It’s happened to all of us. We take the family elephant down to the river to wash off the accumulated sludge of winter from her undercarriage and, next thing you know, a water fight breaks out. Afterall, you’re sitting on the world’s greatest water pistol, right?
Day three in Thailand and it’s a visit to the Elephant Conservation Center at Lampang.
Wrapping up day two of my Thailand trip were visits to a few temples including Wat Chedi Luang. Images from its prayer hall appear above. There are many, many temples in Chiang Mai — I believe I heard the number put at 1038 which hardly seems possible. On my fourth and last day in Chiang Mai, I took a long morning walk through the old, walled city and found that there were temples hidden around nearly every corner. You wouldn’t know it driving through town but on foot these hidden gems are revealed. More on that walk in a few posts. I’ll try and stay somewhat chronological as I go through the images from this trip.
In the afternoon of my second day in Thailand, I visited some highland villages north of Chiang Mai. The people who live in this area migrated to Thailand over the last few centuries from China and Tibet. My first stop was a working village that was largely agricultural but had a couple of small stands where they sold their traditional woven fabrics to the occasional tourists that ventured up.
I posted a couple of other shots from this village in an earlier post. The shot at the top of this post and those that follow came from another village that is more of a tourist-centered, cultural village. This felt like much less of a real, working village and more like something that was created to show off the crafts of each of several tribes. Each grass-roofed “house” had someone weaving or sewing on the porch. Among the tribes represented were the Long Neck Karen, whose women are known for wearing the heavy brass rings on their necks.
One can argue the merits of this second type of village. As tourism grows in an area, these types of villages are ways to present local cultures to tourists in a way that is easily accessible to travelers (no need to venture high into the mountains to some remote village with no services, for instance). That also reduces the impact of tourism on the real, working villages where people want to just live their lives and maybe don’t want tour busses rolling through on the hour. On the other hand, you’re hardly seeing the real way of life of these people in such a controlled display. It’s a form of packaged tourism rather than a true experience. I don’t have an answer for what is right but I do hope that, whichever route is taken, it is good for the local people. Tourism may be key to their survival as their old ways of nomadic farming become nearly impossible with the onset of modern development on all sides. The world is changing and I think many cultures are desperate to find ways to assimilate while keeping something of their own cultural identities intact.
My second day in Thailand began with an early morning visit to the market. In addition to a vast indoor space where everything was sold from clothing to hot meals, there were a line of vendors along the street stretching for several blocks. This was true convenience shopping in that people could ride up on their scooter and do their shopping without ever getting off of their bike.
Smoke from the nearby agricultural burning still hung in the air lending a soft warm glow to the light.
Just a quick note to say that Adobe has announced Creative Suite 5 today, including Photoshop CS5. That’ll put a hitch in my day. Guess I’ll be watching new feature demos ’til the cows come home. Rather than list a bunch of links to the product information, I’ll just link to the post I ran across on John Nack’s blog. He has provided links to several sources and will surely keep it updated as new reviews surface. Actually, upon further inspection, I see that he has started a CS5 category here for future posts. Shipping for Photoshop CS5 should begin within 30 days, according to the press release.
Happy 20th birthday, Photoshop!
PS: Does anyone else think it’s odd that Lightroom isn’t part of Adobe’s Master Collection or the Creative Suite for that matter? And Lightroom 3 does not seem to be a part of this announcement.
I ended day one in Thailand at the night market in Chiang Mai. The market itself was fairly touristy — lots of t-shirts and trinkets — but the local traffic was colorful enough for me. I enjoy places where a large percentage of the traffic is on fewer than four wheels and Thailand is full of scooters, motorcycles and tuktuks. It’s a hobby of mine to lock the shutter speed at 1/15th of a second and pan with these commuters in the evening to turn the background into a chaos of color. Obviously not every shot will be great but you end up with a few and I’m not paying for film and processing anymore so what’s it really matter? Chalk up another win for digital — it frees you to experiment and from failure comes the occasional wild success. As with the lottery, you don’t win if you don’t play.
I haven’t mentioned much about the Red Shirt protests in Bangkok. They began around March 12th and I arrived on the 15th. During my two weeks in Thailand — about half of that spent in Bangkok — the protests remained quite peaceful. You would see the occasional street blocked off or a group of riot police at a checkpoint but you could easily go about your day without any problems. On only one day did a tour get cancelled due to street closures and traffic problems due to the protests. When I flew out of Bangkok on the 28th, there were signs of enhanced security near the airport but things remained peaceful.
That has unfortunately changed in the last couple of days. While I had been having to check the news on BBC’s Asia-Pacific page, the Bangkok protests have now appeared on the front page of CNN’s site. The situation has worsened with at least 20 dead now and hundreds more wounded. It’s hard as an outsider to fully understand the state of affairs or to know from half way around the world what the current condition is or why things went south. I can only hope that we’ve seen the worst and that soon Thailand can move beyond the violence. It’s a beautiful country with amazingly kind people that deserve to live in peace.
