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[cherrchow]

Bangka Island: the House Reef

There are days when I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming. And these past two weeks, I had an entire ten-day “pinch me” trip. I still cannot believe that I get to call the things I get to do my job sometimes. It just will never get old. At the end of October, I was part of the team from the State Key Lab of Marine Pollution to join Reef Check Italia’s annual course/workshop in Tropical Reef Monitoring Methods at the Coral Eye Research Outpost in Bangka Island, North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Whew! I know that’s quite a mouthful. 

Basically, Reef Check is a global organization that gathers scientists with the wider diving community to conduct reef monitoring annually. All locations in the world uses the same consistent Reef Check method, so this system is really useful in making sure we know what’s going on with our coral reefs. There are regionally specific animals we look out for, so that is the reason we went to Indonesia for tropical reefs. On top of that, North Sulawesi is smack in the middle of the Coral Triangle– the biogeographic area spanning from the Philippines, Solomon Islands, to Indonesia, and houses the world’s highest coral diversity.

To say the least, compared with the non-reefal coral communities I work with in Hong Kong, the reefs I saw at North Sulawesi were breathtakingly stunning underwater cities. From the arrival to the crystal clear waters at Bangka, my jaw couldn’t not stop dropping, especially waking up to still crystal waters each day. I did my best to exercise editing control, but there are still so many photos to share. So I’ll be writing about this 10-day trip in a few posts and try to be as succinct as I can. Try :)

After an overnight layover huddled in my sleeping bag at Singapore’s Changi Airport, my fellow underwater visual census diver, Jeffery, and I finally landed at Manado City. We spent a night here before the early morning transfer to Bangka Island north of the city. Manado reminded me a lot of the back streets in Bali where English menus didn’t exist, which to an extent is refreshing to be in a city not catered to tourists.

The transfer to the island took about two hours, so it was quite a long morning for us. But we finally got to meet our fellow professors and participants from Reef Check Italia once we all got to Coral Eye at Bangka.

Coral Eye itself functions both as a research outpost and vacation resort, which for traveling scientists like myself, I’d likely kill two birds with one stone if I ever had the future luck of doing research here again. Because, just look at it, how could you not? It immediately made me nostalgic of North Island, Seychelles seeing the indian almonds and scaevola by the turquoise water.

As a resort/research outpost, Coral Eye sticks to a minimal footprint in terms of its design, with the architecture well connected with the surrounding flora. Not a ton of artificial lights, scheduled midday electricity shutdowns, and natural AC from the nightly storms. It is such a contrast from living in the city that although we were working and tired from diving, this pared back environment gave me a "forest bathing" effect.

We settled in pretty quickly to get right into lectures on the Reef Check method, monitoring programs for coral reefs worldwide, and coral taxonomy the first couple days. The gear check dive and practice dives/snorkels to get familiarized with the indicator species at Coral Eye’s house reef around the jetty also doubled as some of our only down time in the water.

A Stylophora sp. coral at the house reef.

A cuttlefish I chased to these soft corals to around 3.5 meters deep on a snorkel free dive. It had been so long since I had done free diving while snorkeling (and without weights, gasp) that I felt like I had run a couple miles after.

A blue spot stingray I’d found right beneath the jetty pillars. Free diving to get the perfect position for this blue guy gave me a nasty hydroid sting on my thigh, but it was definitely worth it for this beautiful flatshark.

Razorfish, or shrimpfish, are seriously funny and cute fish to follow. They feed with their long tube mouths on top of corals and swim perpetually vertically so in groups up to a dozen. I had to follow this group quite a while on one breath until they finally stopped perfectly on top of this coral.

Our central communal dining table/lecture hall.

Very fortunately so, we were scheduled some fun night dives at the House Reef (finally photos of fish not barred from posting because of copyright!). Night photos are always a mixed bag– you never know what you might come across, but you get full lighting control. For a photographer who shoots like a portrait photographer even when I’m in the field, I had to flex some serious studio-like light while trying to avoid people’s fins. Tricky but when you get the shot, it feels better than anything else.

I generally prefer to fall to the end of the group to avoid paparazzi crowding, and I found this gorgeous mantis shrimp while everyone had passed. 

Even a fish I see quite often in Hong Kong like this Richardson’s Moray Eel are far less shy and pose well for photos.

