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I've just reached home in Malaysia, after driving 17,000 km over 65 days in a 4x4 Range Rover, starting from London and passing through Holland, Germany, Poland, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, China, Laos and Thailand.
I brought along a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II with a 16-35, a 24-70, a 70-200 and a 15mm Fisheye. I used the 24-70 the most, followed by the 70-200. I shot about 160 gigs of RAW images, all downloaded directly into a PD70X Digital Wallet fitted with 2x80 gigs notebook HDD. The PD70X is one of the fastest Digital wallets around, needing less than 4 minutes to swallow the contents of a 2 Gig Sandisk Ultra II CF Card. I didn't bring a laptop and all batteries were charged off a 1000w DC to AC inverter plugged into the cigar lighter socket of my car.
One of the most useful functions on the 1Ds Mark II, besides its fabulous full frame sensor, is the facility to do audio notes directly into the camera right after a shot. It was so convenient to simply dictate your notes which are automatically given dot wav names similar to your images. No more pens and notebooks.
Where there were hotels we stayed in hotels, but many nights we slept in sleeping bags in hotels of a thousand stars, and cooked our own meals from locally bought fresh produce. We had a 12 volt refrigerator in the car in which we stored fresh food and drinks. When it was the birthday of one of my friends, we bought and spit-roasted a whole lamb beside Lake Balkhash deep in Kazakhstan. I can still taste that roast lamb. It was the most delicious that I've ever had. We also stuffed ourselves silly with caviar and faux-caviar bought by the cupful in Russia. Kazakhstan is mostly an arid desert where Russia used to test their Atomic bombs, and where they still send up and bring down cosmonauts from space. Its rich in oil and minerals and the Kazakhs have built an ultra modern new capital at Astana. To say the journey was interesting is perhaps an understatement, because I simply wouldn't know where to begin if anybody asks the question, "How was it?"
So I'll just let some pictures do the talking, and I hope they will encourage more people to go out there and see our wonderful world. This first installment of a series I plan to do will feature images from Russia and Kazakhstan, because the former communist states are still a mystery to most people .....
Fist off, here's a view of the Kremlin that you will see across the Moskova River if you enter Moscow by driving in from the East as I did. During the cold war we thought of the Kremlin as the nerve center of the Soviet War machine. Kremlin actually means Fortress and the Kremlin has about 20 Red Towers along its fortress walls. In the picture, from the right, the first red tower is the Bezymiannaya Tower, and then the Taynitskaya Tower. The building on the left is the Grand Kremlin Palace which used to house the Tsar's imperial family. It has more than 700 rooms, and the inside is lavishly finished with frescoes and paintings. Next to the Grand Palace, the first group of golden domes are those of the Annunciation Cathedral, then the Dome of the Dormition Cathedral, the domes of the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, and the tallest structure is the Bell Tower of the Kremlin. The Red Square is directly behind all these buildings outside the Kremlin. Within the Kremlin Walls there are several cathedrals and a few palaces. The Russian Senate building and the President Putin's office is also in there.
And here's a cliche' picture from Moscow that everyone whose been to Moscow will shoot. It's the "Lollypop" Cathedral, the signature image of Moscow, otherwise known as the Cathedral of the Intercession or Cathedral of St Basil the Blessed. This is the Taj Mahal of Moscow. It was built by Czar Ivan the Terrible in 1555-61, to commemorate the victory of the Russian Army over the Kazan Khanate, which effectively ended the Tartar-Mongol yoke over Russia. That victory united most of Russia under Moscow rule, and it was said that the designer of this cathedral had his eyes gouged out so that he could never again design such a similarly beautiful building. The Cathedral is actually nine churches, each with its own unique dome, and all laid on a pedestal. Eight of them are grouped round the central Church of the Intercession, whose hipped roof rises nearly 50 meters above the other eight domes. In 1588 the popular "fool of Christ" or Basil the Blessed, was buried in one corner of the Cathedral. A tenth Church was built over his tomb, and since then the whole Lollypop ensemble has been known as the Cathedral of St Basil the Blessed. It's a sight to behold, especially from the Red Square and particularly at night. From the other side, the view for the photographer has been ruined by the masses of overhead tram-car wires. I feel this is easily the most unique structure in Moscow, not the most beautiful though, because Moscow has so many beautiful buildings. It looks almost like a mosque, if not for the crosses above the domes. ...
And here's a JPG compressed 100% crop of one of the domes to illustrate the power of a full frame sensor. After minimal post processing in Photoshop, a flattened Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II RAW files can easily baloon to more than 150MB. At that 16bit resolution, a poster of a meter by a meter shows no artefacts at all.
And this is the Cathedral of the Annunciation, one of several magnificent cathedrals within the walls of the Kremlin in Moscow. It was completed in 1489 as the church for the Tsars and princes of Moscovy. It is located just opposite the complex of royal residences and palaces within the Kremlin. This church is where the Tsar and his family celebrated christenings, weddings and daily prayers. The interior is richly decorated with frescoes and the floor is tiled with agate and jasper to match the luxurious decor of the adjoining royal chambers. I couldn't help thinking how expensively gaudy all the decorations were, and if I were a peasant and I see these luxuries, I'd probably bear a huge grudge against my emperor, huge enough to willingly participate in a rebellion to overthrow them. I came to the palaces of the Russian Tsar saddened by what I had read about the brutal murder of the family of the last tsar, but after seeing the opulence of their surroundings, I couldn't help feeling some of the resentment that must have led to their eventual removal.
