BH Neely's Photography

The Blue Mosque, Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan

If you're into religious history, the Blue Mosque in Mazar-e-Sharif is one of a few reputed burial sites for Ali, Mohammed's cousin and son-in-law (there's a lot of that). If the history's important to you, the Wikipedia page for it is probably accurate enough.

I like it for the gorgeous, reconstructed tiles in several shades of blue (and other colors). From a distance, all you see is the blue. Up close, you see a) all the colors and b) the intricacy of the tile work. Should you happen to be traveling through Central Asia, and have a chance to visit, it's well worth it.

Emergency Exit, Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan

This is the emergency exit from the airport in Mazar-e-Sharif. It's not the smallest international airport I've ever been to (that honor goes to Uralsk International, in Kazakhstan), but it is pretty small.

Many of my friends have heard me babbling all weekend about The Plan. It's a simple plan, really...put together 60-80 photos for a sale. I'll be printing books to use as catalogues. Photos will be available in sizes from 11x14" to 20x24", including some square photos at 12x12" and 16x16". I'll also have three sets of greeting cards. Just getting the images ready has been something of a massive undertaking, using up all of my Friday and Saturday, but now the hard part's done and all I have to do is design three books and 12 cards, ship everything off for printing and hope like hell that when I have the sale people will buy them.

Road into the Hindu Kush, Afghanistan

I don't know if you know this about me, but I love to drive on winding dirt roads going into the mountains. I particularly love it when the roads are in terrible shape and demand a 4WD. So living in a place where I can't go driving off by myself is a little painful. But I do get to take helicopter rides over those roads occasionally.

Mountains, Somewhere over Eastern Afghanistan

Not a bad start to the day. The DC-3 rumbled down the runway, took off, and very quickly we were at our safely low cruising altitude, just above the mountains. The misty haze or hazy mist made it one of my favorite ways to look at mountains.

Banana Still Life, Kabul, Afghanistan

I bought some local bananas and peaches and did what any self-respecting artist would do...made a still life. The kiwi is from the cafeteria, imported for our dining pleasure from elsewhere.

Subdivisions, Kandahar, Afghanistan

Turn this into a map, and it's northern Virginia or Federal Way, Washington or pick your favorite faceless subdivision that starred in Rush's delightful excoriation of suburban living. But here, "conform or be cast out" can have genuine meaning.

Brick Factories, Kandahar, Afghanistan

So what do you do with all that sand? Make bricks. Between the melon farms are brick factories. See the squarish piles around the foreground smokestack? Bricks. Stacks of bricks larger than a double-trailer semi.

River, Kandahar, Afghanistan

As we flew over the area, I kept wondering what the hell made people stop walking when they got here. This is not a particularly unusual scene, except that the river has water in it. Someday soon I hope to have my computer (not this netbook) and be able to process photos. Someday. Soon. I only have four more chances to use MS Picture Manager without the product key (which is in the same crate my real computer is in).

Somewhere over Kandahar, Afghanistan

Yeah, it's hackneyed, but these are MY boots hanging out the door of a Huey.

Street, Kabul, Afghanistan

I had a chance to get out the other day. Driving (well, passengering) through the streets I had three observations. A) I need a point & shoot...specifically Sigma's DP2...so I don't have to wave a giant camera around in the car. B) The traffic, though chaotic, is much friendlier than it was in Almaty. C) I am so glad I don't have to drive here.

Updates will be sporadic, though once my hard drives arrive, I'll be able to work on art projects and post those. Thanks for your patience.

Alakiyiz Demonstration, Kochkor, Kyrgyzstan

On the visit to Son Kul Lake, I saw a demonstration of how traditional Kyrgyz felt products are made. The process is laid out in some detail at my Facebook page.

Currently, this particular alakiyiz is in a box in a shipping crate somewhere in Europe. We probably won't see it again for a year, maybe two.

If you want to be notified of updates to this page, you can follow me on Twitter @neelybh and you can hit the Facebook Like button at the bottom of the right-hand column on this page.

Thistles 2, Tamgali, Kazakhstan

So after last night's post, I worked a bit on this shot, and decided that I like it better.

Today's story? When we were leaving the petroglyph site, a family was setting up a picnic at the edge of the bone-dry grass. They hadn't brought cooked food, because you cook your shashlik (kebabs) at the picnic. Pre-cooked shashlik are just wrong.

Now, when I said, "at the edge of the bone-dry grass," I meant with the 4-foot-tall grass waving over top of them as they set up the stones for their fire. And look at these thistles. Do they look like they've seen water recently? So the family takes up some of the dry grass they flattened out for their picnic area and uses it as tinder.

