Andreas Welch Photography

On Saturday I visited a Filigree “factory” in Prizren, Kosovo.  The “factory” was actually a school room being used by a collection of former factory workers.  Their factory is one of the recent state-owned assets that have been privatized.  The person who bought it, locked the doors and shut down the factory.  The remaining workers went from having hundreds of kilos of silver to work with to only 3 kilos.  They lost all their tools, all their projects, and their jobs.  Now they work from a school room with what tools they can buy.  They work basically for free, putting the vast majority of the money they make on the items sold back into buying more silver.  More pictures of them and their work below.

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Located in downtown Pristina, Kosovo, the Albanian Ethnological Museum (aka the Emin Gjiku complex) is housed in an Ottoman era house complex and displays a collection of traditional Albanian clothing and artifacts.

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One of the newest Museums in Washington DC, the National Museum of the American Indian is an interesting place. The special exhibit at the time was “Identity by Design.” The exhibit shows how American Indian dress identifies their tribe. Though the museum is a bit odd architecturally, the exhibit was interesting.

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The National Zoo has a fairly large selection of small mammals in their small mammal house. When I was there, the Golden Lion Tamarins (pictured above) had taken over a lot of the areas in the house (or were mixed in with other animals) but they are usually in an outside habitat. There were still plenty of other animals to see though.

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Another fun to photograph animal at the zoo are the Asian small-clawed otters. Like the red pandas, if you show up too early they’ll be asleep still (once again, the last picture). But if they’re away, they’re probably playing, which makes for good opportunities to photograph.

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What is probably the most famous of animals at the National Zoo, the pandas are always of interest.  The panda babies grow incredibly fast.  When first visiting, I mistook the baby for one of the full grown it was so large and still only a few months old. I’ve got several good pictures of them, so there’s more in this post than usual.

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