Frogfish were one of those bucket list fish I was hoping for, and the divemaster found him within ten minutes of the dive! This one wasn’t shy and stayed nice and still for me. Unlike the orange frogfish, the next frogfish we found that night was not about the intense photographic attention and leapt away to sulk in a hole. The pipefish below was also less than cooperative and preferred darting in all four directions.

Sea pens don’t look particularly interesting until you take the time to look closely at them with the right lighting!

I think my mind was brimming with coral taxonomy and anatomy, so when I saw this Montastrea all I thought was, “ooh! look at that extratentacular budding!”

And of course, as a Reef Check diver, you have to notice the banded coral shrimps! Their fun antennae and coloring lends to the high desirability for aquarium trade, so seeing them in the reef serves as a good indicator of lower harvesting impacts.

Keep an eye out for the next post of photos from the other dive sites!

[cherrchow]

Nusa Penida– Mantas?

As promised, here are the photos from my dives at Nusa Penida on the first full day at Bali. It was the one thing I definitely had down in my mind that my brother and I had to do. For one, why wouldn’t you?! The clearest blue water fed from the Indian Ocean and *fingers crossed* biodiversity. Two, and most importantly, Bali’s home to a frequenting population of manta rays, which are on. the. bucket. list! Reef mantas (Mobula alfredi, previously Manta alfredi) come to Manta Point from the open ocean to get cleaned by cleaner wrasses while getting a good meal of plankton. 

Tim and I got up extra early to get picked up for our ride to the dive boat at Sanur, where we met our divemaster and instructor from Manta Manta, Simon and Stuart. The dive site was a good 40 minutes’ choppy ride out to Nusa Penida. Bali, Nusa Penida, and neighboring Lombok form an island chain and spaced relatively close together, so the oceanic water gets “pressed” (I hope hydrologists aren’t reading this simplified explanation!) through these channels. Because of this, the conditions aren’t exactly calm but does mean the water is crystal clear. 

Our departure area at Sanur. It was hot but what a viewwww!

Stuart (left) and Simon (right) in blue next to two other divemasters I didn’t get a chance to talk to. I had a great chat about my job diving in much colder water back at home, and Simon speaks Bahasa quite fluently! 

When Nusa Penida came into view, it was the most incredible granitic cliff faces covered with trees. They had me wondering how trees grew in such a tough spot...

Sadly, the dive at Manta Point wasn’t quite as fruitful as I wished. My rental GoPro wasn’t cooperating with me and the mantas didn’t show up. But, it was still above average compared to the sites I’m used to in Hong Kong! And it’s a fun dive, not for work, which meant I could get as distracted as I wanted by photogenic fish.

We gave up trying to wait around for mantas to come in, so we headed to Crystal Bay after lunch. My dive instructor told me Crystal Bay had a reputation for insane down currents if I were to chase a Mola mola (you know those gigantic fish that look like they got chopped in half?) for a photo op. Thanks, dude. Luckily, I knew it wasn’t Mola mola season, so just a laid back dive away from the reef’s wall edge where the currents would be. And guys. It was named Crystal Bay for a reason! The water was truly crystal clear and quite blue.

Because I had a GoPro on me, I decided to make a little video to show you the reef! I wish I shot a little more, but I got stung by a patch of anemone while filming the clownfish in current :P Stills were relativelyyy safer after that.

The cone-shaped bommie that slopes down into a reef wall. It was primarily constructed by these massive corals that had an odd bumpy look to them. Like they wanted to branch to stuck with lumps instead?

We started the dive going from the sandy bottom towards the bommie.

A teensy little triggerfish.

Some parts of the wall showed quite a lot of coral damage like this photo. The brownish red parts are all coral rubble.

The clownfish I was harrassing so much that I didn’t notice my leg drifting toward another anemone patch. It left a sting that didn’t go away for a week :/

An Acropora sp. colony near the end of bleaching. They’re extremely recognizable because of the branching pattern and pressed polyps.

Another area with recent coral death.

I did not realize how pink the algae and sponges were until color editing! The anthias here match them well.

The amount of species in this one photo is quite impressive, but also note none of these are the “meaty” fish that are top predators on a reef like this.  Considering how fishing continues to be a dominant source of income for Indonesia, the more ornamental “skinny” fish get to be left alone.

Circling back to the bommie to get back to our boat. 

Boy am I glad I don’t have to do species counts here. Just look how many there are at the top of the bommie!

If you squint, you’ll see a pretty big shoal of blue chromises in the center!

