Sri Lankan Tea Country

It's been two months since our vacation ended and we left the warmth of Singapore.  I've barely touched my camera and I've hardly looked at my photos from the trip.  Work's got me burnt to a crisp and trying to decide what to do with the next eighteen months of our lives has my wife and I mentally exhausted.  

But it's ok.  I'm ready to get back on the blog/photography horse.  The next six months are set up to be some of the most exciting of my life.  My wife is pregnant!  That's right, after this upcoming August this blog will be filled with nothing but baby pictures.  I couldn't be more excited and I can't wait to meet the little guy or girl. 

I'm still working, very slowly, through the Sri Lanka and Singapore pictures.  The more times I look at them, the less impressed I am, and the less I want to post them on the internet for the world to see.  I've been staring at these pictures of the tea plantation for months and they just don't excite me anymore.  But I need some momentum to get back into the habit, so here we go.

Sri Lanka is a photographer's dream.  The light is beautiful, the scenery is amazing, the colors are deep and real, and there's an exoticness to Sri Lanka that you can't find in a lot of places.  The light alone made it a better place for me and my camera than anywhere I've been since I bought my DSLR.  Maybe it was the time of year or the time of day we were traveling, but the way the sun was hitting the leaves in the tea country reminded me about what the color green really was, what it could be.  It sounds crazy to be in awe of one color, but that's the only way I can explain it, Sri Lanka had me in awe of the color green.  As always, here's 10 pictures and some foolish comments.

I think I mentioned this before, but these women make something like $6 a day.  Absolutely nothing when you consider that I gave these women $2 to take photographs of them for about a minute. 

The tea fields just stretch and stretch and stretch, there's practically an army whose only job it is is to pick tea.

We went on a factory tour at Mackwoods Tea Plantation.  It takes a massive amount of tea to make a single cup, which explains why so much of Sri Lanka is covered in fields just like these.

This is the same woman as in the first picture.  I felt like the black and white really helped bring her out.  When I did it in color, she just kind of disappeared into the tea.  

This is one of my favorite shots of the whole trip.  

I really wanted a good shot of the hands.  Hours and hours of picking every single day created some really interesting hands.

This is what I'm talking about when I say Sri Lanka is a photographers dream.  This spot was right on the side of the road, with an easy place to pull over and stop.  I'm always looking for places like this in Korea, a nice place to pull over and take a picture, but they're rare.  By the time you find a place to stop, you've already gone up the mountain and come back down the other side.  

Here's what I mean by those stunning greens.  I look at this picture and I just want to go running around in this field.

And here's what it's all for.  A single cup of tea.  The ironic thing is that we were told that if you wanted really good tea, you'ed have to go someplace else, like England.  In Sri Lanka, most of the tea is just barely drinkable.  The fancy stuff is all exported to places where people can afford it.