Month: December 2017

Under the Milky Way Tonight [Encore Publication]: How to make great images including our home galaxy

Not too long ago, making images of the Milky Way was not practical for most photo enthusiasts.  Only astronomers and a handful of professional astrophotographers had the expensive equipment required to capture sufficient light from the cluster of quite dim stars that we refer to as the Galactic Core in the night sky.  Shooting with a very long exposure didn’t do the trick for the Milky Way, because leaving the camera’s shutter open for more than about 15-30 seconds would blur each star’s image due to rotation of the Earth.  These blurs, called star trails, could make for striking images with the stars appearing to streak in circles across the sky, but the subtle beauty of the Milky Way would be lost with these long exposures.

But in the last five years or so, camera sensors have become much more sensitive to light, and now it is possible–indeed quite easy–for photo enthusiasts to photograph our home galaxy without expensive specialized equipment.

Here’s how:

You will need a camera with a sensor that can gather a lot of light and with a shutter that can be kept open for a long time.  These requirements limit the range of suitable cameras to full-frame DSLRs and advanced interchangeable lens mirrorless cameras.  You will also need a fairly fast wide-angle lens: I recommend a zoom or prime (fixed focal length) lens with a focal length of 14-16mm on a full-frame camera, and a maximum aperture of f/4 or faster.  For astrophotography I most often use the Nikon 16-35mm f/4 lens.  It’s got great image quality and is well built, and of course it is wide enough and fast enough for the purposes of capturing the Milky Way.

You will also need a heavy, solid tripod.  I’ve been successful using a lighter weight tripod for Milky Way shots while traveling, but a good professional tripod is better.  I use the SLIK 615-315 with a ball head.

Finally, you’ll want to have a remote shutter release, either a hardwired cable release or a wireless remote release.  This is to trigger the camera without touching it, so as to avoid blurring the image from the vibration of your touch.

Once you have the right equipment, it’s fairly straightforward to photograph the Milky Way.  Choose a dark sky area, far away from the light pollution of any cities or other sources of stray nighttime light.  Shoot toward the Galactic Core where the stars of the Milky Way appear brightest and most colorful.  To plan for where the GC will be on any given date and time and at any given location, I use a smartphone app called PhotoPills: PhotoPills in App Store.  Try to include foreground and/or middle-ground subjects to add interest to your composition.  The image below, made at Yosemite National Park, is appealing because the Milky Way is seen rising above the iconic peak known as Half Dome.

The Milky Way is seen arched through the sky above Half Dome and other landforms in Yosemite Valley.  Careful composition adds drama to your Milky Way images by including Earth-based subjects as well as the sky.  Buy this photo on my website

With your fast wide-angle lens on your full-frame camera, all mounted on your stable tripod, you are ready to shoot.  Remove any filters on the lens, set your camera on full manual mode, select a fast ISO (I usually start at about 3200 and sometimes have to go even higher) and a wide aperture (f/4 or wider), and choose a shutter speed of 20-25 seconds (shorter if your lens is longer than about 18mm).  You can use the 500 Rule, which states that shutter speed should be approximately 500 divided by the focal length of the lens; for example, for a 16mm lens you can use a shutter speed of not longer than about 31 seconds.  Turn off your autofocus on your lens or camera, as it will not work in so dark a setting; instead, manually set your focus to a point near infinity where the stars appear sharp in your viewfinder (or better yet, on your live-view screen).  I like to tape my lens to this setting before it gets dark, so I know the focus won’t change while I’m out in the field in the dark.  It’s also a good idea to turn off your camera’s long-exposure noise reduction feature, if it has one, as this wastes time in the field and it’s equally effective to reduce the noise in Lightroom during post-processing.  Of course, you want to be sure you are shooting RAW files.

Go ahead and shoot a lot of frames, experimenting with different ISO settings and compositions.  It is often a good idea to get a very long exposure, sometimes several minutes long, so that your foreground subjects will be properly exposed.  The frames with the foreground well exposed can later be combined in Photoshop with the ones in which the night sky is properly exposed.