And of course, a selfie with the buddies! I hope you enjoyed the photos! Photos of Ubud will be coming :)

[cherrchow]

Bali– Uluwatu

I’ve finally begun “developing” photos from my trip to Bali with my brother at the beginning of April. The month flew by when I got back to work trying to fit in diving, data analysis, and report writing! This first photoset is from one of the first locations Tim and I went to on our five-day trip, the Pura Luhur Uluwatu, a Hindu temple located on the southern tip of the island. I learnt from conversations with drivers, lots of Googling, and talking with an Indonesian friend that Bali’s history is heavily influenced by Hinduism, and the island remains mostly Hindu– the largest Hindu population in a largely Muslim Indonesia.

Uluwatu means land’s end rock and it is definitely aptly named. The temple was built right along the cliff’s edge. I peered from the temple’s Great Wall of China-esque path down the cliff, and it is a straight drop 40 meters down to a rocky bay with large rolling sheets of waves coming in from the Indian Ocean.

Tim and I made the mistake of underestimating Bali traffic and ended up nervously chasing sunlight with our Uber driver. It took an hour for us to get from downtown Kuta to south Kuta where the temple was! Luckily, once we had our required sarongs on at the gate, we speed-walked to the coast. No Lonely Planet guide could have described the view of this temple during sunset to me sufficiently. It was just stunning. We caught the tail end of the sunset as most of the tourists were watching the traditional Kecak dance in the amphitheatre. And did I shoot away. I hope you enjoy the photos I managed to rush in between moments of watching the waves crash below and taking in the sunset views! More will be coming from the trip and from the archive that’s been gathering dust!

[cherrchow]

Conversations

I came across Forrest on my Instagram suggestions during a time when I was strung in between giving up on the notion of staying in Boston and moving home to Hong Kong. When I wasn’t trying to fit four years of my life into Home Depot boxes, social media and tv numbed me. The last thing I wanted to think about was work– either trying to convince someone to hire me, or making work as an artist. I had no energy or motivation for either.

But I read his profile. He’s a Chattanooga-native who just moved to Hong Kong to join the Hong Kong Ballet as a corps dancer. What the heck. Will he do a shoot with me? Why am I thinking of photography right now?

He agreed to do it! Couple months later balancing shoot prep and crazy work schedules, we spent a Sunday afternoon at the Forsgate Conservatory. The families visiting the conservatory wove around and got to see a HK Ballet dancer in action. It was incredibly refreshing to create work again, and Forrest was so fun and easy to work with. Not to mention, this is my first foray into dance photography from my usual documentation, portrait, and microscopy work! I don’t think I have had a shoot like this in terms of collaborating with my subject.

This series is on one level, a product of a lot of experimentation and conversations between Forrest and I. But Conversations is also a visual conversation of the human figure and form with the surrounding flora and light, and a conversation about the role of dance and art in the Hong Kong public.

Find him on Instagram or on stage with the HK Ballet.

[cherrchow]

Green Friends

The past week and a half has been a slow one for me– I’ve just moved back to Hong Kong and trying to make my space mine again, especially since all my old things are starting to really get on my nerves. Although I do have an exciting job lined up, HR processing tests my patience, and on top of that, I got a pretty serious gash in my leg from bouldering a week ago. With all that, I am, for the most part, confined at home. 

It’s frustrating feeling like I’m waiting for my life to actually start, so the most exciting thing for me now is watering my plants every morning. As my art professors have always told me, just make what you can with the studio space you have, if it’s a warehouse or a desk in your bedroom. So, I recruited my green friends as models today, somewhat inspired by the botanical photography by Imogen Cunningham and Karl Blossfeldt. Enjoy!

[cherrchow]

Bodies of Research

You would think that after two years or so of attending the commencement ceremonies of friends in classes before me that I would heed the proverbial “senior year is going to go by faster than you know” spiel. But no, so here I am, three months out and I’ve just realized I had not shared my senior art thesis with people that couldn’t make it! I exhibited on May 13-20, and during the reception and discussions with my professors afterwards, the question that came up again and again was, “Cher, why did you do this? How did you think of this?”

Very honestly, the creative process makes no sense sometimes. You find out what you want to say 80% of the way through the work, or sometimes you know from the get-go. I came up with an idea while figuring out credits and class registration in Australia. It was my most field-intensive (i.e. bug-intensive) semester, and the rainforest’s textures and creatures were a significant influence. I’d also been dreaming of doing some sort of independent study with Gordon’s microscopy facilities since 2015. If you remember what I did as a freshman, microscopy is probably the easiest way to combine art and science, so naturally, I had always been gravitating towards it.

