The Vietnamese flag, in flower form

Hi everybody!  I just got back from a week long trip to Nha Trang for some SCUBA diving.  I intended to put this post up before I left, but the last 4-5 days here in Saigon were pretty hectic and I just couldn’t get around to it.

My tribute to Tiny Tim

Hell, I intended to put these photos up months ago, but…  well, I suppose I don’t have an excuse for why it’s taken me over two months to get these posted, but whatever, here they are now.

Friendly flower girl

As I mentioned in a previous post, every year at Tet Holiday (Vietnamese New Year) flower markets get set up all over the country.  These photos were taken at a few different flower markets in and around Ho Chi Minh City back in February.  I’m a big fan of macro photography, and I find flowers to be fun and challenging to shoot.

"Hoa Mai", with the Vietnamese flag in the background

In southern Vietnam, apricot flowers, or “hoa mai” as they’re called here, are ubiquitous during the new year holiday, and evoke a festive feeling similar to what a Christmas trees do in western countries.  In fact, yellow flowers in general are all the rage, and it’s the predominant color at any flower market you go to at that time of year

Two different kinds of structure

This shot of “hoa mai” with Saigon’s town hall, one of the most noticeable examples of colonial French architecture in the city, is probably my favorite of the series I took around town over Tet holiday.  I was trying very hard to not only capture pictures of flowers, but to also put them in a context which makes the images 100% Vietnamese.  I think I got that on this one, as well as a few of the previous shots.  This was also an extremely difficult shot to pull off, not only because hand-held macro shots are just tough to begin with, but aligning the photo so all the lines in the building in the background were flush was quite difficult.

Happy holidays, Hanoi...

Finally, this one here is a tip of the hat to our friends from Hanoi.  While the yellow apricot flowers are par for the course here in southern Vietnam, in the north the seasonal flower is the peach blossom, which is pink.   The “hao đào”, or peach blossoms, are more difficult to find here in Ho Chi Minh City, and according to my girlfriend they’re smaller and less healthy due to the different climate when you do find them.   So, while I didn’t concentrate on trying to get pictures of these pretty pink flowers, I figured it was the right thing to do to add at least one image to this post.  We wouldn’t want our northern colleagues to feel left out, now would we?

I’ve been intending to make this post for a couple of months now, but instead of complaining about being busy and blah blah blah, I’ll just get into it.

Over the Christmas and New Year’s holiday I had 2 weeks off of work and my buddy Hans and his wife came to visit me from Laos.  His wife, Nut, had never seen the ocean in her life, so beaches were in order.

So, off to Con Dao! For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Con Dao is an island in a remote archipelago off of the southeastern corner of Vietnam.  This trip was my fourth or fifth time there, and it’s absolutely one of my favorite places in the world.  The entire archipelago is protected, outside of the town of Con Son, which only has 5000 people.  The marine area around the islands is also protected, and is an absolutely fantastic site for SCUBA diving.  It’s a wild, woolly place with lots of wild animals, and long, clean, deserted beaches…  For now, that is.  There are big plans afoot to develop the place for tourism, and while there used to be only 3 flights a week with only 24 seats, there are now 4 flights a day, on much larger planes.  They’re still having trouble attracting the number of guests they’d like, however the first couple of times I was there I was the only tourist I saw on the island.  That’s slowly but surely changing as access improves and the word spreads of how beautiful the place is.

Beach macro

However, much like in one of my first posts, “My Hanoi Curse”, I seem to have a Con Dao curse.  Every time I go there it’s cold, raining, gray…  This time was no exception.  The result is that the only really good shots I got were random macro shots and pictures of my girlfriend.

A Lao girl and her friend

Not only were the weather conditions poor for photography (and for motorbike riding, for that matter…), the local SCUBA shop couldn’t get their compressor running, and so no diving was possible.  Unless, of course, I wanted to go with the other shop, Rainbow Divers, and they’re asking $250 for two dives.  Insane.  Not sure why they believe they deserve to charge more than almost any other operators on the planet at the moment, but I wasn’t buying into it.

I did actually have a fantastic time while I was there, but that was mostly because of the people I was with, and the fact that all of them seemed to be willing to do quite a bit of motorbike riding and swimming in the wind and rain.

So, the couple of images you see here are the only good shots I was able to pull off.  Believe me, Con Dao is absolutely gorgeous, and one of my favorite places to visit in Vietnam.  I’d like to show you some nice landscape shots, but sadly, I only have shit photos to “show off”, and so I won’t bother.

Goodbye again, Con Dao... I'll get some good shots there someday.

After a few days on Con Dao we headed back to the mainland, and not too long after Hans and Nut headed back to Laos.  Bye guys.  That left me with another week free from work, and nothing to do with it.  I decided to check out Vietnam’s other large southern island, Phu Quoc.

Phu Quoc has been developed for tourism for much longer than Con Dao has, however the whole northern section of the island is a huge, virgin jungle.  It’s also wild and woolly, and quite impressive to fly over.  I was extremely excited for my trip to Phu Quoc, and seeing how I was going alone I figured I was going to have all week to explore, plan, and take photos.

Unfortunately I found Phu Quoc to be rather boring, at least as far as a photographer is concerned.  I biked and trekked all over the island, and despite the island being quite beautiful, high points on the island are both very difficult to access and heavily canopied in jungle, which doesn’t lend itself to landscapes.

I discovered very quickly that, not surprisingly for me, I was completely put off by the tourist beaches.  They seem to be completely gentrified, with areas used only by Vietnamese, areas used only by rich foreigners, and areas used only by backpackers.  Also, you might disagree with me, but sitting on a lounge chair, staring at the beach and being served beers and un-authentic tourist food for a week sounds like the most dull thing imaginable.  I’d want to shoot myself after a few days.

