Posted June 30, 2020
Posted June 30, 2020
Posted May 22, 2020
Finding, photographing, researching, and publishing these tasistal areas was a learning experience. I would like to share all of this with government agencies, universities, forestry and wildlife organizations, and students. So we now have four reports for you.
My personal style is as a photo essay, so each report is primarily photographs of the Acoelorrhaphe wrightii palms, locally known as tasiste palm. And area where they grow en masse, with up to a million palms in a small packed area, is called a tasistal.
I hope that ecologists, geologists, archaeologists, botanists, and zoologists will be curious and want to visit these tasistal ecosystems. What was growing here 2000 years ago when the Maya cities of Aguateca and Petexbatun were not far away (up in the hills a few kilometers away)?
Posted May 13, 2020
Posted May 06, 2020
Posted August 19, 2020
Several weeks ago we visited one of the factories of the international printer manufacturer EFI VUTEk to test the print quality of their newest super-wide roll-to-roll UV-curing inkjet printers (especially the efi VUTEk D3r).
To judge the capability of this UV-curing ink technology to be able to producing a diverse range of colors we use designs from the MayanToons division of FLAAR Mesoamerica (a division of FLAAR and FLAAR-REPORTS).
Posted March 18, 2020
We (FLAAR from USA and FLAAR Mesoamerica in Guatemala) have been donating educational material to schools of Q’eqchi’ Mayan students in remote areas of Guatemala over the recent three years. We will now prepare additional material in Garifuna language, one of the three languages spoken in the Municipio of Livingston (Spanish, Q’eqchi’ Mayan, and Garifuna).
We visited the school in the village of Plan Grande Tatin in early March (an hour in 4-wheel drive pickup truck from the town of Livingston). On this first visit the school teachers, the parents, and the village elders asked if we could help (the primary school teacher was no longer available and they need a new individual to be assigned as soon as possible). So I decided that at least we should return to the school and donate basic educational material; so we drove back in 4WD pickup truck several days later and we donated the samples that we happened to have with us.
Posted February 27, 2020
In 20 years of doing print samples at wide-format inkjet factories and demo rooms around the world, all the media and substrates have been white. Here in the EFI VUTEk factory they also did print samples on solid black PVC and solid red material. When you go to a printer/signage trade show you can see all the other solid colors that are available options. The benefit of UV-curing in is that you can print on all these vinyl materials.
So I show the red and black samples here. Plus a print on transparent material (the D5r and D3r can have both clear and white ink available for your designs; the white is obviously essential for printing on transparent material).
The designs are from the MayanToons division of FLAAR Mesoamerica which is a division of FLAAR. FLAAR-REPORTS is also a division of FLAAR Mesoamerica. Mesoamerica is the word for the areas of the Americas influenced by the Olmec, Aztec, Maya, Teotihuacan, and Toltec civilizations for thousands of years. Our main office is in Guatemala, on the ancient trade routes of all these civilizations in past millennia.
MayanToons prepares educational material for local schools in rural areas up in the mountains and in the rain forests. All the print samples we will take to these schools and donate to them. We thank Hanan Yosefi and Tomer Ohavi for the invitation to visit the factory and demo room; we thank the printer operator Liron Cohen for doing the prints.