I’d coexisted with enough insects in Australia to move across the disgust threshold to be able to find inspiration in them as an artist, and thought, you know? Why not use the microscope like I use my camera? Biologists have been following this one visual vocabulary when image-making, but I can use the apparatus for my own way of designing and composition. I didn’t have much of a mood board apart from Ernst Haeckel and Levon Bliss’ work.

A print from Ernst Haeckel's book Art Forms in Nature.

My professors at the Biology department gave me the Zoology lab to use as my photo studio, as well as access to the college’s confocal microscopy lab. As cool as conducting a thesis with the scanning electron microscope (SEM) would have been with insanely high-res detail, I wouldn’t have to work my photographer muscle as hard. Plus the SEM broke down while I was in Australia.

What I ended up using for the final images was actually on the low-tech end, if you’ve seen my Instagram stories while working in the lab– a DSLR on a tripod precariously aligned to the eyepiece of a dissection microscope, wrapped with a sock to fix the light leaking issues between the lenses, some blue tack, a standard college student desk lamp, and a small ring light. That’s it!

Although technical, this series is beyond cool optical manipulations. Here is my artist’s statement:

What makes us want to save a sea turtle more than honeybee colonies? As a conservation ecologist and artist, the influence of art in the valuation of what is worthy of our efforts fascinates and terrifies me. Ask anyone and they can probably describe their opinion and relationship with insects definitively. Insects are among the most underfunded taxa in terms of conservation efforts, as a majority of conservation fundraising is driven by the marketability and charisma of the fauna or flora. They are understandably overlooked due to cultural distaste and their size, which tragically makes them vulnerable to undetected extinction. How should we approach the notion of being ignorant to loss?

The role of conservation biologists and ecologists can then be described as amplification; they announce existence, presence, absence, alarm, warnings for these populations with little international attention. Paradoxically, the process of garnering appreciation, support, and information on these insects inevitably requires killing as well.

For myself, photographing insects became the only way I could confront my cosmopolitan fear of insects while I was researching and studying in the Seychelles and Australia. I have been hit in the face by cicadas and crickets and walked into giant spider webs, but it was in pointing my camera lenses where I began appreciating some of our oldest animals.

This exhibit features specimens of six beetles species in the scarab (Scarabaeidae) and ground beetle (Carabidae) families from the Gordon College Biology museum collection. They can be found across Europe, tropical Australia, Midwestern United States, and across Asia. I photographed unconventional anatomies of these beetles using a dissection microscope, echoing the roles of amplification in research and bringing you into a biologist’s intimate view to challenge the way we use beauty as a metric in conservation through the exploration of form and iridescence in beetles lying belly-up and pierced.

[cherrchow]

Bare

Cher:

For people that have been reading my posts for the past year or two (hiloveyouthanksforstickingaround), you know that I’ve eaten tofu, wandered around Hong Kong and drank too much coffee with Rachel Chang. I don’t often talk to other people about my photography collaborations with her. While I publish photos documenting trips and daily life here on my site, I also have helped, assisted and styled some of her portrait shoots. Since taking Modern Art Seminar together in our sophomore year, we’ve helped each other find creative outlets in between the usual moments of friendship.

This winter, I came back from my Australia semester and trips to Bangkok and Prague. I found so much artistic stimulation in these places that I was craving to shoot portraits after a long hiatus from portraiture. In our typical winter couch potato stupor, Rachel and I were throwing casual photography ideas at each other over text. After exchanging a lot of phrases and weird expressions in capitals, we found ourselves arranging a shoot we needed to do once back in Massachusetts. Although this idea came out of the blue and seems impulsive, Rachel and I wanted this series to challenge assumptions of heteronormativity, art traditions centered on the male gaze, the female form, and the way we interpret intimacy visually. So here it is, our first collaboration as co-photographers, modelled by Rachel and Amy,

Bare.

Rachel:

Within minutes we knew everything we wanted, we wanted a clawfoot bathtub, and we wanted milk, we wanted nudity and we wanted intimacy, we wanted rawness and we wanted something bare. With this being our first collaborative shoot, all the uncertainties and reservations we had prior to working with each other — bringing our different photography styles and plans for execution all came together, tied by the same vision. Cher and I had always shared ideas, visions, themes for photography projects we wanted to do individually so it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment we decided to actually go through with this project. Essentially our winter break planning went something like this: I want to a milk shoot; In a clawfoot bathtub; With nudity; I want Rachel; I want to shoot Amy again — This is how the project began.

