I have been traveling this past month so I must apologise for neglecting my blog. At the end of August I flew from Delhi to the Maldives where I had the pleasure of taking on a celebrity portrait assignment. The work was a success but beachside portraiture during the monsoon season presents its own unique challenges. I will write more about this episode once the photographs have been published in November.

Manhattan by night. New York, USA ©Tom Pietrasik 2009

From the turquoise ocean of the Maldives it was on to London and then to New York to see family and friends. In New York I was also able to catch up with the picture editors who commission the assignments that make my life in south Asia such a heady mix of pleasure and frustration.

I will return to Delhi refreshed and enthused in a couple of weeks time. But first I shall be heading to eastern Sri Lanka and then Tamil Nadu, south India. I will be photographing communities whose lives were affected by the tsunami of 2004. Among them will be the orphaned children whose lives I have been following for almost five years now. I will publish a selection of these photographs once the work is complete but several photographs from this ongoing series can already be seen on my website under the title Tsunami Lives.