – Ladoga Seal and the Saimaa Ringed Seal. Commenters (see below) have also claimed there are many more instances of seals living in freshwater including a small colony in Lac des Loups Marins, Northern Quebec.

The photo above was taken on March 9th as I lay on the ice of Iliamna Lake with several friends, excited to finally be seeing with our own eyes these mysterious seals. To the locals living on the shores of Iliama Lake this photo will come as no surprise, the seals have been companions for generations.

Despite their long history of inhabiting Iliamna Lake, very little is known about these rare freshwater seals. Many people I’ve spoken with have heard of them but too many questions have gone unanswered. After discussing it for a couple years, several friends and I made an expedition to Iliamna Lake to document that the freshwater seals do in fact spend their winters there. It has been common knowledge that the seals live in the lake during the summer months, but many we spoke with assumed that as winter approached the seals swam back down the Kvichak River that drains Iliamna Lake into Bristol Bay.

Stay tuned for more photos and information about the freshwater seals of Iliamna Lake. This is just the beginning of our efforts to document these seals and their lives in the often icy waters of Iliamna Lake.

A few facts about Iliamna Lake: 1,000 sq mi (2,590 sq km), 75 mi (121 km) long and up to 22 mi (35 km) wide, SW Alaska, at the base of the Alaska Peninsula. It is fed by many lakes and streams; the Kvichak River drains it SW into Bristol Bay. The lake is an integral part of the largest remaining wild sockeye salmon runs in the world, it is also downstream from the site of the proposed pebble mine, which if developed would include the largest dam in the world to hold back the toxic waste created in the hard rock mining process.

The question: “Do you have a Jazz photo you would be willing to donate to a fund raising auction?”

The answer: “No, but let’s go make one, can you help find a willing model?”

Local saxophonist, Dave Webster, made himself available for a quick photo shoot as the sun disappeared over Cook Inlet. It was cold, but he patiently made music for 20 minutes while I worked at capturing an image worthy of occupying a jazz enthusiast’s wall space. The goal was an image that not only says jazz, but also tells a little bit more – Something about jazz by the sea. The photo was framed by the Art Shop Gallery, then auctioned at a fund raising event for the 2008 Homer Jazz Fest.

The photo has grown on me, that’s why you’re seeing it posted here. Lately I’ve found that when doing an initial edit on a photo shoot an image will very subtly make an impression in my memory. Those images then quietly circulate in my mind daily. This is exciting! There has been a lot of time spent analyzing photos in the recent years- soul searching in efforts to define what type of image I love most.

What could be more satisfying for a photographer than to be enchanted by one of his own images?

Below are a few other images from the shoot:

Tech notes: Canon 1DmIII camera body, Canon 24-70 2.8 lens. We were a few minutes late to catch the 15 minutes of sunlight that day so I rigged up a 580 EX II strobe light bouncing off a 22″ silver umbrella. The strobe was triggered by the canon ST-E2 wireless transmitter and dialed down about 1-2 stops for most of the shots. All photos adjusted in Lightroom, signature added in photoshop cs3 and ‘saved for web’. The featured photo was exported from lightroom as a color image, then a layer mask was used to desaturate everything but the saxophone.

Thanks to Dave Webster for modeling.