guest photographer: joshua yetman

Photo by Joshua Yetman

[Yesterday, when I mentioned taking some time to focus on my book, a commenter suggested that I have guest photographers help take some of the pressure off by providing occasional posts over the next few weeks, for your viewing pleasure.  I thought this was a great idea -- and since that commenter is a photographer himself, he got roped into being the first one featured.  Meet Joshua Yetman (otherwise known as "Modern Day Gilligan"), an American photographer, married to a Trinidadian, and living on the island of Grenada, about 100 miles north of Trinidad & Tobago.  I've been following his work for years, and his photographs make me cry with homesickness.  You're about to see why. -- Ed.]

Knowing well the pressures of a looming deadline, I thought Karen deserved some time off from her blog without having to sacrifice daily content...
Translation:  GUEST BLOGGER TIME!

So, greetings from 12°N of the Equator.  When I'm not neglecting my own photoblog, I'm occupied capturing all kinds of busy life in the small Caribbean nation of Grenada.  I thought I'd share a few views from my spectacularly normal working weekend...

First up:  above, covering a vet student symposium wet-lab for a bread and butter client, St. George's University.  The International Veterinary Students' Association was hosting their 58th annual symposium at SGU's School of Veterinary Medicine.  The symposium was a mix of seminars and highly nonacademic island excursions.  The first few hours of Sunday were spent documenting a suture clinic in a surgical lab where the visiting students practiced their stitching techniques on animal tissue.  It's amazing how this was so business-as-usual and so disturbingly odd at the same time.  [::click::  Is that a pig's leg?  ::click:: ::click::]

Photo by Joshua Yetman

After trading in my formaldehyde-smelling scrubs for a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, I headed down to the cruise terminal to photograph a unique tourism event - five cruise ships were visiting Grenada in a single afternoon.  Considering the island's population is only ~95,000, having five ships unload 9,000 passengers in a single afternoon is a fantastic feat.  The good people of the Government of Grenada understood how unique this was and asked me to swing by the cruise terminal to document the sights.  (One ship is docked at commercial port, and the other is anchored further to the left of the frame, above.)

Photo by Joshua Yetman

When I was finished hitting all the good perspectives I ran home for a quick snack, kissed The Wife, and grabbed my hiking shoes before rejoining  the visiting symposium students.  Their evening activity was a lively hash through the tropical bush of Grenada's countryside.  A hashing trail always begins and ends at a rum shop - snaking through beautiful off-the-beaten-path areas that you won't see in a brochure.

The trail started out on a narrow goat path that opened out to a secluded beach accessible only by foot, then up a grassy point (above), back down to another secluded bay, around *that* point through the shallow sea, then up a hillside covered in long grass aglow in the evening light.  The grass gave way to a farm of cocoa and banana trees before dumping us out on the main road adjacent to the rum shop we started from.

::whew::

A working weekend sure beats watching reruns while washing laundry.  :-)