Through the Desert on a horse with no name

I am in Salalah. We finished our trip to the Emirates. Now we are in ISP time. ISP stands for Independent Study Project. I am doing a non-traditional photo essay of Oman. This means I travel all over Oman and take pictures. I am starting down in Salalah to work my way north. The title will be Oman: Face, Space, and Place. The main goal in Salalah was the night sky. My first night down here we got out onto the beach to shoot the Milky Way, and the next night we went to the Empty Quarter. This is the desert part of Arabia. We found some interesting things along the way which contradicts the notion of “empty.” It lead to some of my better photos, and the feeling that this month of photography has started off exceptionally strong. We ended up at a camp-it was free- so the night sky shots aren’t as I would have liked as the Milky Way was right over a village 9 kilometers away. However, we found a camel-slaughtering cement slab that was being utilized for it’s gory purpose, a grass farm, and a John Deere tractor. When we got home we ended up at the market taking pictures of the fish, vegetables, and most importantly the vendors. The purpose of this project is to try to get as many pictures of people as possible, which is hard to do when I can only talk to half of the population. We also noticed that when we (Steve-a photography friend who lives in Salalah who is graciously putting me up for my time here) ask people to take their picture we get a 50% confirmation rate. It is also interesting that the people who say no are very adamant about it, and the people who say yes say so with the same feeling. It is almost as if to say “why would you ask such a stupid question, of course you can take my picture.”