Stop Terrorizing the Nature _ illegal rock carry مقلع الصخور غير الشرعية في لبنان

Stop Nature Terror

Lebanese nature is one of the best aspects of what makes Lebanon a truly beautiful country. If we don't do anything to preserve out nature, it will be just another wasteland. 

In fact change is so fast, humans can landscape an entire mountains in weeks extracting all that rock. For many months illegal carries have been stopped from working then again they restarted... Many can't do anything about it because they think that their action will take them nowhere and the project that started will reach its ultimate goal of extracting every gram of rock, cutting the last tree and killing what is left of the precious Lebanese fauna.

Well I'm not one of those and when something bad happens in my backyard I wanna raise against it... no matter what the cost is

Let's start by the destruction (click for larger view)

I come from a village  named Tamnine El faouqa  تمنين الفوقى

This little town holds about 3000 people. Main products are cherry, almond, fig, and grapes production. you can' believe hoe delicious they are here they are :

delicious cherry

delicious grapes 

delicious fig

Those trees are scattered all around on vast areas.

Temnine is at almost 1000 meters above sea level and is half mountainous. These mountains don't contain wild trees like Lebanese cedars but most of them are of cherry and almond. 

Still with all the *hunters* around there's practically no live animal left and that is sad. My father is one of the last real hunter, he hunts only adults and we eat them afterwards. He goes oldschool, travels kilometers for hours without using radio tracks and speakers to lure the birds in..that is practical genocide for birds, hopefully they are learning this pattern so they can avoid those crazy men.

Here's my dad with his hunting dog

After this quick introduction of my town I wanna raise the problem of the rock quarries (مقلع الصخور) in Lebanon. This business is chewing vast amount of landscapes killing all the living with it whether it has wings, legs or with green leaves.

As I can't have impact on all of Lebanese area, I wanna raise against of what is happening in my own backyard, in our own mountains. This landscape never changed for hundreds of years until the man came and poked his dirty hands in the land that raised him at the first place. When I was a kid I used to play and have fun around that area...  I still do but I take photos of each amazing day I spend there

It started approx 2 years ago way up in the mountains in some remote places in the upper mountains where it is hard to reach on foot.
- A couple of months ago the sites reached different zones easily visible from the valley.
-the men working there are private contractors mainly from zahle, they pay the locals to use the land for excavations. The worst part is that the municipality is in with them, they take 60$ for a load of truck "gemrouk". Note that municipality is also controlled by hezbollah.

cracks of evil are spreading fast disfiguring the hole mountain, when I see this from far away when I go up to the mountain I GET FUCKIN ANGRY

they leave the excavators unattended because they know that people wont poke there noses. well I poked even my lens 

I had only minutes before they came. I would have got real problems because of my camera. Now I hope they will get the PROBLEMS

As you can see for yourself, the situation is out of control and they will keep doing this until the authorities stop them. My camera, it doesn't know how to lie. It only shows you what's put right in front of it.
SO what you think ? isn't time to fight for some kind of future here ? I wanna see the nature fight back but it can't do anything if don't have its back

So please help me, share this post, share an illegal quarry near you, organize yourselves and lets get out there and fight for our right ! they don't own the mountain.. WE ALL BELONG TO IT

The Wedding

In the end it was my first wedding

Wedding photography... Wait what ? did I say that I'm so awesome now to photoshoot weddings now ? 

NO

It all started a year ago when I was passing a rotation in the Ear Nose Throat department. There I met amazing people : Charbel, Chadi, Nadim, Evana; those were the residents from where the impact of what I'm about to tell was the biggest. Not to forget the amazing ENT surgeons : W. Abou Hamad, E. Eter, S. Rassi, N. Matar, A. Haddad, B. Tabchy; those make miracles and save lives (literally).

At first when I joined the team, I was like an out-of-the-context guy. The team follows a strict hiarchy, strict timing, strict behavior, strict work, strict almost everything... they love order. I'm not saying I have a problem with it, I'm just saying that I have a problem following the order. At 7 am in the morning when nobody was in the mood to talk even about the weather, well for me I could talk about anything and they really find it irritating and disrespectful. So I held my horses for a while. 

In short because of my behavior their first impression was that I'm a hippie who is passing by to have some fun and laughter.

You should then look at their jaws when I presented my first presentation and then the second (Anatomy studies).

That was one of those moments where I turn and think that respect is earned, it is not inherited nor bought.

After that Charbel (the senior resident) approached me and had a chat with me for like an hour. He really liked my photography think and was amazed on how much I know about the subject. Then He always stressed on how important is the first impression, the self image. New people, new faces, they all *at first* are shallow, they all don't have time, they all have important stuff to do. So at first you gotta give a sample of what is best of you and then let the relation stream across its natural pathway. Being a wildcard among people like you is a real advantage, use it wisely. In the end people have to spare some time with you because they just want to know how you simply function and what happened with me. 

