On the first day of the Kazakhstan photo tour my group and I visited the Assy Plateau near Almaty. This is an area of nomadic people who tend to their animals in these highlands (about 8500 feet in elevation) during the summer months. We had lunch in a yurt, a round white tent used during the summer as a home, hosted by a Kazakh family. What really blew my mind was that after lunch, the mother of the family pulled out an iPhone and took photos of everyone in my group -- and video as well -- so she'd remember our visit. We were in the middle of nowhere, many miles from civilization, and this woman had an iPhone. Amazing. She had a very small -- like 12 x 18 inches -- solar panel, and that's how she was able to have a single light bulb at night and enough electricity to charge her phone. The photo you see here shows the beautiful landscapes we were able to take, and due to the clouds the patchy lighting in the late afternoon gave us wonderful lighting. The shadows and highlights changed constantly, and it was truly captivating. My settings were 1/6400, f/5.6, 640 ISO, and I used a 100-400mm lens set to 400mm.
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