Of course, photographers have been on scene throughout. The Boston Globe’s Big Picture ran a series of images from the “unrest” on April 9th. I’ve also been following the coverage of Bangkok-based photographer Gavin Gough on his blog (search it for “red shirt” and you’ll see several entries). I think you’ll find from these image galleries that things are not entirely black and white. They never are.
Day one in Thailand continued as I photographed a cooking class at the Four Seasons in Chiang Mai. Beware the Bird Eye peppers in the bowl above. They are small but they are mighty.
I have to say that the food that came out of this cooking class was some of the best I had while in Thailand, and I had some incredibly good food! Hopefully I’ll be able to recreate some of the dishes at home from the recipes provided by the Four Seasons but I’m afraid my attention was more on photography than the preparation instructions. I may come to regret that later.
The top photo of this grouping is the Gaeng Kiew Warn Kai, or Green Curry with Chicken in Coconut Milk (that may have been my favorite). Bottom left shows the open-air “classroom” and bottom right is a Som Tam, or Green Papaya Salad. If you want to learn to cook Thai food, I can’t think of a better place than this. If you want to photograph people cooking Thai food, I only suggest that you step back when the Bird Eye peppers hit the hot wok.
Post-processing images from a trip is like replaying the experience in slow motion. A heavy day’s worth of images can easily take more time to process than to shoot. I don’t tend to review my shots on the road that much. I’ll chimp a bit to make sure everything is working properly but I’m a bit of a battery miser and — given the pace that I’m often traveling — just don’t have the time to review thoroughly on the road. That said, I always have a reasonable idea of what’s on the hard drives at the end of the day and I wonder how I ever managed, back in the days of film, to travel for weeks and not have any idea of what my take looked like until slides arrived back from the lab. Digital — how’d I ever live without you?
So this post is the first of several that I’ll write as I relive my recent trip to Thailand. Day one has now been processed and it began with a trip to Bo Sang, otherwise known as “umbrella village”, near Chiang Mai. Everywhere you turn in this town, there are umbrellas. They are not just sold here, but manufactured here. From raw materials to brightly decorated umbrellas and fans, you can observe the entire process. And it’s humbling to watch. This is not a high-tech factory situation but many skilled workers turning bamboo, wood and paper into functional objects, mostly with the simplest of hand tools. And they work incredibly fast with the assuredness that comes with years of experience.
Much of the manufacturing happens in small, open-air spaces behind homes around the village but the decoration and painting can be seen taking place near the town gate, behind a shop that sells — you guessed it — umbrellas. Freshly papered umbrellas dry on the grass in a central courtyard while painters work in the shade of the surrounding awning. As I photographed these people working, some would offer to paint dragons on my camera bag in just 10 minutes (an offer I now regret not taking them up on). In fact, they’ll paint just about anything for you and I witnessed many people getting their shirts painted right on their backs.
Each January, Bo Sang holds an umbrella festival complete with parades and beauty contests. That, I can imagine, would be a true photo opportunity.
A note on the warmth of these shots: I tend to shoot with my white balance set to “cloudy” to add a little extra warmth much as one would do by adding a warming filter when shooting with film. The warmth in these images is largely natural, however, due to the air quality. Controlled burning of agricultural fields in the area was creating a fair amount of smoke and haze, not unlike what I often experience back home in the Great Plains of the U.S. in the spring. While it doesn’t do much for landscape photography where you want good visibility and blue skies, it does extend those golden hours as the sun filters through the smoke. As with many situations in photography, you can view it as a problem or an opportunity. Here, I think it worked in my favor and has added a cohesive tone element to everything I shot that morning.
I’ve been back from Thailand for a week now but I’m still in the thick of organizing and processing my images from the trip. I’ve ended up with about 5000 “keeper” shots after purging the really bad stuff. Those images have all been renamed and filed with the most basic location information included in their description fields (city, province, country, continent). I’ve also added rough star-ratings but they will undoubtedly change as I begin the actual post-processing. That’s where I currently stand — I’m ready to begin making color corrections and other adjustments to get these images ready for submission to stock agencies and publishers. I’ll also need to keyword everything. Normally I would wait until after making corrections to keyword but I’ll probably jump back and forth between editing and keywording this time so that I don’t end up with a mind-numbingly long keywording task at the end.
Not all 5000 images will be distributed. There are lots of near duplicates as well as bracketed shots for HDR and sequences destined to become stitched panoramas. There are also lots of shots that I take for reference like signs that show the name and spelling of a place. This isn’t the most glamorous part of being a travel photographer but it’s necessary. Taking the photos is just the beginning. Getting them into the market and in the hands of photo buyers is crucial if you want to make a living.
One of the shots I wanted to be sure to get while in Thailand was a floating market. They still exist but many have become so popular among tourists that they products sold are more often souvenirs than food. You also need an early start in order to get more locals in your shots than tourists.
I arrived just as the first boats were setting up. There were plenty of t-shirt and trinket vendors already, but there were also locals — like this man — buying their breakfasts. I liked the moment in this shot where the plate was just being exchanged.
I shot a lot that morning and have a few that I think are successful. Did I get that iconic shot? Probably not. But you can’t expect to get that in one morning.