After passing this rotation my attitude towards new people changed and I didn't get too much frustrated in the beginning because I always stay hopeful and positive. Because the wrong man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world *not a mistype*

So the wedding ? 

Skipping months after my rotation, we became not only colleagues but also friends. We created a circle called the ENT leftovers were the members are old new colleagues who passed the same rotation. We try to meet and have some good quality times. That circle of friends is the most amazing because it joins people of different backgrounds and with this mix it makes my time with them very fruitful.

In the end Charbel invited all of us to the wedding and that was my first wedding I attended by personal acceptance. It was at a lovely church in the middle of Beirut and then the actual soirée was at Mir Amin (beit el Din).

What I wanted to point out is that your photography technique will drastically differ if you are close friends with the subject you're photographing. That emotional bond is priceless between you and your subject because it translates in your exposures. Getting to know the couple before the wedding was a huge game changer for me. I was never particularly vibrant in portrait photography, but at this wedding I had some shots that even the professional photographer of the wedding hadn't made. In fact the couple ended up engraving my photographs into their lives by printing them and putting them in canvases in their home in France. 

So if I will have to face this situation again but with a couple that I don't know, well I don't really know how to communicate the idea but I need to know the couple and at least have a chat with them weeks before the D-Day. It will just transform your work, it will make it much easier. The exposures will reveal themselves because you will try harder.

Charbel and Victoire, the lovely couple

 So the gear I used wasn't fancy at all, my Nikon D5000 and all the night I used my telephoto lens the nikkor 55-200mm VR. That night I learned that I have at last reached the limits of my camera because of its low light capabilities. My D5000 was so noisy without Noise reduction and the photos as you can see after treatment were like painted so I end it up making the whole album black and white. With B&W the soul, the power, the emotion of each moment were more potent and it was absolutely fascinating because the couple never expected to see black and white photographs.

before their first dance

With the telephoto lens, I was able to capture the moment without interfering so basically the couple weren't aware of my snooping around. Like in this photograph on the right, in fact in front of them was this huge and massive entertainment/show called the "zaffeh" it is like a tradition in Lebanon on every wedding, it is the Lebanese Wedding Entrance. So here in the photograph it seems that they really weren't sure about the hole idea, Charbel who is Lebanese loves fattouch not tabbouleh and he do not really like the zaffeh thing but Victoire is french and she never saw/experimented the whole shebang hence this nervous smile, on both of them. 

The zaffeh

Her shadow really loves the smell of the flowers

 Here was the beginning of the zaffeh, when the groom and the bride are brought to stage. Well the challenge of this photograph was the distance and low shutter speed. Because she was on heels I was able to capture the moment when she freezes before she take another step. With that and a little help from the overhead projector I later found out that her shadow really loved the flowers and didn't accept to let go of them. What I like in this photo is the harmonious position of all the elements inside one frame, from the foreground to the background which merge flawlessly without creating distraction from the main subject who is Victoire.
 Then came the dance, there is not much to tell, any photographer would have taken those....

 But there is such moments where it is difficult to decide on when to press the shutter like the photograph below, each position of her eyelashes even her hand would tell a different story...

 Same goes here, in the photo bellow you could see his face but only guess hers. That leaves a great memory for the couple alone to enjoy and an enigma for the others. Not much of an enigma but still I granted you the power of imagining the moments thus bringing it to life...

 Now they are really happy, no more nervous smiles...

 In this photograph bellow I wanted to snap the intense moment of their dancing focusing on their hands alone... It summarizes a lot of the action but THIS is what I love about photography over videos, you got to REALLY live those moments because your activating your deepest brain matter, you only need a spark provided by photographs like these.

 

In the end it was a great experience and I thank you both for inviting me into the beginning of your story , the story of Victoire and Charbel.

With this experience I discovered a side that was practically hidden in me, I was really emotional that day and shed some tears because those people really meant something for me...and I really liked it.

I am writing only now because I miss the couple and hope because of this blogpost they will respond and return to Lebanon just for a couple of days...pretty please.

The Chadded or Vlad or Chaddad..... this post was written with a happy face and with love.

The BeerVasion

The BeerVasion

First of all I wanted to point that beer, for the Middle-East community in particular the Lebanese one, is the one and the only blonde that is almaza which literally means diamond in Arabic. So I wanted to clear something, like I cleared the megapixel myth. The nose receptors combined with the tongue can generate infinite amount of flavors when the signal is transmitted to our brains.

