Without an H

Photography from south-east Asia by Jon Sanwell

Posts tagged ‘black and white’

Dalat to Ho Lak and back again

One of the things I like best about living in the city is leaving it every now and then to spend a few days in the country.  A week in the central highlands around Dalat gave me the chance to breathe some clean air and try my hand at some landscape photography, neither of which I get to do very often.  I took a couple of motorbike trips with one of the Dalat Easy Riders, Mr. Thanh (aka Joseph), who did a far better job of negotiating hairpin bends and avoiding oncoming trucks than I ever could have.  As a passenger, I could concentrate on looking at one spectacular view after another.  Impressive as those views were, the people we encountered in the villages, fields and markets were even more memorable.  These pictures are taken from those two motorbike trips, and were taken in the area around Dalat, and on the road to Ho Lak (Lak lake).

Dalat: town and country (potw #35)

I spent last week in and around Dalat, in the central highlands of Vietnam.  It reminded me a little of Hanoi in the autumn – it was hot but not humid, and cool in the evenings – but Dalat doesn’t really resemble anywhere else I’ve been here. Dapper gentlemen wear fedoras or berets, while children wrap up warm in woolly hats or balaclavas. The smell of coffee is everywhere – open-front cafes line the streets, and coffee fields surround the town. Lanes and alleyways meander up and down the hillside before leading you somewhere you weren’t expecting or petering out altogether.  Vietnamese tourists arrive by the busload from Saigon and elsewhere.  The town centre lake and the surrounding mountains give the place an Alpine feel, as if a little bit of Austria had been transplanted to Vietnam a hundred years ago and left to fend for itself.

I decided to test myself a little on this trip by only shooting in black and white.  It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but never really followed through until now.  The change of scene seemed to call for a change of style – black and white landscapes instead of colour portraits.  I’m sure I’ll go back to colour before too long, but I’m hoping that taking black and white pictures for a while will make me think about colour in a different way in future.  I’ve not given up taking portraits – I’ll be posting many from this trip at a later date – but I wanted this first post from Dalat to feature a landscape and a street scene.

More pictures from this trip to follow soon.

A sunny interlude (potw #34)

It’s been a very wet week – even when it wasn’t raining, it felt like it was about to start – but I found a little time during a sunny interlude late on Tuesday afternoon to take a walk round the block and shoot a few pictures.

Later today I’m heading up to Dalat for a week of mountain air and cooler temperatures.  I plan to spend the week walking, reading, napping and taking photographs, probably black and white photographs, as that’s what’s interesting me at the moment.

Up with the sun

Vietnam is a nation of early risers. In the cities and countryside alike, people are up with the sun. It’s not uncommon for dissolute expats to make it home in the early hours, just as their Vietnamese neighbours are going out to face the new day. When I lived in Hanoi, my alley turned itself into a small fresh food market every morning; I knew I’d had a long night when I came home to find market traders setting up outside my front door.

Saigon’s parks are often at their busiest in the early mornings, when the sun is low in the sky. People of all ages gather to take all kinds of exercise – jogging, walking, badminton, aerobics, martial arts, ballroom dancing – before the working days begins. I’m not naturally an early riser myself, but back in January I made a few early morning visits to my local park to take a few pictures.

I don’t take that many black and white pictures, but with these I wanted to see if I could capture the feel of the early morning sun without the benefit of colour.

Parklife (POTW #13)

Exercising in the early morning sun.

This is one of a number of shots from a few recent early morning park visits.  I’ll be posting a longer series of shots soon.

In the meantime, I’m away for a couple of weeks over the Tet holiday, traveling through the Mekong Delta and into Cambodia.  I’m currently in Vinh Long.  I have my camera with me, of course, but not my laptop, so no more pictures of the week until I get back, when I hope I’ll have plenty of Mekong shots to share.

Chuc mung nam moi!