I had a nice spread on the BBC's travel page earlier this week of my photos from Tsingy de Bemaraha in western Madagascar. Someone wrote me yesterday to ask if the photos were real or if they were faked.
The question stems from rocks seeming to float in mid air. Well, the pictures and the place are real. I have the scars to prove it. On the other hand it is the most bizarre landscape I have ever encountered. The truth is that if I had not seen the place with my own eyes I might not believe the photos myself.
The reason that rocks sometimes seem to float in the tsingy is that layers of soft sediments are occasionally sandwiched between layers of harder stone. Sometimes that softer sediment erodes away leaving the stones seeming to "float" unnaturally like in the BBC photo above and the image below.
And sometimes enough of the soft sediment erodes away that whole towers topple over and the area resembles a huge stack of fallen dominoes.
This is definitely one of my favorite frames from the Tsingy story. I like it not just because it is dramatic but because it show just has difficult moving throught the tsingy is. It is the NGM photo of the day today and on the NG site someone asked where I was shooting from. Well, I am perched on one of those sharp pinnacles and leaning out over John as he climbs out of that gap between pinnalces. I'm shoting with a real wide lens and looking almost straight down.
Usually by the end of an assignment I am done with a place, I've wrung it out and don't feel the desire to go back. Occasionally though I'll get a glimpse of somewhere new at the end of an assignment, some trip I'd like to take. At the end of my Tsingy expedition I went up the Manambolo river for a couple of days. That trip has stayed with me. Even as exhausted as I was after cramming a 12 week assignment into 6 weeks I loved the pace and beauty of the river. It is a place I have always wanted to return to.
After a year, I have finally converted my RAW selects from the 2009 Madagascar Stone Forest story. It is a good exercise to go through pictures a long time after you shoot them. It is much easier to remove the emotional memory of making the image from the picture itself. What struck me in going through the photos is the amazing diversity of animals that live in such an inhospitable place. So here for the first time, previously unseen pictures from Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park, Madagascar.
Tsingy de Bemeraha contains hundreds of square miles of limestone pinnacles. Also surprisingly a vast number of animals. Some are cute, some are creepy, all are fascinating.