Heavy morning traffic on the Duong Dong bridge

I seemed to like the parts of the island that the tourists aren’t meant to enjoy.  Namely, the town Duong Dong had a few spots that I really liked.  The harbor, with the boats coming in and out each day was great for some shots, and the bridge in town was great.  The bridge is actually a long raft that’s chained in place, and every few hours as the boat traffic builds up on either side of it, they disconnect it and push it aside to the river banks and allow the boats to come in and out.  By the time they push the bridge back in place there’s a great big clot of traffic waiting on either side of river, and there’s a big flood of motorbikes and pedestrians that come over the bridge.  I found myself standing on the bridge photographing this event several times.  The bridge operators had no problems with letting me stay on the bridge as it was pushed back and forth, so I was able to find a great spot to get photos.

Rocks at the southern end of "tourist beach"

Another thing that Phu Quoc is great for is sunsets.  There are many big collections of rocks in the shallow surf surrounding the island, making great places for good sunset silhouettes.  You can walk literally 5 or 10 minutes away from the tourist bars on the beach and find yourself almost completely alone, watching the sunset near these beautiful outcroppings of rocks, scratching your head and wondering why all the backpackers prefer to be sat on their ass and listening to British pop music instead of enjoying the quiet and solitude that the majority of Phu Quoc has to offer.

I love the dramatic lighting in the markets

I also dig the market area in Duong Dong, which is right off the northern side of the bridge via the muddy, rutted track they happen to call a road.  Markets near fishing ports are always great to shoot in, and if you’re wondering what daily life is like in a southern Vietnamese village, then I suggest to sit down in a cafe near the Duong Dong market and watch life go by for a while… slowly, that is.

Cute kids in the coffee shop

One afternoon, after shooting a sunset photo with some coconut palms in the foreground, I decided it was beer o’clock and I severely needed a cold one.  This is a common occurrence after a day of riding and shooting photos.  There was a little Vietnamese spot opposite the road from where I was shooting, and I was about to pop in there, sit down on a tiny plastic stool and swill several Tiger beers, but then they suddenly started blasting awful Asian club techno at full volume, and I realized I needed a different venue.

Phu Quoc - great for fish sauce and coconut palms!

I hopped on my rented motorbike and drove further down the beach on the red dirt road that surrounds the island, and came upon the Phu Quoc Pearl operation.  I suppose a pearl diving operation isn’t where you’d expect to find a drink, but there was a sign out front saying something to the effect of “good food, great music, cold drinks, and good company.”  Sounds good to me!

I had found my local watering hole.  I spent the next several nights getting smashed and hanging out with Grant and Jerry, the two New Zealanders that are running the place.  Phu Quoc, in my mind, is great for two reasons – the dense, undisturbed jungle with it’s waterfalls and wildlife that can be explored with a bit of effort (but which are bloody difficult to photograph), and Phu Quoc Pearls, with it’s cold beer, good music, and odd conglomeration of customers who have all taken the effort to get the hell away from the tourist bars to find somewhere a bit more removed and interesting.  I managed to get another great sunset shot at the little village down the beach from the bar, and a couple of hangovers.

The last good shot of the trip

I blew off my opportunities to go diving while I was there, mainly because of the other divers I met along the way who complained about low visibility and seeing nothing but sand while they were there, but basically on the last night I was there, Jerry told me that there are absolutely fantastic places to snorkel around the island, and for $20 and a promise of seafood dinner and beer he’d be happy to show me the spots he goes to swim.  This advice, taken from a pro diver who lives on the island, would have been appreciated earlier in the trip, but it’s enough to make me curious to go back.  That, coupled with an offer to let me go under water with their local divers and watch how they harvest pearls has got me itching to go back to Phu Quoc and dig a bit further under the surface.

So, there we have it.  Maybe not the most exciting adventures I’ve ever posted about, but there were enough decent shots to make a new post nonetheless.  I have another post written already, and quite a few good shots from the last couple of months, so more soon.  And I mean it this time.

Early Morning Pepper Picking

Earlier this year my buddy Adam and I took a weekend trip to Tay Ninh Province.  Tay Ninh is one of my absolute favorite places to shoot, and not just because you can get loads of great rural and agricultural shots like the one above, usually without straying more than 50 meters from your motorbike.  The real main attraction for myself, and I would guess just about any photographer, is Toa Thanh, the Holy See of the Cao Dai Church.

I supplied photos and wrote an article for East & West Magazine that was published in June, 2009, about the Cao Dai religion based in Tay Ninh Province, Vietnam, and in the process shot one of my favorite series of photos.  I was recently looking at their website, hoping to download the past issues that I had contributed to, only to discover that the company is going out of business and their back issues don’t seem to be accessible anymore.

So, in order to post a few more photos that I took both of the main temple in Tay Ninh town and some other smaller Cao Dai temples I found while wandering through Tay Ninh, and also to keep the article I wrote “alive”, I’ve decided to post the text here in it’s entirety. If you’ve already read the article, sorry for the rehash, and if you haven’t, well, I hope you enjoy it!  Here we go…

A Cao Dai temple located West of Tay Ninh town

Southern Vietnam has never been known as a destination for temple goers.  The grandeur of the ruins at Angkor in Cambodia, the proliferation of glittering “wats” in Thailand, and the quaint, leafy temples in Laos all seem to take the lion’s share of credit for religious sanctuaries in the region.  However, anybody who has traveled to Saigon, or even just perused the available tour packages available there is probably familiar with the sight of the Cao Dai Holy See in Tay Ninh Province.  It’s definitely something that once seen up close is not easily forgotten.

In Graham Greene’s book “The Quiet American”, the view of the interior of the temple was described as “Christ and Buddha looking down from the roof of the Cathedral on a Walt Disney fantasia of the East, dragons and snakes in Technicolor.”

It can’t be denied that the site is gaudy, full of strange, contrasting imagery, all painted in day-glo colors.  There’s nothing subtle about it.  The architecture itself is a hodge-podge of styles, with French colonial influences, traditional Vietnamese Buddhist temple designs, Roman Catholic cathedrals, and even the designs of Islamic mosques all paid homage to.  Add to this the fact that visitors are usually informed that sect members pray to Victor Hugo, who is, amongst an eclectic group of Western and Eastern historical figures, considered a saint, and the fact that the Cao Dai adherents pray to a huge 3-meter diameter globe with a picture of an eye painted on it, and the result is that most people write them off as a kooky cult.

