Quick Trip to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan by Michal Huniewicz
About this shoot
Here's my gallery from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Frankly, one of the main reasons for me to go was that a) I've never been, and b) they allow drones.
If Kazakhstan boasts any particular sites one may want to travel to to photograph, it must be Baikonur - the legendary Soviet and now Russian spaceport. Foreigners are not allowed though, not without permission, anyway.
Other than that, they let us fly the drone pretty much anywhere. The photos in this gallery were taken using my drone, my big DSLR, my compact mirrorless, and my phone.
Uploaded on: 2016-12-18.
Map showing Almaty, Kazakhstan location (opens in OpenStreetMap)
This is Almaty, the former capital and still the largest city of Kazakhstan. As a side note, the Guardian writes if you're wondering where the Kazakh oil money has gone, you should go to the new capital, Astana, instead. [2]ISO 100, 4mm, f/2.8, 1/1100s.
As I explained in my Uzbekistan gallery, the identity vacuum after the downfall of the USSR was often replaced by religion. The largest religion in Kazakhstan is Islam, brought by the Arabs during their 8th century conquest. [3] In the photo, Ksenia and Innabat, a Kazakh girl we met in the female part of the mosque, separated from the men with a wooden fence. Somewhat better than some of the Istanbul mosques where women were squeezed behind the shoe shelves.ISO 200, 24mm, f/3.5, 1/60s.
Innabat would hang out with us and talk to people on our behalf - that made drone activity possible, although most people were curious rather than suspicious, anyway. Kazakhstan presents another challenge for flying drones. Tonnes of electricity wires everywhere couple of metres above the ground! Nervous, I botched a landing and "shaved a tree".ISO 100, 4mm, f/2.8, 1/390s.
This either is a Korean dish (there are Koreans in Kazakhstan after Stalin relocated some), or it is referred to as a Korean dish. Someone on my Instagram says it's a "spicy but not really hard; [served with] soy sauce, vinegar, oil, garlic." "Perfect with vodka".ISO 640, 23mm, f/2.0, 1/60s.
Exsentially, Kazakhstan is a mix of the indigenous Kazakh people (probably Muslims) and the Russians that stayed after the downfall of the USSR (probably Orthodox Christians). For example, they call these lepyoshkas (Russian word), but technically speaking it's more like Central Asian-style flat bread.ISO 200, 23mm, f/2.0, 1/850s.
Kazakhstan is the size of Western Europe and often perceived as flat, but there are mountains, as you might have gathered from previous photos.ISO 200, 38mm, f/5.0, 1/1250s.
I thought fog would be an interesting environment to fly in. When the Polish Tu-154M with Polish president onboard hit the infamous birch tree at the speed of 269 km/h and subsequently crashed, it was flying twice as low as me here.ISO 100, 4mm, f/2.8, 1/1600s.
Fear of heights. You can imagine me screaming with horror in an increasingly high pitched voice as my drone was steadily climbing higher and higher up into the air next to the Almaty TV Tower - how high is it?! When will it end?! My drone cannot look up, so it's hard to judge how much higher it needs to go to take a picture of the tower, and it turns out the tower is as much as 371.5 metres tall (the Eiffel Tower is 300 metres tall).ISO 109, 4mm, f/2.8, 1/100s.
Quite unfortunate - this somewhat phallic-shaped building is the... Children's Republican Palace in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Clearly not built with drone photography in mind, or perhaps anticipating the difficult questions children ask their parents. Kazakhstan has very liberal drone laws, even though they have recently cranked up their terror alert level.ISO 141, 4mm, f/2.8, 1/50s.
Good people on Reddit helped me identify this as a Lada 1200, even though the logo is missing. This Soviet car was even sold in the West. [4]ISO 200, 23mm, f/4.0, 1/1900s.
Sharyn Canyon, aka Charyn Canyon. Although as a tourist you get to see a small bit of it, it's actually at least 80 km in length. [5]ISO 200, 23mm, f/16.0, 1/180s.
Here's a commercial yurt encampment you can stay at. Traditionally, yurts were tents used by the nomads of Central Asia. As tents go, these are quite comfortable. Both the Emblem of Kazakhstan and the Flag of Kyrgyzstan feature a yurt. [6]ISO 100, 4mm, f/2.8, 1/710s.
