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.