Doing so without having a greater understanding of Cao Daist philosophy and history would be a mistake.

Prayers at the Noon Service at the Cao Dai Holy See in Tay Ninh

Cao Dai is a syncretistic religion, meaning that it is openly representative of other faiths – in Cao Dai’s case, all of them.  The essential principle is that Cao Dai is not meant to be a separate religious institution, it is all religions in one, an acceptance and an understanding that all of man’s faiths are pathways to one single, primordial truth, and that each and every one of them all lead to the same place: God.

On one of their main websites, www.caodai.net, they state: “If Cao Dai is not only Cao Dai, but encompasses Buddhism, or Taoism, or Confucianism, or Christianity, or any path toward God, it is then truly Cao Dai.  Cao Dai does not propound to convert the followers of any path, but wishes to unite all faiths in the understand that faiths all are of one same principle…”

On their altars, they simultaneously worship God, symbolized by an image of an eye, Sakyamuni, representing Buddhism, Lao Tse, a Taoist, Jesus Christ of Christianity, Confucius, for Confucianism of course, and Khuong Tai Cong who represents Geniism, another indigenous religion of Vietnam which is similar to Shintoism from Japan.

They are monotheists since they worship a single, all-encompassing God, but they pray to superior spirits, or saints, as well as engaging in ancestor worship.  Cao Daists believe in Karma, and consequently in reincarnation as well.

Followers are expected to pray at least once a day at 6am, Noon, 6pm or Midnight, and are required to attend a temple service for prayer twice a month.  The are also instructed to eat a vegetarian diet at least 10 days a month, and are highly encouraged to distance themselves from luxury or pursuit of wealth.  They are forbidden to kill animals, to be dishonest or deceitful in any way, to commit adultery, to drink until they are drunk, or to “sin by word”.

A Cao Dai temple west of Tay Ninh town, near the Cambodia border

The Cao Dai faith traces its roots back to the early 1920s, and a man name Ngo Van Chieu, a civil servant for the French colonial government.  Purportedly Ngo received visions in which he was ordered to begin worshipping “Duc Cao Dai”, or “The Great Lord in the High Place”. From this name, the shortened moniker for the religion was taken, “Cao Dai”, which by itself means “High Place”, or “High Tower”.

In 1925 Western spiritism was becoming extremely popular in Vietnam.  Three spirit mediums in particular, Pham Cong Tac, Cao Quynh Cu, and Cao Hoai Sang, claimed that during a seance God revealed himself to them and ordered them to begin a new religion that would bring together all of the world’s cultures and faiths.  Together with Ngo Van Chieu, on September 28, 1926 they drafted a statement to inaugurate the Cao Dai faith.

Popular acceptance of this new faith was overwhelming – within two years there were an estimated 200,000 people in Southern Vietnam practicing the faith, and by the early 1930s estimates of Cao Dai adherents range anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million believers.

In response to the French occupation of Indochina, an arm of the sect became militarized in the 1940s, eventually growing to a force of 25,000 troops.  At first they resisted the French along with the Viet Minh Communists, but eventually turned against their partners and looked to the French for help.  They were also strongly opposed to Ngo Dinh Diem’s southern regime, and when the French left they found themselves with few political friends.  In 1956 Ngo Dinh Diem’s troops occupied the town of Tay Ninh, forcing Pham Cong Tac, then the sitting pope of the religion, into exile, and permanently bringing an end to the military activities of the Cao Dai Church.

A shot that was submitted, but not accepted, for the original article

With over 13% of the population of Southern Vietnam professing to be Cao Dai adherents, an institution that should have been a major political and social force found itself side-tracked.  19 years later when the Communist North took control of the region, their anti-Viet Minh activities were not forgotten, and the church and its leaders were even further ostracized and marginalized.

The church elders, however, were no longer interested in heading a resistance, and after nearly 20 years of being banned by the Vietnamese government, the church was officially recognized in 1997 as a legitimate and legal religion in Vietnam.  Restrictions on public practice of the faith were removed, and large sums have been donated by the government to restore the Church’s main spiritual and administrative center in Tay Ninh to the state that it’s in today.

Many estimates now show that world-wide there are 8 million Cao Dai adherents, with populations in Cambodia, Japan, America and Europe.  According to Tran Dong Tan, a Cao Daist historian since 1967, the percentage of people inside of Vietnam practicing the Cao Dai faith has remained roughly the same – but the overseas enclaves are growing.  “I strongly believe,” he says, “that it is the next generations that will develop Cao Dai faith outside of Vietnam.”

Here’s a link to a gallery of photos that were taken on my trip to Tay Ninh in 2009 to photograph the Holy See and do research for my article.  More coming soon folks!

Fuji Velvia 100, Pentax 67II, 105mm

Sometimes life gives us lemons.  If we’re smart, we make lemonade, or some other cliche bullshit like that.  If we’re idiots we sit around sucking the lemons, wondering why the hell they taste so sour.

So maybe I’m a bit of a lemon-sucking idiot.

2010 has been a rough year for me in many ways.  It didn’t start out that way, or at least not if you’re a Westerner like myself and you figure the beginning of the year starts on the morning of January 1st.  From that point of view it started off with a full work schedule, which translates into pockets with money in them, a spark of creativity itching inside me which was externalizing itself through great images and growing ideas, new challenges brought on by my switch from digital photography to film, a relaxing trip to the Mekhong Delta and several weeks of time shooting photos in southern and central Vietnam looming on the horizon, a social life which had become vibrant and satisfying, and a personal relationship with a young woman that was promising to become the most significant in my life so far.

The several weeks of shooting photos in southern and central Vietnam materialized, a period of time which I spent with people near and dear to me, both from Vietnam and also childhood friends that came to visit.  I worked my ass off, shot wads of film, and charged back into Saigon with a smile on my face and a determination to continue full-throttle throughout the 36th year of my life.

