Young women getting drenched with yellow-colored water

Last month I went to Luang Prabang in Laos for the Lao New Year celebrations.  I was there for about one week and did lots of work.  Most of it has already been posted on the Laos Photo Library, but I’m going to start posting more of my Laos stuff in galleries on this site.

This new gallery showcases the insane street celebrations that take place during Lao New Year.  During the New Year festivities, Lao people traditionally wash the Buddha images housed in the local temples, and also have ceremonies where they wash their elders’ hands in a show of respect.  In the modern interpretation, young people crowd onto the streets to toss water at each other, throw talcum powder in people’s faces, and smear kettle grease all over their friends.  The whole thing is quite chaotic and a bit stressful for a photographer who doesn’t particularly want to get water, handfuls of white powder, or grease and soot on/in his camera.

I really wanted to capture the sense of constant movement, the streams of water flying through the air, and the general sense of friendly mayhem.  In order to do this I used slow shutter speeds for much of my work, and I’m rather pleased with the results I got.  I hope you enjoy this set, it’s one of my favorites!

A girl covered in white powder and coloring during the Lao New Year celebrations

A couple of weeks back I went to Luang Prabang in Laos for the Lao New Year celebrations. If you’ve ever heard of Songkran in Thailand, it’s really similar to that. Traditionally all the Buddha statues and furnishings would be taken out of the temples and washed by the community during ceremonies and parades. Young people would also wash their elders hands in a symbolic show of respect. Nowadays it’s become a tourist attraction, more noticeably recognized for crowds of people standing in the street flinging water at everybody, often with food coloring mixed in, and also people rubbing and throwing something like talcum powder all over each other, and rubbing pot grease on each other’s faces. The Lao New Year festivities are far more relaxed and low-key than in Thailand, however they can still get a little hectic. There’s a big parade with hundreds of kids dressed up in traditional outfits, and everybody shares food and alcohol with everybody else. If you’ve never done it before, especially if you’re young, it’s a blast and an experience you’ll never forget. If you’re closer to 40 than you are to 20, sober, carrying several thousand dollars worth of equipment and trying to work it’s not so much fun.

This is what it looks like when a guy in a truck throws a bucket of water on your camera

April is a terrible month to shoot in Laos, it’s usually very hazy, hot as a furnace, at least this year it was raining intermittently, and when there was direct sunlight the light was so hard that it was even more difficult to work with. Now imagine my anxiety when somebody has thrown a bucket of water on my camera just moments after it got a fistful of mysterious white powder thrown on it, and I’m sitting there watching something that like looks like dough clump up and drip off of it. I must say, the experience was more work than it was play, but I got lots of material I’m really happy with, and that’s all that matters. I put up a new gallery for Lao New Year on my Laos Photo Library site. Go check it out.

After a week in Luang Prabang and another week working with my photos and working my day job I took a bit of time to wind down, and now it’s a four-day holiday here in Vietnam. Under normal circumstances you’d find me off somewhere else, but I’m going to take some time to work more locally and get some good Saigon material, and work more on marketing. While going through my material from the last 6 months or so I realized I’ve got a really nice set of shots of windows and doors, so I put together a new gallery of doors, windows, and assorted decorations on old houses and pagodas in Laos and Vietnam. For the near future I’ll probably be making shorter posts and adding more galleries of stuff I get around Saigon. So check back soon, I’ll make announcements for new galleries and other stuff I post!

The view from Phoxai village, Vang Vieng District

Photography in Laos is not easy, I’ve been averaging about two photos a day which I can use, and for those of you that don’t know, that’s definitely not enough.  But I think I’m figuring out how to work here… more on that towards the end of the post.

Yesterday I tried to rent a motorbike in Vang Vieng.  I wanted a real Honda, not some Chinese piece of junk.  I asked a guy if I could rent one for 10 days, and he got very suspicious.  “Where are you going to go?” he asked.  “Kasi”, I replied, which isn’t all true.  Kasi is only 56 kilometers from Vang Vieng.  Yeah, I was going to go through Kasi… but I was going to keep driving another 150 kilometers or so through the mountains to Luang Prabang.  He said Kasi was too far, then became very aloof and stopped looking at me, which is the Lao way of saying no.  Being the bastard that I am, I stood and stared at him and basically forced him to actually tell me no.  Which he did.  I asked another guy, went through the same questions, and was told a ridiculously high price for the bike.  So, what should I do now?

Just rent a piece of junk and lie about what I’m going to do with it.

So, I did exactly that, got my clunky Chinese 110cc motorbike, and spent my first day with it scouting for spots between Vang Vieng and Kasi to shoot on my way out the next day.

So, having done that, I woke up this morning before sunrise, grabbed my stuff, hopped on the motorbike I’m currently abusing, and headed to my first spot.  There’s a great big, open, beautiful view point right off the highway I had scoped out, with a little shop next to it that sells coffee, which I most certainly needed when I arrived.  I got there, set up my tripod and…  waited for the light.  For almost 2 hours.  I’m damn glad I waited, ‘cause it was the only moment in the whole day that the light and color were right for a good landscape shot.  The shot that started this post is one of the black and white shots I snapped while I was there.  The fantastic color one I got will eventually wind up on my Laos Photo Library site.

