The Big Picture: Lathmar Holi

Photo © Adnan Abidi/Reuters-All Rights Reserved

I know....I've featured photographs of Lathmar Holi and of the main Holi festival a little too enthusiastically over the past few weeks, but the color is overpowering...and I'm in grey London on my way to India in a couple of days. I'm giving Holi a miss...landing in Delhi a day later, so I'm making up by posting really phenomenal photographs by Adnan Abidi, Manan Vatsyayana, and Kevin Frayer who've done a really great job of documenting this "pre-Holi Holi".

The Big Picture photo blog featured 22 of these photographs....each one better than the other.

Photo © Kevin Frayer-All Rights Reserved

Kukup Golf Resort at Kukup, Johor

Kukup Golf Resort (N1.36964 E103.44343) is located along the road to Kukup. It's approximately 13KM from the intersection of Pontian town. We visited the Resort for the 2 days 1 night getaway on weekend.

I like the resort environment very much! Our unit is located in some sort of nice garden! (photos below...)

We were on "113"...

The Green area we passed by...

The area was nice and clean! There are many units of chalets over there and we took the Family Suite with 2 bedrooms...

Chalet No : 113 - The Family Suite

There was a BBQ pit in front of our unit and I believe we can use it for BBQ dinner if we wanted to...
Once we stepped into the chalet, another suprised! The unit consisted of a living hall, a mini kitchen and 2 bedrooms with bathroom attached.
(The management do provide the buggy service FOC from the chalet to the clubhouse, just a phone call)

The Living Hall

I like the antique table very much!

The mini kitchen is located after the small wooden door just next to the living hall, and the bedrooms were on the both side...

The kitchen is behind the wooden door (right) and one of the bedroom on the left...

There was a small fridge, electric kettle and cups in the kitchen.

Kitchen

Both bedrooms come with different beds configuration, one with the King Size bed and the other was with 1 queen and 1 single bed. Both rooms have a ordinary television and air-conditional. We chose the queen and single bed room...
The management also provided another extra bed for us in one of the room...because we had total of 6 persons...:)

The King size bedroom

The room with 1 queen and 1 single bed

And the attached bathroom...

Water heater provided

The bathroom looks a bit run down due to the stains on the tiles...but anyway, it was ok for us. After we put everythings in the chalet, we started to walk around the Resort...the next surprised was...the swimming pool! Look at that! It's Huge and Beautiful!

Nice landscape swimming pool at Kukup Golf Resort, Johor.

There were another Olympic standard pool just about 30 meter away from the pool above. The children love the swimming pool very much and they spend almost the whole afternoon in it...

It's a really nice place to relax in the calm and quiet environment...and we rated this resort as one of the Best resort for weekend getaway! If you are golfer, you can even enjoy the 18 holes golf course in the resort.

I noticed there was a Karaoke pub and a Gym center had closed down...maybe due to no demand...

The Family Suite cost RM323.70 per day after the taxes on peak season. It's comfortable and reasonable!

We had a rest after the swimming session and heading towards Kukup town (merely about 7KM away from the resort) for our Seafood Dinner! :)

Kukup Golf Resort

Pekan Penerok,

82300 Pontian,

Johor.

Tel : +607-6960950   Fax : +607-6960963

http://www.kukupgolfresort.com.my

Emai : info@kukupgolfresort.com.my

Location map of Kukup Golf Resort at Kukup, Johor.

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Mary Calvert: Bhutan: The Art of Archery

Photo © Mary Calvert-All Rights Reserved

Bhutan's national sport is archery, and Mary Calvert documents the sport in her Bhutan: The Art of Archery photo gallery.

In Paro, I witnessed a couple of these archery contests, some impromptu and others more elaborate, in the valley where one could see the famous Tiger's Nest monastery. Apart from these contests being raucous, and during which I was told that opponents were fond of distracting each other by insulting each other, they are taken very seriously by participants and spectators.

There are two targets placed over 100 meters apart and teams shoot from one end of the field to the other. Each member of the team shoots two arrows per round. Traditional Bhutanese archery is a social event and competitions are organized between villages, towns, and amateur teams. 

Mary F. Calvert is an award winner photographer who worked as a staff photographer for eleven years on the award-winning staff of The Washington Times. She will be teaching Intermediate photojournalism at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington D.C. In addition to being a guest faculty member of Momenta Workshops, the Western Kentucky University Mountain Workshops, the NPPA’s Flying Short Course, and the Eddie Adams Workshop, she has been a member of the faculty for the Department of Defense Worldwide Military Photographers Workshop in Ft. Meade for the last fourteen years.