Fuji Acros 100, Pentax 67II, 105mm

On my trip I’d been to the Central Highlands, the coastal port city of Danang, the old royal capitol Hue, the ancient town of Hoi An, and had discovered an area new to me, the city of Quy Nhon and the surrounding areas in Binh Dinh and Phu Yen provinces, which was to become my favorite place so far in Vietnam.

And so began the Vietnamese reckoning of the New Year.  Tet holiday came and went, the moon continued it’s course around our planet, our planet continued it’s course around our Sun, the cosmic dice were rolled and my new set of luck came into force.

Dear God, why did my luck for this year have to suck so bad?  Or should I say “so far”?

Fuji Provia 100, Nikon FE, 60mm

Where do I begin describing the bullshit?  Or, rather, how do I describe the bullshit without sounding whiny, depressed, self-pitying?  Because I’m not any of those things.  Some of the difficulties I’ve had this year most definitely stem from personal decisions – the main one being my decision to switch to shooting strictly film.  I believe strongly that people have to own their own decisions, and we don’t deserve the luxury of feeling bad for ourselves when the things we choose work out contrary to our desires.  I’m not moping, and I have more things to be thankful for than to be upset about.

But coming home to a work schedule of 9, or 12 hours a week wasn’t my fault at all, and definitely wasn’t expected.  Add to that the fact that not only did the only lab in town I know double their prices for processing slide film immediately after I arrived, they also gave me back my film with fingerprints, scratches and chemical residue on them.  And that’s the color work – we won’t even get into how they abused the black and white film I gave them.

They also gave me hundreds of dollars worth of scans that were great for nothing more than lining the inside of a garbage pail.

I couldn’t use the work I had, I was no longer willing to give my money to a “businessman” who treated my film like shit and for other reasons I won’t get into here had proved to me that he was slimy, backhanded and dishonest, and even if I did want to deal with the guy, I was broke and had no immediate prospects to improve that situation.

Except for a short weekend trip with my buddy Adam to Tay Ninh province, and a surprise trip to Da Lat and back up to Hoi An and Quy Nhon with an old friend from back home that came to visit, my explorations and creativity ground to a halt.

Fuji Velvia 100, Nikon FE, 35mm, polarized

And it seemed like everything else was determined to take a great big pause as well.  I have to be thankful for my girlfriend, both for being there for me through that period, and for remaining cheerful and supportive when it must have been somewhat boring and frustrating to see what I was going through.

No work – no play – no creative spark.  Even the last couple of blog posts I made sucked.  “I went here – I went there – I took pictures of this…”  Uninspired drivel…  Bewildered, I felt the things that make me be myself dropping to the wayside, one by one.  I think my interest in photography disappeared almost as a defensive reflex, a way to stop myself from getting depressed about it.  It didn’t matter that I wasn’t shooting if it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing.  But it wasn’t just that – my interest in music started to fade, my interest in exploring the world around me began to disappear, my curiosity started to flag, and I began to lose interest in even the little bit of work I did still have going.

A short trip to Singapore to get a new visa and visit a friend happened, and I bought *some* of the chemicals I would need to start doing some black and white developing at home, intending on getting back to shooting, only to discover on my return to Saigon that the shop here that used to sell the other chems I needed had recently stopped sourcing them.  I felt like crawling into a hole and shutting out the light.

I was starting to lose myself.  I was starting to give up.

Shot with my girlfriend's digital Panasonic point and shoot

I saw depression, weight gain, and a lagging professional life looming ahead.  Sitting here at my computer one day I came to the realization that the more passive I became about how things were going, the worse they were going to get.  Opportunities weren’t going to create themselves for me, I was going to have to make some changes, start making calls to people, start looking for things to do, and make an effort to reconnect myself.  I needed a swift kick in the ass, and nobody was going to give it to me but myself.

So up my rear my own boot went, and things have started happening again.  My work life is still heaving back and forth in fits, I don’t know from one week to the next how much work I’m going to have, or what kind of work it’s going to be.  But the amazing thing about looking for opportunities is that sometimes you find them.  Without putting too fine a point on it, I have some things coming up which look promising, and enough happening in the meantime to keep me on my feet.  I still don’t have a digital camera to go out and shoot cheaply and freely with, and I’m still loathe to spend what little money I do have at the crappy excuse for a film lab I have available here.  That being said, I still have over 20 rolls of medium format Fuji Velvia, 15 rolls of Ilford 50 speed black and white, a small assortment of 35mm film, and a trip planned to the southern Annamite mountains in northeastern Cambodia that should provide more than enough opportunities to shoot some amazing new material.

Shot with the Nikon D3 I shouldn't have sold

In the meantime I’ve borrowed a friend’s scanner for a couple of weeks (thanks Nam!) to scan all the film I shot at the beginning of the year, and I’m going to start making more posts, themed by subjects and locations.  Also, I used to have a website dedicated to my photography from Laos, but due to the fact that I would rather keep all my work in one location, and also because the site has generated very little besides spam and people sending me messages telling me how overjoyed I should be that they’re “willing” to use my work and “give me credit” as long as I give it to them for free, I decided to let my subscription go out of date and the site has been taken down.

Some of the best work I’ve ever done was posted on that site, and since it’s not being used anywhere now, I’m going to start adding that stuff to this site as well.  Who cares if it’s almost 2 years old?  I want to show it off.

And so on that note, I leave you with one of my favorite landscape photos, taken in the Si Phan Don area of Champassak Province in Southern Laos.  I’ve been scanning like mad, and have lots to add.  Here’s to getting back to living life on MY terms once again.

Southern Laos and a Nikon D3 - two things I miss.

