More Market Flowers
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. Read more »
Vietnamese Islands
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! Read more »
Back to Tay Ninh
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. Read more »
Life Gives Us Lemons
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. Read more »
Market Flowers
"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.
A Weekend in Ben Tre (part 2)
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.
A Weekend in Ben Tre (part 1)
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.