While standing there, the man that owns the little house/coffee shop by the side of the road came over and started talking to me.  The conversation basically went like this:

“Hi!  You’re taking some photos, huh?”
“Oh, yes, I am, thanks!  The view from your home is very beautiful.”
“Oh, thank you.  You drove here on this motorbike?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Do you have a driver’s license in Laos?”
“Oh… no, I don’t!”
“Hmmm…  you rented this bike, huh?  Where are you going?”
“I’m going to Luang Prabang.”
“That’s really far from here… you’re not supposed to take these rental bikes that far.”
“Yeah, I know, but the owner doesn’t know what I’m doing with it”
“What town did you rent it in?”
“I rented it in Vang Vieng.”
“Oh…  I work in Vang Vieng.”
“Really?  What do you do there?”
“I’m a police officer.”

Sooo… what could I say?  I said “Oh! That’s great!” and stood there with a big shit-eating grin on my face until he just started laughing, then he clapped me on the back and walked away.  That’s Lao people for you.  I’m starting to love them.

So, I got my great morning landscape, and set off.  The road was beautiful, but it was cloudy and raining on and off the whole way, and the 3 other spots I had picked out had to be shelved for another day.

Now, this is where I start to get frustrated.  This has been a typical day for me.  Wake up, get one, maybe two nice landscapes, then struggle the rest of the day to get another decent photo.  Here are the problems in Laos:

• The light sucks.  It’s way too harsh most of the day, and the times when it’s not, it’s likely to be cloudy or overcast.
• There’s very little color, especially in the landscapes.  Everything is green, green, green, which looks beautiful to eye, but when photographed has no tonal range and shows no depth.
• There’s very, very little activity.  There are less people in the entire country than in most major cities I know, and people spend most of the day sitting around in the shade doing nothing.
• When you pick up your camera to take a picture, people either run as fast as they can, turn their head so you can’t see their face, give you a stiff, unnatural smile (if they want to be nice), or just look scared or even upset.  People here don’t appreciate photographers.

I’m used to working in Vietnam, where there are so many people that in markets, and even villages, you can do some work going unnoticed or being ignored.  Plus, people in Vietnam like being photographed it seems.  They are usually really great about it.  I can be driving along the road, see a market, stop and pull out my camera, and people are welcoming, jovial even, and as you take their photos their friends tease them about it, and the result is lots of photos with laughing, happy, natural looking people.

Pull up next to a market on the roadside here and pull out a camera, and watch the people flee for their lives.

I stopped in a couple of villages today to photograph kids playing, and I got a couple okay shots, but really nothing great…  mostly kids looking scared.  However, I stopped in one village, sat down and bought a drink, and when the kids showed up I bought them all snacks, teased them for a while, pulled out my camera and showed them some other pictures, and then took some shots…  that yielded some better results.

Kids in Kiewkacham

Then about 2pm, I was feeling quite tired after being out and about since 5:45am, and I came upon a mountain village called Kiewkacham.  I saw that there was a guesthouse in town, and I decided to stop off and spend the night.  After taking a short nap, I wandered around a bit, taking a few shots here and there, but mostly getting the same results.  People just weren’t receptive.  So I laid off shooting, and just started approaching people and talking.  After a few minutes, I’d ask for a photo.  That started to work.  Eventually I wound up being invited to sit down and eat bananas and talk with a Hmong guy.  His wife and kids came out.  His father came over from another house.  The woman next door and her granddaughter came over.  A local school teacher stopped by.  Soon there were more than 20 people hanging about, most of them just staring at me.  But as I started trying to take photos… it started working.  Then the schoolteacher’s son took me over to the local school to meet the English teacher during his class.  I got a great shot of him, too.  Things started to flow.

The local English teacher in Kiewkacham village

Now, being able to speak some Lao helps a lot.  But I think I figured something out this afternoon about taking pictures of people in Laos:

You gotta’ hang out.  Rolling in on a motorbike, walking through the villages and taking photos simply will not work like it does in Vietnam.  You have to sit down with people and make friends, make them comfortable with you.  People in Laos, especially the minority tribes people, are very shy, but very friendly.  If you let them warm up, and do things on their terms, it can work.

Oh, and another thing I’ve figured out:  Forget waiting for the perfect light.  Use it when it’s there, but “perfect” lighting is hard to come by here.  I have to use what I’ve got to use, and that’s it.  If I hang out waiting for perfect light, I’m never going to have enough shots when I leave here.

So, after all this, as the sun was going down, I came back to my guesthouse, sat down with the Lao people sitting outside, and bought beer for everybody. We started chatting, joking around, and looking up stuff in my Lao/English dictionary together.   Now they want to hang out with me.  Now they want me to come back again, and stay longer next time.