"Hoa Mai" at the Buon Me Thuot Tet Holiday Flower Market

In my last post, I mentioned that I had been out of town on a trip.  I took a trip on my motorbike from Saigon, up through the central highlands of Vietnam, down into Danang city, up to Hue, and then down the coast all the way back to Saigon.  Altogether the trip took me over 5 weeks.  I started with a couple of friends riding up with me (one of them being Josh, the guy at Hi-Fai that built this website), met several more friends in Danang from Vietnam and overseas, we all stuck together for over a week until the group started falling apart, people started going their own separate ways, and finally the last 12 days or so I was by myself.  I shot tons of film, both 35mm and 6×7 medium format, color and black and white.  I worked really hard, and got what I thought was quite a bit of good work done.

The only problem is that almost all of my negative/slide scans are terrible.  I thought that was the problem, because my slides look really, really nice, however on the computer screen they’re just flat, drab… terrible.  A good friend of mine who is a professional photographer took a look at my work today and confirmed what I had hoped was correct – that my work was actually pretty good, and it was the scanning that was faulty.  This is good and bad – good, because it means that I still have good slides, and didn’t waste a huge amount of money shooting garbage.  It’s bad because I don’t have digital copies of most of my good shots to process and put up on my blog!  Having never shot using medium format or slide film previously outside a few isolated instances, I felt I needed a second opinion before I continued spending more cash shooting, and getting more work processed and scanned at the same location.  I’m really happy to know that I have quality some quality material to work with, but I’m not sure when the next time I’ll be able to afford a scanner will be.

In the meantime, I’ll start posting some of the stuff that did scan well.  All my black and white stuff came out fine, and for some reason my 35mm work seems to have scanned much better than the medium format stuff did.

A Rare Flash of Pink in a Sea of Yellow

On the first night of the trip we stayed in a town called Thac Mo in Binh Phuoc province, and the next day we pushed on to the next large town to the northeast, Buon Ma Thuot.  This was the first place we stayed for more than one night.  We checked out a few different places in the area while we were there, but the first place we got to explore was the Tet Holiday flower market, a vast, seasonal market stretching down a main east-west thoroughfare which had been blocked to traffic, covering several square city blocks, flowing over into local parks and even 2 or 3 blocks to the north and south down the intersecting streets.

I wandered around by myself for several hours with my little Nikon FE and a 60mm macro lens.  All of the shots on this post were taken on Fuji Reala 100 speed color negative film.  I have another Nikon that has a somewhat more sophisticated light meter that I would have preferred to use, buhe shutter release jammed after about 48 hours on the road.  It was a good thing I brought both of my 35mm bodies, however the meter on the FE isn’t exactly the best thing to use for macro work.  As a result, a lot of the highlights were burnt on this series of images.

Newly Opening Blossoms

The first photo on this post is called “hoa mai”, or “apricot flower” in Vietnamese.  In southern Vietnam it’s synonymous with Tet Holiday and New Year’s festivities in general.  You can think of it sort of like a Vietnamese Christmas tree, in that anybody in Vietnam who sees these flowers will automatically associate them with the New Year’s holiday season.  In northern Vietnam they use a pink flower called “hoa dao”, but in the south it’s definitely yellow, and yellow seems to be the official color for Tet Holiday in general.  I would guess that about 95% of the flowers at the market were yellow, rows and rows of yellow flowers stretching down the streets.  It’s beautiful, but it can be difficult to find any contrast or tonal variation when you’re shooting.  I looked for opportunities where I could either get other colors besides yellow for some contrast,  or where I could isolate the yellow flowers against an alternate colored background.

Finally, Something Other Than Yellow!

Finally, this last one here turned out to be one of my favorite shots from the entire trip.  I snapped this one in passing, and completely forgot about it until I got the negatives back from the lab.  That’s one of the things I really like about using film now – I get surprises!

Some of the black and white work I did came out really well, so I’ll be posting some of that soon as well.  I had originally planned on presenting the entire trip in chronological journalistic posts, but because of the fiasco with my scans it’s not really feasible at the moment.  I’ll just do it all according to subject matter rather than day to day.  Is there anybody in HCMC that’s got a negative scanner that can do medium format?  After spending over $200 just on scanning for a bunch of garbage, I’m a little bit reluctant to go back to the same lab…

Have You Seen This Photographer?

I’ve been missing for some time now.  I disappeared.  Poof!

Actually I’ve been spending lots of time in my bedroom, but judging by a few of the emails I’ve gotten recently some of my acquaintances apparently consider me “missing” when I haven’t made a blog post in a long time.

Well, at least somebody out there gives a shit

I was, in fact, gone for quite some time.  I took a 6 week motorbike trip from Saigon to Hue in central Vietnam and then back.  Except for a week or so where the weather was quite grey and raining, conditions were great for photography.  I took dozens and dozens of rolls of medium format film with my new Pentax 67ii, and I just couldn’t wait to get back to the city and get my work processed.  The only problem was that most of it sucked.  I’ve been shell shocked, so to speak, at what a terrible job I did trying to expose slide film on my trip, and for the last couple of weeks have wanted to think of just about anything but photography.  To keep my mind on other things I decided to re-organize all my music and data on my computer, a gargantuan task which claimed weeks of my life, but which I’m also extremely happy that I completed.

I’m rather broke at the moment, and since I sold my digital gear that means that I can’t really shoot for the month of April.  Well, I could, because I have a nice stock of film, but I couldn’t process any of it until May.  I’ll start shooting again in a couple of weeks.  In the mean time I’m going to be spending a lot of time in my bedroom studying Mandarin.  Ni hao.

I actually do have some really nice shots that I will be posting over the next few weeks, and in fact it’s mostly landscape shots that I screwed up.  I got some great 35mm stuff at a Tet flower market in Buon Me Thuot, some really nice black and white work in both 35mm and medium format while I was in Hue, quite a bit of good work during my time in Hoi An, and various other crapola that I shot.  That being said, I was so upset with myself over the shots I screwed up that I didn’t bother optimizing any of the good stuff.

So these shots here on this post are old!  I shot these on the 28th of January and intended to put them up on my blog before I left on my trip, but I was quite busy in those last days before I left and didn’t get it done.  So here’s more now.

