I could probably teach an entire class on all the various ways to stabilize your camera on the fly, the various things you can use as a makeshift tripod to reduce camera shake and motion blur, etc., etc., but one of the things that I have no ready solution for is how to continue taking quality handheld shots when you yourself are shaking-- because you are laughing so damn hard.

This is something I don't encounter very often, if ever really -- laughing hysterically while trying to photograph something -- but on this particular day I could not stop cracking up at these monkeys. Their faces and mannerisms are so incredibly expressive and so undeniably human that I felt an immediate connection with them. I wanted to tell the little guy in the above photo, "I know, right? I felt the same way about a whole bunch of weird things we were forced to eat on the EBC, too! Bleh!"

I wanted to tell him, if you think that goopy, fibrous, orange membrane you're holding looks gross, wait until you try garlic soup! It's a soup of garlic broth featuring...

Featuring nothing. It's just cloudy garlic broth. In a bowl. And it's one of the culinary mainstays of Himalayan trekking in Nepal.

Earlier this same month I had learned something important about myself, and that's that I didn't actually enjoy 2+ weeks of solid trekking as much as I thought I would. (By the second week of the EBC, I was PRETTY MUCH OVER IT, lol). However, on this day at the Monkey Temple, I learned something else about myself that I also never knew -- and that's the fact that I can watch and photograph monkeys longer than I ever thought possible. I find them absolutely delightful, and had to basically be dragged away from their little Monkey Temple community.

Once I was back home and going through my photographs, looking at these monkeys again, I finally made up my mind about something I had been considering for quite some time, and I booked a trip to Uganda this coming August to track the silverback gorillas through the jungles and the misty mountains.

I can not even describe to you how excited I am to finally get to photograph silverback gorillas; but for now, here's another fun monkey! This one seemed to be showing me that he could just as easily pose profoundly as the buddha behind him. What a ham:

Check out this other posing monkey HERE, and this Moroccan monkey checking out his dad's junk HERE!

And here's a reel of a bunch of the monkeys I've shot around the world.