In these infographics below you can clearly see how much the taste and smell are complicated. With this complexity each human being has his own favorite combination. We all have the same mechanism but the interpretation in our brains differs and sometimes the actual signal differs.
 It is a Pandora of infinite flavor generation.

Take it for example the preference of a perfume over another and how for some a perfume is awful but for other it is THE perfume that complete their senses.

Most if not all will skip the first part and acknowledge the fact that this process is super-complex.

Well now I'm gonna introduce you to a simplified complexity of beers, in short beers are either Lagers or Ales. The infographic below will clear up the ideas for you:

(Click for the big view)

Now let's talk Complex -- Now we're talking

So as you can see that there are thousands of beer styles crafted around the world. So beer as the wine has a wide variety of styles. Each style is crafted for the combination code that is unique to our individual brains. There is no equal, the more you taste and experiment the more you are likely to find that epic moment when you swallow that beer that matches you combination.

So now that the bubble has burst, Let's talk beer.

So to fool the consumer big companies tend to brew beers that are likable by most of the people, they don't vary the style because their ultimate goal is to create a robotic atmosphere that is focused on only one style of beer. So if you are stuck in your country with one style of beer for years any outsider is immediately alienated because of the doctrine created by the big company.

The problem is that at first the consumer did not know that he has a choice... like in wine. In Lebanon all are know-it-all in wines but as for the beers their only information is restrained to the 3 syllable word al-ma-za.

The first guy to burst to bubble was Mazen. He is one of the true Lebanese patriots, He doesn't care about politics nor the religions. He only care about uniting people and making a Beer-name for Lebanon across the mountains and the oceans. Long story short he created a truly Lebanese beer from the premium ingredients shipped all the way from the United Kingdom and Germany.

He named his beer 961beer, +961 being the international telephone code for Lebanon.

My favorite style, the Red Ale. 

Mazen with the premium hops

961 Beer Heart

 Mazen, The C.E.O of 961beer is like any normal Lebanese but turns into an energetic lightbulb when he talks about beer. In his office he has put all his card on the table telling me that has no secrets to the world. In fact he wants the other to know what he's got so he can work on the next big thing. This way he has a constant rotation of beer styles hence covering bit by bit different combination in each and one of us

And that's me Meeting at last the Biermeister

   

Malt from Deutshcland

 So Mazen chose the Reinheitsgebot which in german means the German Beer Purity Law. This law only permitted water, hops and malt as beer ingredients. So there's no additives like Maize which you can find in Almaza, hence by this law Alamaza isn't suppose to be called a beer. 

Of course you can choose to ignore this law, and trick the consumer by using low grade material so you can sell more! Big companies are all about money, Craft-beer brewers are all about Beer Premium Quality.

This 961beer is the Kissmeyer, it is only shipped to Danemark making a name for Lebanon in the heart of Europe. Besides 961beer can be found all the way from the USA to Australia passing by Honk kong

 961 beer has internationally 12 different style. Lebanon is too young for the hole gamut because people still don't know that there is a choice... there is democracy in beer too. You can dislike all of the 961 beer style ONLY if you have tasted each and one of them. Mazen wants to introduce variety into the market and ultimately his goal is to target the wide variety of combination with a wide variety of different beer style.

The beer styles in Lebanon include : Lager, Red ale, Witbier, Porter, Lebanese pale ale, American IPA, 

Here you can find a hint of Irland, Irish stout produced only for the Saint Patrick's Day

Jean studying the label because of the distinctive taste of the Lebanese Pale Ale. This pale ale is amazing in its variety of tastes that you can feel.

The interesting part between me and the 961beer, is that this photograph caught their attention via twitter. So they contacted and offered me free beers as well as they want to buy some of my photographs for their ads because, like me, Mazen and Thomas (his partner in 961beer) like to see the complexity there is in one simple clean neat shot.

.

Here I introduced the 961Beer to my friend, quickly each one of them hocked up for a beer style and screamed for more beer ! 

So much for the mouth and nose, pore the beer directly into the Brains !

Panoramic shot of Beer Styles.

 

Thanks to Mazen And Thomas the Beer kept poring that amazing weekend ! 

A porter Bottle tanning in the sun

I hope know that the beer myth isn't a myth anymore and you should all get out there and experiment the styles that is offering 961beer, you can find the beer in big supermarkets like TSC and Spinnies. Hopefully we can find this beer in our little dekeneh here in the bekaa valley. It only takes one epic moment with this beer to change your beerknowledge forever.

Common Is Boring, so why 961beer should be common?

Hope You enjoyed the photographs, you can see more of my photography work on my page on facebook

Sincerely yours Vlad ... Or Chedded ;)

found this interesting pictogram, nations classified by drinks ;) :