Igniting a conversation was an important outcome we wanted from this collaboration, we wanted to create an intimate space that also held room for provocative dialogue surrounding themes that may not necessarily be socially accepted. Yet we also wondered and had conversations trying to figure out why it is that society views nudity as something so uncomfortable. Why is it that everything pertaining to the physical form and human anatomy over-sexualized? Why do we have so many reservations about intimacy between couples (relationships between all genders), without viewing it as strictly sexual intimacy and eliminating the possibility of platonic intimacy? Naturally with these societal assumptions, we entered this collaboration with art being an all-encompassing title for aesthetically pleasing visuals and thought-provoking undertones. So here is what came out from hours of brainstorming, 1.5 gallons of milk and lots of laughter — please join us in this conversation. Thank you for accepting our work so graciously.

[cherrchow]

Dark Balcony Blooms

If you remember from some posts last year, Hong Kong’s well known Flower Market is only a half mile from my place and also a favourite of my mom and I to take our Toffee for strolls. Toffee and I both needed some fresh air a couple mornings ago and I couldn’t resist buying a bunch of crimson ranunculuses. 

Looking at my flowers every day and discussing future projects with Rachel (shoutout to creative partners!) got me itching to do more intentional shoots. I’ve been a huge admirer of Jamie Beck since high school, particularly the beautiful tonal 3 x 5 photos of blooms as holiday cards. The depth of the crimson in these flowers as well as Beck’s photos inspired me to focus on the tonal nuances more than usual.

And so I put my makeshift studio skills to use (you guys can ask Rachel how many shoots we’ve managed to set up together in the Barrington studios without borrowing any lighting equipment) and whipped up a mini setup with a navy duvet cover, laundry rack and some clips. I layered the ranunculus blooms with dried eucalypts, forget-me-nots, and white caspia bunches from my room in a mason jar and shot away. 

I've probably worked these flowers to death, but I really love the results.

[cherrchow]

Yidinji

I hope you liked the first overview post of my Australian semester last week! This is the second “installment” to catching up on writing about the hundreds of photos I’ve been itching to share since September, and it’s on the first excursion I had with my SFS peers at the Mandingalbay-Yidinji Country.

One of the first things we covered in Environmental Policy and Socioeconomics was the colonial history of Australia’s “founding” and oppression of Aboriginal people groups under the British empire and later governments. It’s a narrative following a similar pattern to the little I know of the United States’ oppression of Native Americans. Several indigenous people groups were in our region once but have since been relocated or displaced.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the government allowed petitioning tribes rights to their land for traditional cultural and religious purposes, forcing a long uneducated and unemployed population through long trying legal processes for their homeland. 

Our professor Justus had a well-established relationship with a group that was awarded their Native Title. We met with rangers in the Djunbunji Land and Sea Program Center in Mandingalbay-Yidinji Country to learn about their program and instutition. You’ll notice I don’t have many photos of people, not to omit them from a narrative about their land, but that I was also there as a guest and I chose to engage with my camera last out of respect.

This is a to-scale map of the Mandingalbay Yidinji area, where the land is surrounded by hills and mountains, one resembling a croc and another a stingray. The rangers told me that they made this by hand and won an award for it at a conference in Brisbane, if I remember correctly.

Good ol’ Brennie posing with a warrior’s shield.

Trees with bare white bark like this one were all around the parts of the land we got to see. I think it’s either a Corymbia or Eucalyptus sp. but nevertheless, I was so drawn to photographing it in black and white.

The Djunbunji rangers manage several plots of government-protected land. I can’t speak to their operations completely, so you should read more about them at their website! Our first day there, we learnt about their feral pig management project and set a couple pig traps ourselves at the center and learnt about traditional uses of native plants for medicine and construction of vessels and shelter. We helped them set up a couple in the grasslands the next day with bananas and molasses as bait.

Pandanus trees like this one are used primarily in weaving baskets and other domestic items.

Later during dinner, some of the tribe’s elders, all of whom were women (!!), came to show us baskets woven in a technique used for millennia using Pandanus leaves. These baskets took months to make but would last for decades, carefully constructed by knotting.

An example of an oblong basket in process. You can see the detailed concentric knotting patterns.

