Posts Tagged ‘Burma’
Crumbling Burmese Architecture for WSJ Magazine
January 24th, 2013In October of last year I had the wonderful opportunity to travel to Burma to photograph at the behest of WSJ magazine. I was following in the footsteps of writer Tony Perrottet as he painted a vivid picture of the challenges surrounding the preservation of colonial architecture facing Yangon (formerly Rangoon) as it opens itself up to further tourism and regional investment.
The architecture in Yangon – and all the crumbling buildings – was like catnip for a photographer like me who absolutely loves photographing the spaces that we as people inhabit. I also had the good fortune of travelling on to Bagan and Inle Lake to explore more of the country.
I am planning on going back to Burma this year on a number of occasions (it is a bit of a commute) to continue photographing the country as part of a personal project.
You can see how the story ran here: rowat_wsjm_201302_burma-architecture
You can see some additional outtakes here: http://andrewrowat.com/travel/burma-all.html
Service Service Service v2 – Four Seasons Thailand
November 15th, 2010I was recently at the sublime Four Seasons Tented resort in Northern Thailand and it reminded me of the first time I had ventured there for work a few years ago (this most recent time I was there off the clock).
http://andrewrowat.com/design/design02-2.html#1953,39
At the time the resort had just opened and I was shooting for Travel + Leisure’s hotel issue. In fact one of the images ended up being used as the cover.
If you have ever stayed at a Four Seasons you know that in response to any request they will always say “Certainly.”
“I would like a unicorn to deliver my low-fat extra-hot latte with the morning paper. And if you could arrange for a full moon that would be terrific.”
“Certainly.”
So on this particular shoot one of my light meters (I always carry two – redundancy!) decided that it was no longer interested in performing its core function. So I had a very dead light meter on my hands.
I popped the light meter open (this one had already gone for a swim in Australia once upon a time and been revived with a de-ionized water bath at a marine research station on Heron Island) to see if I could see anything that was obviously broken.
And lo and behold it looked like some solder points had cracked. Given that we weren’t exactly in downtown New York (the tented resort is located in the Golden Triangle on the border of Burma and Laos near Chiang Rai) I wrote it off for the rest of the shoot.
Four Seasons engineering staff weren’t having any of it. They absconded with my light meter and I went back to shooting. But not for long.
Soon enough my light meter returned, working perfectly fine, with all the contact points flawlessly re-soldered. Amazing.
“Can I have my light meter fixed and re-soldered along with that latte?”
“Certainly.”
Travel + Leisure Cover - Four Seasons Tented Resort Golden Triangle - Photographed by Andrew Rowat