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.