I think that was it for our first day, and we returned to our campsite out near the wetlands to set up and relax a bit. It rained quite a bit later, but we ate Tim Tams and Shapes crackers (give me a box of barbecue Shapes and I will get nostalgic) and played Oh Hell through the night. Fun detail to add: there was a croc that lived around the streams nearby and apparently liked the banks and roads by our campsite, so we needed a croc fence. Australian ruggedness, check!

Our second and last day at MY Country was spent on a boat tour around the inlet’s streams, mostly looking for that croc we heard about, and learned about their water management in East Trinity. It was once so acidic due to fertilizers reacting with the soil when the land was cleared for sugarcane fields that they are still adding lime to the water to restore the pH of the area.

I foolishly left my hiking boots outside the tent under our “covered” entrance overnight, and the rain soaked it completely. Nevertheless, I finished the hike at the end of our stay in my Chacos and it was still an enjoyable walk! It was in the end a little devastating to see how much hard work was needed on the part of the traditional land owners of the Yidinji people to get where they are, to work to preserve their heritage, keep their people afloat and reconnect with a land they lost. However, I find that viewing this in a context of merit and empowerment honors them much more than pity and anger could ever do. They are incredibly warm and are doing great work in wildlife and land management. Pay them a visit if you’re ever in Cairns!

[cherrchow]

The Semester Down Under

I’ve finally returned to the land of lightning fast (comparatively!) wifi after my semester in the Australian Wet Tropics and subsequent travelling with my mom around Bangkok and Prague. It’s been a lot to process, not just visually and mentally, but, literally, more than a thousand photos to go through. I’m not exaggerating, but no complaints here! Sharing and describing my experiences in all these different places is definitely on my to-do list. I guess I’ll just be adopting an “analogue approach” as a photographer/blogger– like waiting for film to develop, print, and scan, but writing and photo-editing (I also have film from Prague that I haven’t sent to the lab yet. Productivity is not my forté this holiday season.) But here goes! Also keep an eye out for some photosets later on from my semester excursions!

First off, I just want to say, I wasn’t in the outback of Australia! I know a lot of people’s impression of Australia is the outback and its dry climate with kangaroos and wallabies, but my program focused primarily on rainforest studies in the Wet Tropics region way up north of the usual Aussie destinations. As you see above, we were surrounded by towering stands of figs, bleeding heart trees, and a bunch of other species I only know the scientific names to. The campus is situated in a patch of highland rainforest bordering Cairns, so we were pretty isolated from everyone and anything else in civilization most of the time. Day to day routines were centered around our classroom, common room, offices, dining area, and outdoor volleyball court. We weren’t there the entire time, however; my cohort had overnight trips to Cairns, coastal rainforests up north in Daintree, Chillagoe in the outback region, and even worked at the local music festival before finals.

I took three classes for the first two months of the semester– Rainforest Ecology, Forest Management, and Environmental Policy and Socioeconomics– and then finished my semester with a month of directed research. I could write forever on the details of my courses, but in a nutshell, ecology and forest management covered the typical “biology-esque” information of Wet Tropics flora and fauna, and respective conservation. The policy class acted as the practical glue, adding people, culture, and history into the science, especially knowledge of the indigenous people groups in the region.

My field study abroad experience definitely is not the glamorous stereotype people usually envision of “studying abroad”. Someone from a previous cohort wrote on my bed that it would be the dirtiest but most fun semester, and they weren’t wrong. To give you an idea of what field work was like, here are the titles of my papers and what data collection actually entailed:

Assessing species composition and recruitment success in tropical rainforest reforestation techniques– Spent two days killing marsh flies and trying to avoid raspberry “bushes” while measuring, tagging, and identifying all the trees in 11 x 17 m plot.

Assessing boundary dynamics across a tropical rainforest-wet sclerophyll-savanna ecotone through young tree and grass communities– Mastering how to kill marsh flies while hug-measuring trees, creating a gear system with your Bean pants pockets, team bonding in group Lyclear lotion sessions (heard of chiggers?).

The role of fire in wet sclerophyll forests for yellow-bellied glider den habitat in Far North Queensland– ACL killing/strengthening bushwacking through 6 ft high lantana thickets and then a sunset stake out to look out for flying furballs, i.e. gliders.

If you guys remember my posts about the time in Seychelles, you know that one of the aspects I cherished most was the amount of knowledge I gained by living in close proximity with the wildlife and plants. That was a large part why I chose this program, because learning in situ is so valuable.

a Placospermum coriaceum treeling. Its distinctive staghorn leaves are a reliable self-esteem booster during plant ID days.

