photography | Without an H

Posts from the ‘photography’ category

Streets of Jogja

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Yogyakarta, Jogja to its friends, was a breath of fresh air – literally – after Jakarta. While Indonesia’s capital, as previously noted, is a massive, incomprehensible metropolis, Jogja is a friendly, laid-back city, more notable for its atmosphere than its sights, but easy to walk around and with an unhurried, familial vibe that I really liked. My visit coincided with the Ramadan fasting month, so the streets were perhaps less busy during the day than they would be normally, but there was still plenty going on and lots of pictures to take.

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On leaving Hanoi

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I’ve lived in Hanoi for a long time. I’ve had two spells in the city, the first from the summer of 2008 until the end of 2010, and the second from the autumn of 2013 until now. And now my time here is coming to an end. In a couple of days’ time, I will be leaving Hanoi and moving to Yangon. I’m incredibly excited about the move. I took two trips to Myanmar in 2015, and the idea of one day living there lodged itself in my head fairly early in my visit. Having slowly marinated the idea in my brain for a couple of years, things suddenly started moving very quickly over the last month, as I found myself a new teaching job in Yangon and finally started making concrete plans. I don’t want to tempt fate, but I have a very positive feeling about this new start.

But I will miss Hanoi. It’s been my home for many years, and has shaped me in ways I probably won’t fully appreciate until more time has passed. I’ll miss my lunchtime bún chả or phở gà. I’ll miss my afternoon coffee by the lake. I’ll miss the friends, old and new, that I’ve made along the way. I’ll miss scooting about town on my Honda Wave. I’ll even miss the casual lunacy of the Hanoi traffic. But I won’t miss mouldy March.

I can’t even begin to fully describe Hanoi in words. It’s a truly unique place, and everyone who’s spent any time here has their own take on it. It’s not always an easy place to live, but for all its frustrations and imperfections, there’s something about this city that gets under a person’s skin.

Choosing the pictures to include in this post has been a difficult task. On another day, I would have made a different selection, but these are the pictures I’ve taken in Hanoi over the last few years that most seem to mean something to me today.

Things might be a bit scattered on this site over the next few weeks. I still have some more pictures from my trip to Indonesia to post, some more from Ha Giang that have been on the backburner for a while, and a few bits and pieces that I’ve shot in Hanoi over the last couple of weeks. And of course, I hope to be out and about shooting in Yangon as much as I can, and sharing some of my early impressions. There’s a lot I could write about what I’m looking forward to about life in Yangon, but for the rest of this post, I’m just going to wallow in photographic nostalgia.

Hẹn gặp lại, Hà Nội. See you again.

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Luthier of Jogja

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Another short post today. This man ran a small guitar workshop just round the corner from my guesthouse in Jogja.

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The birdman of Jogja

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Just a few pictures today, but more from Jogja – and some exciting news – coming soon.

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Going Solo

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There’s no shortage of spectacular sights in Indonesia: live volcanoes, ancient temples, endless rice terraces. I enjoyed visiting and photographing all of those places, but some of my best memories and – I think – some of my best pictures came from wandering the streets of the towns and cities, and experiencing the everyday life of the country. People, markets, street food, patterns and details: these are some of the things I most enjoy photographing.

Solo, also known as Surakarta, in central Java is my kind of town. It’s a fairly unassuming place, full of warm, friendly people going about their business in no great hurry, and I hope that these pictures capture some of that mood.

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Lazy days in Ubud

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Like Hoi An in central Vietnam and Luang Prabang in Laos, Ubud in Bali is a town that has wholeheartedly embraced Western tourism; the streets are lined with hotels, souvenir shops and restaurants. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Yes, it’s heavily commercialised and a little contrived, but there’s still something very appealing about Ubud and the surrounding countryside. Hindu shrines and temples are squeezed into every available space. The streets are strewn with carefully packaged offering of petals, fruit and rice. Taxi drivers politely offer “transport” to passing pedestrians. Ancient statues are draped with silk or garlanded with flowers. It’s all very conducive to doing not very much at all, a welcome change of pace and scene after the (quite literal) fire and brimstone of east Java.

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A Javanese sunset

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I don’t take many sunset pictures, but I like this image of the fisherman wading through the shallow waters back to dry land. It was taken at the end of a long day in East Java, which began with a climb up a volcano, Mount Bromo, and ended with a stroll around the nearby port town of Probolinggo.

Jon vs. the volcanoes

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One of the joys of travelling to a new place is getting up at stupid o’clock in the morning to take a look at something unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. And so it was that I rose at 2am (two hours before I went to bed) to make the trip to Mount Bromo, probably the best-known of the many volcanoes in Java. The trip began with a climb to the Penanjakan viewpoint for sunrise, before descending the hill into the low-lying clouds and walking across the Sea of Sand and then climbing up to the rim of the crater itself.

Sunrise view of Mount Bromo from Penanjakan hill.

Walking across the ‘Sea of Sand’ to the volcano

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One thing I wasn’t prepared for was the noise coming from the crater, a constant, angry rumble.

If I ever open a pub, I’m going to call it the Horse and Volcano.

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It really is that colour.

A couple of days later, after a similarly early start and another pre-dawn climb, I found myself looking out over the extraordinary, otherworldly turquoise sulphur lake in Ijen crater as the sun rose behind me. Choking fumes filled the air, as wandering tourists and photographers crossed paths with tough, hard-working sulphur miners.

A sulphur miner takes a well-earned rest.

Not the surface of Mars, but it could be.

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These two volcanoes, Bromo and Ijen, are among the most-visited sites in Java, but that doesn’t make them any less extraordinary to see, especially if, like me, you’ve never set eyes on an active volcano before. Memorable sights don’t necessarily make for compelling photographs, however, and I don’t think these pictures are among my best. I struggle sometimes, when faced with much-photographed locations like these, to make photographs that offer anything different to what’s been done before. I think these pictures give a decent idea of what these places look like, but don’t quite capture what they felt like. That doesn’t really detract from my memories of these early morning visits, but I’ll remember Bromo and Ijen more for the experiences than for the photographs.

Grey skies over Prambanan

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The title says it all, really. I made two trips to the Hindu temple of Prambanan while I was in Java. On the first visit, the heavens opened minutes after I arrived (shortly after the picture above was taken, in fact). On the second, the rain held off, despite the threatening clouds overhead. So no spectacular sunsets, but I think the cloudy skies make for quite dramatic pictures in this case.

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Around Borobudur

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A few pictures taken in and around Borobudur town: a farmer sharpening his scythe; rice terraces on the road to Selogriyo temple; a house in the shape of a giant camera; and buddha carvings, large and small.

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