Without an H

Photography from south-east Asia by Jon Sanwell

Posts tagged ‘market’

Saigon Street Portraits

I like taking people pictures more than any other kind of photography.  I’m always on the lookout for an interesting face or a striking attitude.  These pictures might not be street photography in the strictest sense, since I tend to ask permission before taking a shot, but they’re portraits of people I encountered on the street, so I’ll call them street portraits.  I try not to get too caught up with labels and genres.

To take people pictures that I’m happy with, I have to be in the right mood.  I try to establish some kind of connection with a person when I’m taking their picture, even if it’s just through nodding and smiling.  Sometimes, everything clicks, and I can’t wait to get home and look at the pictures on the laptop.  Sometimes, it just doesn’t happen, and I feel like throwing away my camera.  I generally find that the pictures I most enjoy taking are the ones that turn out the best.

These portraits were all taken in Saigon over the last couple of months.

This tailor was hard at work outside, near the bus station in Cholon.

This man runs a shoe shop in Cholon. I showed him his picture and he smiled a little sadly and said, “I’m very thin.” I couldn’t really argue with him.

With her broad smile and pleasant demeanour, she’s not a typical taxi driver.

These two lovebirds are music students, practising in the park after class.

Second Impressions of Saigon

I’ve been in Saigon for two months now, and it feels like time to take stock.  I was going to write about the differences between Saigon (as Ho Chi Minh City is still commonly called) and Hanoi, but it feels too early to do that just yet.  I need to feel more settled here before I can make a proper comparison.

I lived in Hanoi for two and a half years and felt very comfortable there, but I always thought that I took my best pictures when I left the city.  My favourite shots from that time were taken in Sapa, Bac Ha, Hoi An, Cambodia, even the outskirts of Hanoi, rather than the centre.  Perhaps there’s something about familiarity with a place which makes it harder for me to take good pictures there.

These pictures of Saigon were all taken in the last couple of months.  I can’t really call them first impressions, as I spent a fair amount of time here before coming here to live.  So these are second impressions – some of the scenes, people and details that have caught my eye.  How will my pictures of Saigon change as I become more familiar with the city?  Time will tell.

Bangkok: ten days, one lens

A few days in Bangkok on the way back to Vietnam from the UK.  My idea was that this would be a kind of interlude, a blank space of time between saying my goodbyes at home and getting my life together in Saigon, with none of the emotional wrench of the former or the practical stresses of the latter.  An opportunity to chill out for a short time; not that Bangkok is the most relaxing place in the world, but it provided the chance to escape life’s obligations for a while.

Also, and just as importantly, it was a chance to reacquaint myself with my camera.  Ten months in the UK was a fairly fallow period for me photographically.  I’ve got some nice pictures of friends and family to show for my time there, my niece and nephew especially, but I never felt the same urge to get out and about and make pictures that I feel when I’m away from home.  They say that the best photographers can find good pictures in anything anywhere, and that’s probably true; but the rest of us need a little help, a little inspiration, and I wasn’t finding that inspiration in Tunbridge Wells, or even in London.  Although I wasn’t taking many pictures back at home, I was reading a lot about photography, from Scott Kelby’s super practical – if slightly irritating – Lightroom manual to a scholarly tome on composition by Michael Freeman (both of which found their way into my 20kg luggage allowance, at the expense of frivolities such as underwear and toiletries).  I also spent a lot of time reappraising my old pictures, trying to be brutally honest with myself about which ones worked and which didn’t, reworking some old favourites, trying to make them as good as they could be.  The results can be seen on my homepage; you be the judge, I can’t look at them any more.

So I felt ready to take on Bangkok, photographically.  I set myself a challenge.  For the ten days I was there, I would shoot only using my 50mm lens, with no cropping later, and only in black and white.  Why 50mm?  I like the simplicity of it; what you see with the naked eye is broadly what you get through the viewfinder.  I wanted to force myself to think about composition, rather than just relying on my zoom.  And for such a simple lens, it’s incredibly versatile, suitable for portraits, street scenes, details, abstracts, almost anything.  Why black and white?  I wanted to avoid the cliches and concentrate on textures, contrast, and light and shade.  I also had an idea about photographing statues, potentially a very boring subject for a photograph, as if they were people, using a shallow depth of field and focusing on the eyes.

Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted that the picture above is in colour.  What can I say?  There was just too much colour to ignore.  The gold of temples, the orange of monks’ robes, the pink red yellow green of taxis.  I abandoned the black and white thing after a couple of days, although there are a number of monochrome images that I’m very pleased with.  I stuck with the 50mm rule though, which was no hardship.

I love taking portrait pictures, and I like the way 50mm lets you include plenty of background, giving context while keeping a human subject.

As well as the city’s people, I also wanted to capture details…

… movement…

… street scenes…

… and some more people.

There were many things I wanted to do while in Bangkok: buy t-shirts, nap after lunch, eat as much Thai curry as my body could handle, while away afternoons reading in cafes, wander the streets with no clear destination in mind, and get more of a feel for the city than I’d managed on my two brief previous visits, five years and ten years ago.  I did all of this, I had my little oasis of calm, Bangkok-style, and I took a lot of pictures, some of which I’m happy with.  I won’t leave it another five years before my next visit.