One of the largest strangler figs in the Atherton Tablelands area called Curtain Fig.

Rooming in a less-than-bug-proof cabin with four other girls was actually pretty fun (it felt like Parent Trap-ish!), thanks to the grit from Gordon’s La Vida program. The most surprising things were like falling asleep to shuffling noises in the roof (most likely a white-tailed rat or a python), cicadas flying into our windows, seeing a monitor lizard walk down your cabin steps or waking up at 5am because the whip bird couples are calling to each other. The male starts this long sustained note and the female responds with a very ‘70s sci-fi sounding “CHIOO!” Other neighbors of ours in the forest included brush turkeys, more moths than I can name, terrestrial leeches (nicer than mosquitoes!), the omnipresent huntsman spiders, cockatoos, wompoo pigeon, and my archenemies– the white-kneed king crickets.

I’ll leave you with photos of some of these neighbors of mine. More photos and posts about Australia will come! 

Bill, our campus’ facilities guy, is our go-to for the most interesting wildlife encounters. Sometimes he shows up at night with a snake bag and a snake hook for Steve Irwin-esque release action. He just happened to find a stick insect this day and it became my study buddy.

The amethystine python, named for its scales’ iridescence. They are normally found curled up in some basket fern epiphytes, but this 5 m long one came out for some sun.

The world’s largest insect, a female Hercules moth. It was larger than my hand!

a Boyd’s forest dragon

Feathers from a wompoo pigeon. They’re a brilliant teal-green and have a muffled throaty call that goes “wo-om-poo”

[cherrchow]

Bommie Squad

Hello from Australia! My apologies for being AWOL this past month. I haven’t been able to get off-campus to find solid wifi capable of uploading all my photos until now. I’ve been on Spring/Midterm Break for the past five days in Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef. A group of five students from the program and I spent three days on board of a boat in the middle of the Pacific. I’m not sure if it’s my post-boat inner ear issues, but it feels like a dream. The entire experience has me at a complete loss for words – just the privilege to be able to visit a childhood bucket list item, doing nothing all day but lie on the bow of the boat, eat, dive, and snorkel. We snorkelled/dove four times a day with our first session at 6am. It was absolutely beautiful coming up from duck dives to a red sunrise, swimming with all the fish waking up. Not to mention that snorkelling fresh out of my Ichthyology class and with the experience from fish surveys in Seychelles with much better fish identification skills is so rewarding. I have so much envy towards marine biologists now.

The trip with Cairns Dive Center also included introductory diving, which let me dive without certification. Can’t really say I’ve got neutral buoyancy down (so so sorry, corals) but swimming through a trench between two bommies (reef columns) and leaning up close to families of clownfish has been unforgettable. Here are a few of my favourite photos from the trip. I really hope they do the job of capturing the beauty and biodiversity of the Reef!

Scissortail sergeants and chromises are always on the surface in schools.

photo by Chris Clark

Dennis our dive instructor on snorkel sentry.

[cherrchow]

Away to Long Ke

When I was making a list of things I want to do in Hong Kong before leaving for Australia, even all the picturesque coasts in Massachusetts couldn’t satisfy my need for the beautiful short hikes to the beaches in Sai Kung here. I went for a short overnight camping to Long Ke just a little north of East Kowloon with small 30 minute hike (nasty inclines on the way back though!). The view at the path looking down to the bay reminded me a little of North Island in Seychelles, nothing like what people think about HK – just mountains surrounded by bays and reservoirs. Here are a couple shots of the trip! 

[cherrchow]

Portrait of a Tofu

Rachel and I visited 公和荳品廠 located on 118 Pei Ho St, a soy shop with restaurant seating, for one last meal together this year (so dramatic). It's got the old, textured, classic Hong Kong atmosphere that would beat any trendy retro-looking places popping up lately. If you're in HK, go look for an old congee or soy shop for hella good comfort food under $20! **Not pictured: Loud hollering waiters.

[cherrchow]

3 Years in Micrographs

For the past three years as a biology student, I spent every Tuesday and/or Thursday in the coldest labs for three hours or so. Some of them pass by more easily than others, but I always love one with some microscopy involved. I started taking photos through the microscope in freshman year out of curiosity and laziness (surprise!) so my teary eyes wouldn’t have to strain so much to sketch these. I thought I’d share the best in my collection so far as I enter my senior year! If any of you are interested in my methods to take these photos, I just used my iPhone with a really steady hand to the eyepiece.