She was honored with the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in International Photography for her project, “Lost Daughters: Sex Selection in India” in 2008,  and was awarded the White House News Photographers Association Project Grant to document sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Some of her clients include The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, AOL, The New York Post, Inside Counsel Magazine, McClatchy-Tribune Photo Service, The International Herald Tribune,  Le Monde, Mother Jones, and The Christian Science Monitor.

Smithsonian 9th Annual Photography Contest

Photo © Kyaw Kyaw Winn-All Rights Reserved

I never participate in photography contests, but I know many of my readers do, or would like to. So here's one of the more popular contests featured by The Smithsonian magazine. 

Its editors have announced the 50 finalists in its 9th annual photo contest, which has five categories: Americana, The Natural World, People, Altered Images, and Travel.

In Focus, the photo blog of The Atlantic is featuring 25 large sized photographs from the final 50 finalists, which include some stunners from David Lazar, Nicholas Wiesnet, and Budi Prakasa. However, the one I liked the most was the photograph of soccer-playing Buddhist novices in Myanmar by Kyaw Kyaw Winn.

I ought to also highlight that The Smithsonian magazine’s 10th Annual Photo Contest begins March 1, 2012 and ends November 30, 2012.

Some may wonder why I am so empathetic about not participating in such contests. Here's why:

"By entering the contest, entrants grant the Smithsonian Institution a royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive license to display, distribute, reproduce and create derivative works of the entries, in whole or in part, in any media now existing or subsequently developed, for any educational, promotional, publicity, exhibition, archival, scholarly and all other standard Smithsonian purposes."

MSNBC: Lathmar Holi

Photo © Manan Vatsyayana / AFP - Getty Images

I featured quite a number of posts on Holi in the past weeks, and I'm not about to stop now especially as a number of photographer friends will soon be on their way to Mathura and Rajasthan to document the festivities.

MSNBC's PhotoBlog just featured a couple of large photos of Lathmar Holi, a festival which took place yesterday, a few of days before the actual Holi celebration. It takes place at Barsana near Mathura, where people flock to celebrate the revelries.

The Lathmar Holi festival begins with a ceremony at the Radha Rani temple. The legend has it that Radha and her friends decided to teach a lesson to Krishna for stealing their clothes at a bathing ghat, and in a sort of re-enactment ceremony, the male villagers in Barsana smear themselves with colors while the women attack them with wooden sticks in response to their efforts to put color on them.

More here with Kevin Frayer's photographs. On one of these photographs, the colored water was clearly splashed on his lens!

Alfonso Moral: Machine Man: 69th POYi

"Allah has said that a woman should behind 5 fences"

Alfonso Moral and Roser Corella were awarded POYi's First Place Award for Long Form Multimedia Story with their Machine Man, a documentary dealing with modernity and global development, with men (and women) as machines.

In Dhaka, Bangladesh, men and women undertake hard physical tasks with machine precision and routine: they load their bodies with heavy materials; they manufacture bricks; they separate plastics and they drive rickshaws. They are the machine men, a mass of millions of people who become the driving force for the city.

There's a lot of powerful work by a variety of photographers on POYi 69th which has announced its winners. However, I decided to feature the work of Alfonso Moral (photographer ) and Roser Corella (editor) on this blog, not only because Machine Man is a very well done documentary, but because they're freelance.

I might take some flak for this, but the photographers and photojournalists backed by powerful newspapers, magazines and other media such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and the National Geographic getting awards have a considerable edge over others who don't enjoy this backing. It's therefore refreshing to see that POYi chose freelancers for this category.

Alfonso Moral is a Spanish photographer, who worked for a while with El Norte del Castiliano newspaper. He later moved to Syria and began focusing on the Middle East from where he covered Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq in addition to elections in Afganisthan and the Hezbollah movement in Southern Lebanon. Apart from winning a photojournalism grant for his work on the Palestinian refugees, his work was featured in El Pais and Newsweek amongst other publications. He is currently based in Barcelona.

Richard Van Lê: Cao Dai

I've recently found this updated short movie on Cao Dai by Richard Van Lê, which fits my current mindset, as I am thinking of a photo expedition-workshop to Vietnam in the near future.

Cao Dai (Cao Đài) is a syncretistic, monotheistic religion, officially established in the city of Tay Ninh, in southern Vietnam, in 1926. Its first disciples claimed to have received direct communications from God, who gave them explicit instructions for establishing a new religion. It's a blend of elements from Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, and Animism.

Its saints' list is rather an eclectic one; with Buddha, Confucius, Victor Hugo, Joan of Arc, William Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Louis Pasteur, and Jesus.

More background on Cao Dai can be found here.

Richard Van Lêis a New York City-based photographer, filmmaker, and multimedia designer. He is the founder of 138 Media LLC.