Dry grass, once it becomes embers, floats upward. Where it impacts other dry grass. Which ignites. Which drops embers to the base of the grass. Which ignites. The wind blows a bit. And you have a prairie fire before you can say, "Crap, get the fire extinguisher."

As the family beat at the trailing edges of a rapidly growing fire, we took self-preservation in hand, hopped into our truck and sped off.

Thistles, Tamgali, Kazakhstan

At Tamgali, there are petroglyphs showing continuous human usage of the area for at least 3000 years. Many of the symbols are very similar to those found elsewhere in the world - sun gods, antelope, man, earth mothers and so on.

Unfortunately, they wouldn't let me take my camera onto the site. Not even with the offer of paying a little extra for my entrance fee (that shocked me). So I took pictures of the dry thistles along the road.

Cow, Son Kul Jailoo, Kyrgyzstan

There are so many things to say about this photo. There's a cow in the middle of the road. Or there's a road across the prairie. Or the prairie is at 10,000 ft, and that line of hills in the distance are 16-18,000 feet high. The mountain prairies (or jailoos) of central Kyrgyzstan are among my favorite places on the planet. Although I'd go out of my mind with boredom (or perhaps not) I would love to live with the shepherds for a year and see life from their perspective.

We were about 2 weeks early for the huge party that's about to descend on the jailoo. Every summer the shepherd clans gather here for festivals, marrying off their children, trading, seeing the children they've married off and games of buzkashi (goat polo - see pictures at siananjim's travel blog). I love the idea of something like a giant Boy Scout jamboree taking over this vast grassy plain.

Sammy, Shoestring Gorge, Kyrgyzstan

I had a red 4x4 Nissan Patrol turbo diesel that I loved. I loved it so much I named it after Sammy Hagar, who in the 80's you'll recall was known as The Red Rocker, because he always wore red and even wrote a song as a paean to the color.

Sammy and I drove to the top of a 14,000-ft mountain right to the Kazakh side of the Kazakh-Kyrgyz border. We drove across the open steppe, multiple times. We got stuck in a swamp (you read about that a couple posts ago). I learned about 4wd hi and low and how to drive on "roads" that make the forest service roads in the Cascade Range seem like highways. I drove on highways that make the forest service roads in the Cascade Range seem better than highways. In the city, I could drive as aggressively as I needed to, because he was bright red and had a no-bullshit look. I could say, "Yeah, I'll take out your Mercedes if you won't let me into the traffic stream."

Sammy was awesome. And I miss him.

Karakul Redux

  I wasn't happy with the earlier version of this picture, but I wasn't sure what I wanted to do to fix it. A little more experience, a couple more edits, and I arrived at what I saw at 7:32 am on May 17, 2006.

Ili River, Kazakhstan

  Millenia pass. People migrate across plains, steppes, deserts, mountain ranges (thousands of times faster now than 200 years ago), and when they need to rest, to stop for a while, they look for a river, a lake, a delta. And millenia pass.

Sorry about the gap for the past few days.

Shoestring Gorge, Kyrgyzstan

  Need some soup on your road trip? You can also get shashlik or lepeshka (Central Asian flatbread).

Kashgar Sunday Market

  In Western China, you can follow Marco Polo and go to an old Silk Road market in Kashgar (or Kashi). The Sunday Market is an amazing, vibrant place that is as close the Platonic ideal for market that you can get. Whether you're looking for a skewer of lamb, a few dozen pomegranates, a new pair of pants, a bicycle, a transverter for your R2 unit or a jade necklace to take back to Seattle, you can get it here.

Sunday Market, Kashgar China

Afternoon, December, Bukhara

  We had a 3-day weekend in Uzbekistan, taking the night train from Tashkent to Samarkand, spending the day and night there, then a 3-hour bus trip to Bukhara, spending the day there, picking up the night train to Tashkent, spending the day there, flying home to Almaty. This was the last photo I shot in Bukhara. It's my favorite from that trip. I saw what I wanted to shoot - keep detail in the dark interior of the walkway and in the brightly lit buildings just outside.

Ibriks, Morning, April 2006

  This is from a silver gelatin (read: wet darkroom) series called "Silk Road Moments." It was shot at the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul on a cold, drizzly morning in April last year. I didn't feel terribly inspired in Istanbul, but this little shop selling nothing but copper ibriks, or Turkish coffee makers, met at the crossroads of two of my great loves - coffee and hand-made tools.