Cho Lon Alley

I took a walk with Chi the other day in the Cho Lon area of Saigon.  Chi is my best friend in Vietnam.  I always love hanging out with her, and she likes to shoot film like I do now, so we had quite a bit of fun.  Cho Lon overlaps district 5 and district 6, and the name means “Big Market” in Vietnamese.  It’s what we Western folks refer to as “Chinatown”.  It’s interesting for a million different reasons, and there’s a million different things to take pictures of there, however on this day I mostly did portraits of people on the street.

Chi Head

Well, that’s not exactly true.  I should say I mostly “did” portraits, it’s just that those are what came out the best.  Like I mentioned in my last post, the 50mm lens I’m shooting with is extremely contrasty when it’s wide open, and that caused some problems on some of my shots, and I’ve also discovered that for a mid-range lens it has a lot of barrel distortion, which pretty much ruined all the pictures I tried to take of windows, doors, or anything else with straight lines.  However, while discovering those limitations, I’ve also discovered that not only is the lens awesome for portraits, but Ilford PAN 100 speed black & white film probably produces the most beautiful portraits I’ve yet seen as well.  I got the portrait of Chi up above in a restaurant where we had lunch before we set out on our little jaunt.

Ilford PAN 100 - My New Best Friend

I’ve also found that walking around with a little manual film camera that most people on the street perceive as being old and shitty makes taking portraits much easier.  The D3 I used to have seemed to intimidate a lot of people, and I usually got asked several times a day if I was a journalist.  And quite often got told roughly to fuck off.  On this afternoon people were actually waving me over and asking me to take their picture, and approaching people with my best stupid tourist smile and my camera in hand was more or less an effective approach.  A tourist here, I am not.  Stupid?  Well, that’s a more difficult question to address…

Couple That Asked Me To Take Their Photo

These next guys though, did imply that I was a journalist. They asked me after I snapped their photo when they’d be able to find their picture in the newspaper.  I think they were kidding…  Anyhow, I love this kind of scene in Vietnam – the culture here is all out on the street.  In more developed countries you really need to be invited into people’s homes, into their lives, if you really want to experience their culture.  In Vietnam you can simply wander up and down the street and get a good taste of what daily life is like for most people.  In most cases, if the people aren’t actually out socializing on the street, then their front doors are wide open so they can see and talk to the people who walk by.  These guys apparently found this old, rotten couch on the sidewalk an inviting place to sit down and have a chat.  It’s the dry season at least, so it probably wasn’t soaking wet and stinking of fungus.

Rotten Sofa Squatters

Some things are much easier to work with in black & white, the lack of color contrast can actually make some things that don’t work at all in color work fantastically in monochrome.  Markets, however, seem to be quite a bit more tough for me.  I’m used to shooting for color in the markets, looking for really bright fruits and vegetables, and I find myself now trying to figure out how to shoot for contrast in tone as opposed to contrast in color.  For example, a bright yellow and a bright red pepper sitting next to each other in color may look fantastic, but then in b&w they look almost the exact shame shade of gray.  Red specifically screws with my head – I’m never quite sure what I’m going to wind up with when I shoot red with b&w film.  In the near future I’m going to get myself some red and yellow filters so I can bring out the contrast when I want, but at the moment I’m at the mercy of my environment.  These dried fish came out much nicer than the fruit I tried to shoot.

Little Wicker Baskets of Dried Fish - Ubiquitous at Vietnamese Markets

And finally, one more here.  This little kid was just the cutest thing on two legs, but she was hanging out in a shaded part of the sidewalk and the sun had gone behind the clouds.  She was also a feisty little kid, and would not stop moving.  The only hope I had to get a decent shot was to open my 50mm up to f/1.4 and fire off several frames.  “Spray and pray”, as a friend of mine said the other day.  This was the only shot that came out well.  Reducing the size to fit my blog really took away from the atmosphere of the shot as it now looks much less soft than it does at full size – the only thing in the entire shot that’s sharp enough is her right eye, which really focuses your gaze on her quirky look and gives the shot a really old-school, long ago feel to it.  You can see, though, what I mean about this lens being so damn contrasty – it loves to eat highlight details for dinner.

Funny Little Monkey

Long live black and white.  More stuff coming soon, keep coming back!