Palms in the Park

On this particular day my buddy Chi and I were just walking around the park shooting some black and white.  I wasn’t there to shoot any one subject in particular, but had the goal of trying to look at things differently and try to get good compositions with interesting shapes and lines, good tonal range and rich texture.  It was high Noon and very sunny, so conditions were a bit difficult, but I think I did pretty good!

Whatsit?

What in the hell is that thing??  Hmmm, maybe the next shot will help you.

Got it yet?

I’ve really been enjoying working more with black and white.  It makes me look at things completely differently, and I love how the lack of color contrast forces me to think harder about the other elements of the image.  I think that all of the shots I’m posting today are great examples of images that simply would not have worked well in color but came out very interesting in monochrome.  They were all un-colorful subjects, and if they’d been shot in color they would have looked flat and uninteresting.  However, in black and white the tonal range is really highlighted and instead of drab, boring images they have depth and form, and the texture I think is especially highlighted well through the use of black and white.

This last one wasn’t shot in the park, but on a street near my house a little later in the afternoon.

Wicker Brooms

I believe that this was a shot only made possible by black and white as well.  Had it been much later in the aftenoon and the light softer, a color image may have worked, but with as hard and contrasty as the light was I think that at this particular moment color would have failed me.  In black and white, though, the high contrast works out really well, and again I think the texture is highlighted by the lack of color.

So, there’s some stuff folks.  I’ll get to prettying up some of the scans I’ve got from my trip and begin adding them over the next couple of weeks.  I have some really awesome portraits of friends from the trip too, but those will be going up on Facebook.  I usually don’t pictures of my personal friends here on the blog – unless they wear the swan hat, of course…

Sunflower in the Sun

Hey there everybody.  There’s not too much going on these days.  The week before last we had some unseasonably crappy weather which stopped me from taking a short trip to the coast to take some landscape photos, and then I had a tattoo touched up, which kept me sitting at home and avoiding getting sweaty and moving about too much for the better part of a week.  Which all means I’ve been bored for about 10 days or so.  I haven’t been completely home-bound, I’ve gotten some more street photography done, with a roll of b&w in being processed right now, and about half a roll of Velvia used up.

Aside from that I have a couple of flower photos to post at least.  I recently bought a bunch of crappy film, 10 rolls of ISO-200 Kodak ColorPlus, and 10 rolls of ISO-400 Fuji Superia, so I could test out my cameras’ meters and also just play around, experimenting with ideas while not having to worry about wasting a roll of Velvia, which costs about $10 here.  I went to the local zoo, which also doubles as a botanical gardens of sorts, and took some macro shots of flowers to test out my meter.  These two shots were my favorites.  The sunflower pic is cliche as hell, but I like how I caught the blue tones in the background that contrast with the yelllow so well.

Cannonball Flower

Ben Tre woman I met coming over a little bridge, Fujifilm Provia 100F

I had convinced myself I was going to wake up at 6:30am and start shooting if the weather was nice, and do some exercise if it wasn’t.  I did, in fact wake up in time, stagger to my door, and look out at the grey, hazy morning sky.  That’s as far as I got.  I happily got back in bed, vaguely hoping for better weather later in the day, and distinctly hoping for my headache to go away.  Happy New Year, indeed.

Thankfully the weather and my pulsing head both improved, at least marginally, and around 10:30am our guide took us on a long walk over to another island so we could check out an old house.

At that hour of the morning, the light was too hard to get good shots of anything directly in the sunlight, so I decided to try and get some pictures of plants and fruit using the natural, diffused light in the shadowed areas.

Green bamboo, Kodak ColorPlus 200

I had Kodak ColorPlus 200 speed film loaded into my cameras, which I can get for less about $1.75 a roll here in Saigon, so I wasn’t feeling shy about shooting off lots of frames and experimenting with stuff.  I’m actually really impressed with how the colors and details came out, especially considering it’s negative film.  I was particularly happy with this picture of a gourd I got.

A freshly picked gourd before being hung to dry, Kodak ColorPlus 200

I found it sitting on this table, under a little covered area next to a tiny old house.  I moved the gourd a bit in order to make a nice composition with the window in the background, but essentially this is just how I found it, sitting on an old rotten table in that beautiful, diffused light.

Eventually we came upon an old cable suspension bridge crossing a channel between the two islands.  The river ran almost perfectly west to east, with the sun able to cut a direct path overhead.  Adam and I had found our afternoon shooting spot – we’d be returning here at about 4 in the afternoon.

Our little snack shop in Ben Tre, Kodak ColorPlus 200

The bridge led over to a much more developed village, with cement pathways instead of dirt, and the occasional snack shop or noodle stall.  After stopping to get some much-needed water, we headed further into the village until we came upon the ancient house.

The house was actually pretty cool, built some time in the late 1800s.  Southern Vietnam was populated much more recently than the north and central regions were, and so old architecture is not nearly as easy to come across.  Structures built before 1900 are uncommon, and ones built before 1800 are almost unheard of.  This particular home we visited has been in the current owner’s family for several generations.  Out in front of the house were hundreds of small pots, containing “cay mai”, small trees that bloom with bright yellow flowers, usually coinciding with Tet holiday.  In southern Vietnam these flowers invoke a festive feeling in the locals, similar to how a Christmas tree does with people in the West.  The family at the house has been breeding them for years and years, and renting out the small trees to local families over Tet holiday.  Around the back of the house they raise fighting cocks, which they claim sell for 5-6 million Dong (somewhere around $300).  It would have been a great place to shoot, if it hadn’t been high Noon with such hard, white light.  I did, however get a great portrait of the nice old lady that invited us into the house and gave us tea to drink!

The friendly old lady at the ancient house, Kodak ColorPlus 200

Stopping again at the little snack shop on the way back, we had the woman running the shop make us “nuoc mia” – fresh crushed sugar cane juice on ice, usually with a squeeze of lemon or orange in it.  Fantastic.  This shot is a picture of her with her sugar-cane-mashing machine.  I shot through a roll of Ilford PANF 100 over the weekend, but most of it was just okay, nothing really stood out to me except this one shot.  Due to the low light I had to shoot wide open at f/1.8.  Because of the extremely shallow depth of field at that aperture setting, I had to focus on an area near the middle of her machine and wait for her to lean forward and grab the cane coming out the other side and try and catch the shot at the perfect moment.

