Everybody's Bruce Lee

The perfect playground for some twelve year old boys...a plain white plastic drop cloth for a stage and someone with a camera! One of Jan Nikolai's photos of the Abu Sir children.

Smiles For The Camera

I never ride without a camera and in this case I was riding with a friend who also had one. Some of the village boys were climbing up into a huge mulberry tree to get the last of the spring fruit with the aid of a highly dubious stack of bricks. I got a shot of them, which was nice, and my friend Kelly got this one of me showing the boys their picture on my camera, which was much better.

The Photography Elf's Friends

Years ago a friend of my daughter's gave me a plastic lizard that we called George. He lived on the dashboard of the jeep and gave great fear to many gas station attendants until he had an untoward end when the jeep (The other jeep, the good jeep, the newer jeep) fell into a canal while in another person's custody. The person and the jeep survived (the jeep more or less and needed to be sold while the going was good.) but George had vanished never to be seen again. A few years later I spotted George the Second at a bazaar, enchanted by his orange and green stripes. George the Second took up residence on the dashboard but he isn't scary at all, so another well-meaning friend decided that we really needed Snaky, a yellow plastic snake, as we were missing the gasps and hand jerks that the original George had occasioned. Another friend gave me George the Small, another beaded gecko, for Christmas. Ok, everyone. That's enough reptiles. It's getting crowded here and I'm worried about Mohamed spending too much time photographing toys.

My Life

I took my camera out when I went to play with the horses and check that they had their flymasks on. Flymasks make wonderful toys in the sand paddock. My big Thoroughbred/Arab mare Stella came up to me to nuzzle my neck and ear while I was trying to get a shot of the mules playing across the paddock and I took this silhouette of us. I wouldn't trade my life with anyone.

A Natural Model

I love the faces of people everywhere but Egyptians are very open and they are right there...in your face. This old man came up to me on his camel near the pyramids and demanded to have his photo taken. He was a bit disappointed that I would have to download to a computer to have a large view, but thought that the small picture he could see on the camera's display was pretty good.

The National Sport

If ever a country was made for photography, it is Egypt. Not only are there so many subjects available, but the light itself is extraordinary.

Taking a Watery Break

Canals are a fact of life in the Nile Valley. They were used in pharaonic times as well, although not as extensively as they are now since the building of the Aswan High Dam and the end of the yearly flood. They are slow-moving bodies of water with a lot of decaying plant matter in them giving them the dark colour of peat bogs in Europe. Many of my favourite riding trails wind along them and one of them is the cause for a hopefully brief break in posting to this blog.

Yesterday my young gelding Fagr and I went for a short unplanned swim in a canal when his back leg slipped off the path and he was unable to regain his balance. Though the experience was, to say the least, shocking to both of us, neither of us sustained any real damage due to our swimming adventure. I wish I could say the same of my mobile phone and my beloved Lumix, which I had only just received from the Panasonic service shop where it had spent Ramadan having two motors replaced due to dust damage. During that hiatus, I made due with the camera in my Nokia...but the Nokia was also in the saddle bag that got thoroughly soaked in the canal and while both machines will turn on, they are acting in an utterly erratic fashion. I'm just hoping that Panasonic will be able to fix the camera in something under a month this time.