Ksenia was born in Kazakhstan and grew up in this building. I must say, when we visited, people there were remarkably rude even by Polish standards! With the exception of our taxi driver who protected us from a verbally aggressive man washing his car, dressed in an Assassin's Creed jumper. Everyone was deeply suspicious of us two being there, apparently because they feared theft. I asked Ksenia to translate for them that yes, I have indeed come to Kazakhstan from London specially to steal stuff from the inhabitants of this building.ISO 200, 23mm, f/2.0, 1/90s.
I asked my friend Ammar to analyse this photo geologically, and he says:
I'm no expert beyond an amateur interest in this and it's been a long time since I've studied it. But I'll try.
The lake in the foreground looks to be the terminal point of a glacier (glacial lake it might be called?) which has either melted long ago or is still existent but further in the background. You can see the debris from the glacier (either carried on top or more likely scraped along underneath the glacier) just behind the glacier between the two sides of the valley in the middle left of the photo. Note how the debris is higher than the lake itself which indicates the fact the glacier melted down into the lake. OR the debris could be the sign of a seasonal river/stream/flood which occurs when there's enough rain/water. The theory about this being a seasonal river that feeds into the lake is further evidenced by the type of the valley (see below).
The sides of the valley are angular (v-shaped). Not curved (it would have a u shape). This indicates they were carved by a river and not a glacier. It may be that the glacier only went as far as this point and beyond it there was the melted water gushing from the glacier which formed this valley. Or it may be there's no glacier here and it's actually a seasonal river.
There may be something else going on here, like a fault line. The reason I think this is there seems to be striations in the rock that you can see on the right hand side of the valley. These lines of compressed rock usually indicates some sort of fault/tectonic activity. I think the fact the two sides of the valley aren't directly opposite each other from the photo (one overlaps behind the other) might indicate that.
All of what I said above could be bullshit. But that's what it seems to me based on what I know.
We had a little Cold War-like adventure here in these mountains. Turns out there's an observatory in the area, but it's also a military zone where they check your passport and everything. We asked for permission to fly, they said no, they said we'd get arrested.ISO 885, 4mm, f/2.8, 1/6s.
Well, we left and then flew the drone to shoot it anyway, although I didn't dare to fly any closer. To add to my excitement, the drone app crashed on me and I had to manually land it.ISO 1060, 4mm, f/2.8, 1/13s.
And we're moving to Kyrgyzstan! This is the New Central Mosque, forever in the making. Meant to be the largest mosque in Central Asia, it's not yet finished, but it's already been surpassed in size (by the Hazrat Sultan Mosque in Astana; took three years to build). [8]ISO 200, 23mm, f/8.0, 1/350s.
Always worth looking around with your drone. This is the Headless Goat Hippodrome - two teams on horses that have to get a headless stuffed goat, into a concrete pit goal, located at each side of the field. [9] The name of the sport is buzkashi - which means "goat grabbing"... Nothing about this sounds right.ISO 100, 4mm, f/2.8, 1/3200s.
This is the tomb of a man known as Kalygul. Our driver (in the photo) could not quite explain to us in Russian who the man was (he only really spoke Kyrgyz), so I have to rely on a website I found. [10] Apparently, he was able to see the future - "Kalygul seer could predict how the Russian empire tries to grab Kyrgyz lands". His work was supposedly banned during the Soviet period.ISO 200, 23mm, f/8.0, 1/480s.
Petroglyphs we found near Issyk-Kul, at Cholpon-Ata. They are meant to date 800 BC to 1200 AD, and like everything else in Kyrgyzstan, they are not very well described on the Internet. Someone claims the stones were "all deposited 10,000 years ago or thereabouts by a massive glacier as it retreated". [11]ISO 200, 23mm, f/5.0, 1/2400s.
In my entire amateur photography career I have taken one photo that was justifiably converted to black and white, and it is not this one. But it's good to do something pretentious from time to time, so here goes. Simulating the legendary Kodak film (I'm not clever enough for actual film photography)... Ksenia in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. Thanks for viewing!ISO 200, 23mm, f/2.0, 1/4000s.Sources
