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.
The Last Morning of 2009
What I woke up to on the last day of 2009
Well, 2010 is here. Whoopee. Hope you all didn’t make an ass of yourself over New Year’s weekend.
I had a great time myself! I spent the night of December 30th at my good buddy Tim’s apartment in Binh Thanh district of Saigon with the plan of waking up at the ass crack of dawn on Dec. 31st and getting some great dawn photos of the city from the roof of his building. His apartment building is 18 stories tall, and it the tallest building for a long, long ways, with nothing surrounding it but urban sprawl. I’d never been up on the roof for sunrise or sunset, but I figured it must be fantastic. I wasn’t disappointed.
I shot one roll of Fuji Velvia 100F and one roll of Kodak Elite Chrome so I could compare the results. Fuji thumped Kodak squarely on the nose, and I can assure you that once I shoot through the couple rolls of Kodak Elite that I have left, I’ll be sticking with Fuji slide film from here on out.
These shots look better the bigger you see them, so I decided that while I’m only going to show off 5 shots from this morning’s shoot, I would still load them as a gallery album so you all can see them a bit larger. Click here or on the photo above to see the series.
I’ve got lots more stuff from the weekend to upload – I tried to get it up sooner, but I couldn’t get my gallery app to browse my computer for content. I eventually figured out that the version of the app I’m using and Flash Player 10 don’t play nice together. Anyhow, problem solved now, and more coming soon. Happy New Year everybody! May you have 365 sunrises as nice as the last one for 2009 was for me.
Doorways of Vietnam
Doorways of Vietnam Gallery
Here’s a new set of photos that I took while traveling around Vietnam. A collection of doorways, windows, and other things I found on and around old houses and pagodas in Laos and Vietnam.
Destination: Dalat (Part 2)
A procession of people coming to pay their respects to King Hung Vuong
Saturday morning I woke up just before dawn. The bed in my hotel room was right next to the window, so why I’ll was still laying there I leaned over and pulled the curtains aside to take a peek outside. Thank God, I wasn’t disappointed in what I saw. Clear blue skies, with strands of thin, wispy clouds, illuminated bright pink in the early morning light. My friend was already getting dressed to go outside and shoot some stuff down at Xuan Huong Lake. Read more »