From top to bottom

Onion root tip cytokinesis, hydra eating water fleas, onion skin, iodine stained potato, Gram negative bacilli, pine stem cross section.

Onion root tip in anaphase, unknown, human osteons, frog dermis, cheek cell wet mount, dicot plant vascular tissue.

[cherrchow]

Monthly Picks

I don’t know how often I’ll be able to do this (I said monthly just to have something for the post title! ha) but I just wanted to share with you guys a few discoveries upon which I’ve been fixating lately! If summer isn’t for taking all the time to absorb, learn, and discover new things, I don’t know what I’d do with all my spare time. Also just to catch you up with some of the things I've been doing!

Bauhinias & Ginkgo Leaves

Lately I have bauhinias and ginkgo leave shapes occupying my mind on commutes to and from Boston. I can't quite get them out of my head just yet – maybe I'll figure something out to get them out of my sketch pages.

Ijeoma Umebinyuo

If you haven't read her work yet, do it now. Even if it's just going through her blog for a moment, do it. She uses words with a grace and strength that I've found really comforting and empowering when I needed it most.

Gee Gee Collins

I found Gee Gee Collins' work through this blog I follow that reposts some of the most original contemporary artists' work I haven't been able to find elsewhere. Her work has amazing color and transparencies. Check out her work on her Instagram feed.

Roberto Jamora

His work reminds me of the pure glee of peeling off dried acrylic off palettes after finishing a painting, but impeccably executed on canvas.

Frédéric Forest

He's the epitome of less is more – I've never seen any one use so few lines to hold the fragility, curves, and beauty of the figure so powerfully. Just look at those lines!

Stuart Davis

I recently went to the MFA again (while I still have free admission from my student card!) and realized I had never gone to the Modern American wing. Thank God I went, because I found a small gallery wall with his work. As a transplanted city girl having been away from home for so long, this reminded me of the energy of home – pure fun, like if architecture could dance, this would be it.

Claire Oswalt

I have no words for her work. It just blows me away with its subleties.

Melike Kara

If we had a Gauguin with contemporary illustrator sensibilities? Here it is.

David Hockney

My friend Gianna went wild when she discovered David Hockney at the MFA's exhibit, but yesterday I was hanging around Manchester-by-the-Sea and came across the most beautiful little book of his watercolour sketches from Yorkshire. If I hadn't bought $65 worth of silk screen prints earlier, I would've gotten that book in a heartbeat. I hope these little sketches bring you as much joy as it did for me in that little book shop.

That'll be it for the time being! I'll be heading home in a bit, so be on the lookout for some photos of Hong Kong before I head out to Australia for my field study program!

[cherrchow]

Intaglio & the Creative Process

Time for a college student like me now is a commodity, either to be allotted to a certain item on my to-do list or strategically distributed between my friends and for myself. All too often time left after I’m done spending time with people and with assignments, I’m spent and have almost nothing left in me to be an artist. At most, an Instagram edit is the most creative process I get out of my days – isn’t that sad?

I’ve always loved witnessing my friends’ creative processes – as they’re photographing, editing, developing, painting, writing. The process is the unseen intimacy in the work, the hours spent with unsuccessful attempts honing something beautiful and truthful but never final. Those are the hours where an artist finds their stubbornness with their work, which is exactly what I love seeing. Exactly because it’s so raw and true to an artist.

I spontaneously decided to keep Kelly company yesterday afternoon in the printmaking room after I got stuck in the house because of a cold, and also spontaneously decided to bring my camera. Here is the inky messiness of intaglio (in-TAL-ee-o), which I got to try out myself as well.

Here’s the zinc plate with the print I made with Kelly’s help.

After etching the plate and the acid soak, the plate has to be washed to get rid of the ground

Inking of the grooves and etches

[cherrchow]

Snowy Creative Workouts

I made myself a promise in the beginning of 2016, as a part of new year’s resolutions, to invest more time in my creative self. 2015 was a sort of dry period for my creativity, which I realized when I began taking studio art classes again last fall semester.

Laura and Gianna got me to leave my desk last night after a long snow day to take some photos by our house. It reminded me of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a quiet enchantment that I’ve always loved emanating in my photographs. Here are some photographs of our snow day night, exercising the creative muscle.