Cane juice, the natural way to ingest sugar! Ilford PANF 100

After returning to our rooms, cleaning up a bit, having lunch and having a short rest, Adam and I set off together back to the bridge for some good afternoon shots.  We’d been hoping for some good sunset shots down the river, and maybe some nice shots off to the east with boats laden with fruit coming towards us on the river.

Well, things in the Mekhong Delta move at a slower pace than you might like them to at times, and very few boats came along.  While it was looking like I might not get that nice, wide angle sunset photo with boats and great colors in the sky, I wasn’t going to let that stop me from doing something else.  The light coming into the bridge from the west was perfect, and so I decided to crouch down on the opposite side of the path across the bridge and photograph people going past on their motorbikes and bicycles.  Adam and I sat there shooting for about an hour, waiting again and again to get good shots of people coming across the bridge.

Sunday drivers in Ben Tre. Fujifilm Provia 100F

Crouched down on a rickety little bridge swaying back and forth over a river while motorbikes zip past you can be a bit unnerving, but it makes for good photography!  After using up most of a roll of Fujifilm Provia 100F slide film, I got these couple of shots that I really liked, plus the portrait I used to start off this post.  The horizon was quite bright in comparison to my foreground, so I used a .6 graduated neutral density filter to bright out the blues in the sky.

Traffic piling up on the bridge. Fujifilm Provia 100F

And as far as photography goes, that was all we did that was worth talking about that weekend!  I could complain about how our tour the next morning got us to the floating market too late to see anything, and the rest of it was touristy and crappy, but you wouldn’t care.  Mini-bus rides are boring to talk about, and besides all that I’m out of decent shots to show off from the trip.  I won’t be taking any more trips until the first week of February, but I’ve got quite a few mornings off in the next couple of weeks, and some material from the last few weeks that I’ve been saving up to use in galleries.  More soon!

Window on the Vinh Hue police station, shot on Fujifilm Velvia 100F

New Year’s is not my favorite holiday.  It never has been.  In my experience, New Year’s Eve seems to be this holiday where every idiot under the sun figures they have an excuse to go out and be loud, drunk and obnoxious in celebration of what is really just an arbitrary date which no longer even correlates to the lunar cycle, thanks to the Gregorian calendar.  I don’t usually make special plans for NYE, and this year was no exception.  I was at home alone, and went to bed about 5 minutes after midnight.  Whoopee, it’s 2010, goodnight.

About a week before the auspicious date of January 1 arrived, however, my friend Adam invited me to go down to the Mekhong Delta for a few days with him and a group of his friends.  I hadn’t been out of the city in months, and the quiet and fresh air were sounding really, really nice, so I decided to take a couple of extra days off of work and head down there with them.  Thank God!

We set out from Saigon about 10:30AM on the morning of the 1st.  I was feeling well rested and energetic and ready to hit the road.  The same couldn’t be said for my all my traveling companions.  Being New Year’s Day it should have come as no surprise that more than a couple of people were nursing moderate-to-severe hangovers, and some lingering drunkenness was even apparent.  Cold beers were purchased and brought into the mini-van, and shortly after setting out one of the guys demanded we pull over on the side of the highway to buy some homemade rice whiskey.  I was getting a good idea of what the weekend was going to be like.  I was determined to preserve my sobriety long enough to get some decent photography done though!

The abandoned nursing station, Fujifilm Velvia 100F

The ride down was pretty uneventful, and it took us about 3 hours to reach a little hamlet called Vinh Hue in Ben Tre province, from where we would be boarding a boat to go to our bungalows.  We were dropped off in a little decaying town square with a mostly vacant market in the middle of it.  The town had a feeling of transition, like it was in the middle of being forgotten, yet still clinging to existence.  Even the old nursing station had been boarded up and forgotten, meaning the people living there now have very limited access to medical care.

Vinh Hue woman, with her son in the background. Fujifilm Velvia 100F.

As in most poor villages I’ve visited in Vietnam, the people were friendly and welcoming, and I enjoyed a slow hour wandering around, looking for interesting things to photograph and talking to the locals.

Our "taxi driver" on the Mekhong River. Fujifilm Velvia 100F

Our “taxi” finally arrived, a long, flat, slow wooden boat that was apparently going to take us to the far side of a small island in the Mekhong River.  My buddy Adam is a pretty avid photographer as well, and the two of us spent the boat ride trying to get shots of the boat driver and his 3 cute kids that came along for the ride.  These boat rides always sound like a lot of fun, but the reality usually winds up being that they’re quite loud, and you’re breathing in thick diesel fumes the whole time.  So much for enjoying the fresh air.

The boat driver's kids try to protect each other from the diesel fumes. Fujifilm Velvia 100F

Also, trying to shoot in overcast weather, on a moving object with 100 speed film while your boat is going under, through and out of thick, overhanging vegetation is a bit of a pain in the ass.  It’s situations like this that I *almost* miss shooting digital.

Boat kids. Fujifilm Velvia 100F

Needless to say, I was relieved when we finally arrived at our guest house, if you can call it that.  We were situated inside of a grapefruit orchard, a series of 5 or 6 little bungalows, some with double beds inside, others with bunk beds.  We had fans and electricity in the rooms, but shared detached bathrooms.  There was a great big covered common area, with a bar, large tables, and even a TV area, built just a few meters from the banks of the Mekhong River.  It was the only accommodation on the island, and our group of friends were the only people staying there.

By the time everybody got settled into their rooms, cleaned up and ready to start drinking it was already getting to be quite late in the afternoon.  It had been a bit grey and dreary most of the day, but just about an hour before sunset the clouds broke and we started to get some sunshine.