I was surprised at the number and variety of very old and splendidly preserved cathedrals in Russia, because I had believed that Communism frowned upon religion. In my journey across Russia, I must have photographed at least a hundred of them. So if you are interested in this type of architecture, Russia is the place to go. In the tiny village of Suzdal for example, there were more than 30 magnificent cathedrals for the less than 100,000 villagers. Many of them were more than 500 years old and have been well preserved or restored. Suzdal is internationally recognised because UNESCO has listed Suzdal as a UN world Heritage Trust site, which means it will receive international funding to help maintain thsse gorgeous buildings. .....
And there were many mosques too, especially in Kazakhstan where nearly half of the population is Muslim. Here's the Sharif Mosque in the city of Kazan, in the Eastern part of Russia. This mosque was completed only in August 2005 on the site of an ancient mosque razed to the ground during the siege of Kazan in the 15th century. It was rebuilt as a sign of the new tolerance in Russia, to commemorate the 1000th anniversary of Kazan, in September this year.
Outside of the cities, Russian houses are quite tiny. For such a technologically advanced state which has nuclear weapons and were the first to sen men into space, I felt the living conditions of villagers in Russia were almost medieval. Here is a typical Russian house in the countryside near Vladimir, about 150 km outside Moscow. Their colourful windows were the most conspicuous.
And here's probably one of the reasons why the farmers are so poor. In medieval times the Tsar and the Church must have heavily taxed the peasants. In modern times, the arms race and the cold war were the reasons. This is the magnificent Assumption Cathedral, one of about a dozen in Vladimir, and only two kilometers away from the house of the Russian Villager above. The ancient city of Vladimir was the center of North Eastern Russia in the 12th century. It was the capital of the Vladimir-Suzdal region until it was sacked by the Mongol-Tartars in middle of the 13th century. Moscow defeated the Tartar Khanate and acquired Vadimir in 1364. and since then it has been part of the Russian Federation. The original Assumption Cathedral was built around 1152, but it has been burned and reconstructed many times over the centuries. The present Cathedral is believed to have been built in the 1880's. The Cathedral sits high on a hill beside the Klyazma River and it is visible from as far away as 15 km. More than 4000 people could fit into this Cathedral.
And here's another reason for the chronic poverty in old rural Russia. The Tsars liked everything extra large. This is the Tsar's Bell - possibly the biggest bell in the world. It weighs a gigantic 200 tons, and is about 6 meters in diameter at the base. The bell was originally built for Tsar Alexi in 1635. It was hoisted into the bellfry of the Asumption Cathedral in the Kremlin, but it fell to the ground and shattered in a fire in 1701. A replacement bell was cast in 1735 from the shattered pieces of the original bell, but while the bell was cooling off in its casting pit in the ground, another fire broke out. They had several kilns around the bell pit with each kiln pouring in several tons of molten metal into the mold during the bell-making process. The fire probably started from one of the kilns. Water draining into the casting pit during the process of fighting the fire caused a chunk weighing 11 tons to crack, and break off, and because of that, they simply left it there. The bell lay in its great pit on Ivanovskaya Square for almost a hundred years until 1836, when it was raised and placed on its present granite pedestal, next to its broken section. The Tsar's Bell is three storeys high, and that pedestal is almost the height of a man, and you really have to stand beside the bell to appreciate its enormity. And within the Kremlin walls there is also the biggest cannon in the world. The Tsar's Cannon is more than 5 meters long and the barrel alone weighs 40 tons.
And this is Lake Balkhash in Eastern Kazakhstan at sunset. We camped by its banks during our drive across Kazakhstan. Its an amazing and beautiful lake - the eastern half is salty, and the western half has fresh water. The lake is more than 600km long and 400 km wide. It is fed by several rivers, including the Karatal, Lepsi and Lli. The eastern part is shallow, as a result of diversion of waters from the Lli for irrigation and power generation. This gradual strangulation of the eastern part of the lake is the reason why it is becoming increasingly saltish and polluted. In winter the entire lake is usually frozen. The fresh water western half is still beautiful, a turquoise gem in the orange expense of the Kazakhstan desert. At sunset it is a sight to behold.
Seven almost crazy bikers from Malaysia also accompanied us during our trip. Crazy because you need to have your head examined if you are willing to ride 18,000 km over 60 days from London to Malaysia through some of the most inhospitable parts of Central Asia. A few of the bikes broke down repeatedly from the punishing terrain, and we had to put them onto hired local trucks until we could get or fabricate spare parts for them. This is one of the rewards for biking - a swim in warm fresh water at a beautiful campsite beside Lake Balkhash.
I will try and put up more pictures on another occasion. For now I hope you'll enjoy this brief insight into where I was a few weeks ago. You can view more pictures from Russia and Kazakhstan http://www.digitalartist.com.my.
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