Backlit leaves in the fading sunlight, Fujifilm Velvia 100F

Adam and I set off hoping to find a good spot to get some sunset photos, but only made it to the end of one dirt trail that eventually just trailed off into the brush.  No good evening shots to be had this day, but I did get one shot I really like of some backlit leaves during the last few minutes of sunlight on our side of the island.  With that, our shooting light was gone, and it was time to call it a day.  Well, we did stay up quite late, but the rest of the night was filled mostly with eating and lots and lots of drinking, and this blog is supposed to be about photography, not beer.

Chinese fortune telling sticks in a shop in Cho Lon

Playing with different kinds of film is fun.  Lord knows I don’t really need any new excuses to go out and take more photos, but deciding that I need to test out different types and brands of film has made it easy for me to justify spending my hard earned cash, and helped me feel good about blowing off other responsibilities while I wander around and do my ‘research’.

During the few days following Christmas I was testing out Agfa’s APX line of professional panchromatic B&W films.  After playing around with a bit of Ilford’s product I was going to be a hard sell.  I started off with APX 400 speed film, first in the slums a couple of blocks away, and next at my friend Tim’s Boxing Day Party.   Another buddy of mine, Bryan, made the comment that Agfa film looks “old”.  By that I think he meant that it looks like old school photos shot in the 1930′s on old chrome films.  Judging from this shot below I’d have to say I agree with him.

Laundry lines in the tenements

Pretty much more than anything, I enjoy shooting portraits.  So, Tim’s Boxing Day party seemed like the perfect occasion to capture some of my friends in a festive mood.  For you Americans out there (or any other nationality, for that matter) who scratch your head like I did and say “what in the hell is Boxing Day?”, the answer is:  bent if I know.  Apparently the Australians, English, Canadians and probably the New Zealanders celebrate this holiday on the day after Christmas, and I don’t think anybody really knows what the purpose is.  It’s definitely not about the sport of boxing.  I think it might have something to do the fact that gifts come in boxes, however we Americans have removed all of our gifts from their boxes by this point in time, and are more concerned with using, wearing, eating, or returning said gifts than we are with the frigging boxes they came in.  It seems to me like an excuse to tack another day onto to the end of the holiday.  In America we basically have no intentions of working the day after Christmas anyhow, and so feel no need to make up yet another holiday and name it after a sport which we aren’t planning on watching that day.  But I digress…  let’s continue with the discussion of film.

So sad... and on a holiday, no less!

Here I seem to have captured Tim in a rather melancholy mood.  What’s wrong little buddy?  Chipper up and enjoy the day off of work!  Or at least appreciate the gorgeous tonal gradation in this photo, the subtle contrasts, and the way I caught the emotion and sense of longing in your face.

You photographers out there that are reading this know that one of the best things about 400 speed film is that it’s perfect for capturing action.  The high speed allows you freeze those moments that would be blurred and unusable if taken with the much slower 100 ISO film you might prefer for most other occasions.   Using Agfa APX 400 was exactly how I was able to catch this next gem.

Notice the subtle movement in Hiroshi's hand as he fondles Albin's goose

It’s the capture of special, timeless moments like these that drew me to the fine craft of photography in the first place.  It’s also what keeps my finger poised, quivering over my shutter release in expectation of the next fleeting scene passing in front of me that deserves to be saved for future generations to cherish and learn from.

Obviously I was pretty impressed with the results from this particular film – however I was still far more impressed with the Ilford PANF 100 I’d used.  To be fair, though, 400 speed film just can’t produce the same fine results as a professional 100 speed pan film can.  To really, honestly make a comparison I knew I’d have to shoot some of Agfa’s 100 ISO APX.  And so I did.

Agfa’s website claims that their 100 ISO panchromatic B&W film is fantastic for both still life photography and portraits, and that it’s perfect for capturing fine detail.  Well, the shot I used to start off this blog post is one of the still life pics I took, a shot of Chinese fortune telling sticks in a shop in Chinatown.  Basically, you hold the can of sticks horizontally and mumble some stuff while you shake the sticks around inside.  When one finally falls out you pick it up and read what’s written on it, and it will tell you what to do today, or who to stay away from, or what brand of washing powder you should be using.  Or something.  I’m not really sure, as I can’t read Chinese.  Anyhow, it turned out great, so, check.  Still life photography good with Agfa APX.  Next!

Detail of old wooden window shutters

They weren’t bullshitting about capturing fine detail either.  If you’re familiar with my work you’ll know that not only am I fixated on laundry lines, I also love windows, doors, and anything remotely resembling a shape affixed to a building.  This macro shot of window shutters came out beautifully, contrasty, sharp and detailed, with a really nice tonal range.  I only wish monitors were like 5 times bigger and my website would support files of that width so you could see how nice it is full size.

I still wasn’t sold for portraits, though.  The richness, the luminosity of Ilford’s PANF film really has me hooked.  But then I got this shot:

Cyclo driver outside a market in Saigon's Cho Lon area

No witty comments about this one.  I’m blown away by the beautiful, silvery tones produced here, and happy with the work I did.  I took this one with my 50mm that loves to eat my highlights, and this shot still came out great, so not only am I happy with my exposure, I’m also pleased with the film’s exposure latitude.  Sooo…  Agfa vs Ilford.  Who wins?  Damn.  I’m not sure yet.  Ilford is hard to come by here, but I have 5 more rolls of the PANF 100 speed, and my local photog friend Nam gifted me a roll of  PANF ISO-50 to check out.  On top of that, I just ordered 35 more rolls of various Ilford film from the States, and my local film supplier seems to have a bountiful supply of APX.  So, shucks…  guess I’m going to have to shoot another 50 or 60 rolls of film before I decide.

And now, before I go, I need to clear up one little unresolved issue.  Poor Timmy!  We left him looking so sad and forelorned, and I know you readers are pining for our dear friend’s tainted holiday, wishing he hadn’t suffered such a terrible emotional letdown on the auspicious event of Boxing Day, 2009.  Well, I’ll leave you with a shot showing Tim after we cheered him up, proof that we didn’t let our mate cry into his beer in sorrow at his own party.

Hey there Timbo - glad to see you feeling yourself again!