This image was made from several frames: one long exposure for the lake, trees, and mountain in the foreground and middle-ground, and several different 25-second exposures that each captured a different meteor during the peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower.  The resulting image shows all of these objects quite prominently, along with the Milky Way.

You may want to combine several different images to see all the features of the night sky and the terrestrial objects clearly. Buy this photo on my website

With practice, you’ll find that capturing the Milky Way is within your reach, so long as you have suitable equipment and the patience required to compile enough images that a few will turn out to be successful.  I believe it’s well worth the effort because a good Milky Way shot is so subtle, colorful, and strikingly beautiful.  Good shooting!

Have you created a Milky Way image that you love?  What were the key components to your success?  What were the challenges you faced?  Please share your thoughts and experiences here.

Want to read more posts about photographic techniques?  Find them all here: Posts on Techniques.

What I’m Thankful For [Encore Publication]: An opinionated list of my top five photographic blessings

At dinner on the American Thanksgiving holiday each year, the members of my family go around the table sharing our lists of what we’re thankful for.  This is a common tradition, and I find it energizing, comforting, and occasionally challenging to learn from my wife and daughters and any other family and friends gathered for the feast what they consider to be their greatest blessings.  So for this Thanksgiving Day post, I’m going to share a photographic what-I’m-thankful-for list.  Of our many modern photographic blessings, here is one photographer’s very opinionated list of the top five.

Jumping for joy over the brave new world of photography in which we live

  1. Instant image review: Those of us who cut our photographic teeth in the film era became accustomed to waiting for days to see the results of our work.  After shooting a roll of film, we would package it up, mail it to the lab, and receive our transparencies or prints back in a few days.  If we botched the exposure, focus, composition, or any other element of the image, we wouldn’t know until it was too late to recreate the shot.  For travel photographers, event photographers, and photojournalists, this was an especially harsh situation, as those once-in-a-lifetime moments would be lost forever if even a small setting was incorrect.  In today’s digital world, we get to preview each image instantly on our camera’s LCD display as it is captured.  If any aspect of the image is less than ideal, we can immediately retake it.  The built-in real-time histogram featured in many advanced cameras makes the instantaneous image review even more powerful, as we can see at a glance whether the exposure is in the expected range.  It’s so easy to take this capability to instantly review our images for granted, and many modern photographers do abuse it (pros call it “chimping” when a photographer constantly looks up and down at the LCD screen while shooting), but I am grateful every day to have this feature available.
  2. Modern full-frame image sensors: If you’d have told me when I was a kid that 40 years later we’d be able to instantly choose any sensitivity for our shooting needs from ISO 50 through ISO 25,000 and even higher, I’d have asked what you were smoking.  Same with the concept of a camera that can capture many times the resolution of what was possible on the most fine-grained 35mm films.  Ditto for the idea that our camera could focus for us, even under low-light situations with fast-moving action, faster and more accurately than we could achieve focus ourselves.  Or that we could just hold down our finger on the shutter release and the camera would shoot 10 or more frames per second with almost no limit to the number of images that could be stored.  All of this would have sounded like science fiction, yet modern full-frame image sensors provide all of these capabilities and much more.  My Nikon D810 bodies are so good at capturing images in nearly any genre of photography that I can’t imagine anything working better.  But of course every two to three years a whole new generation of sensors is released that does everything better still.
  3. The Nikon 85mm f/1.8 lens: We have so many incredible optics for which to be thankful that it’s hard to single out just one.  But there is one piece of glass that makes my heart sing with joy every day.  It’s inexpensive, small, light, fast as lightning, sharp as a razor blade, and renders accurate colors and glorious bokeh.  I do about 80% of my shooting with prime lenses, and probably two-thirds of that is with this one lens.  And that lens is the Nikon 85mm f/1.8 lens.  It’s a classic for making portraits but also works great for sports, wildlife, and even many landscapes.  If only everything else in life were so satisfying!
  4. Lightroom: Even with today’s amazing camera and lens capabilities, few images emerge perfectly from the camera.  Most images need some tender loving care during post-processing, and for my workflow needs, Adobe’s Lightroom software is perfect.  It’s great at importing, culling, and organizing huge batches of photos, and it’s editing features are all I need for more than 90% of my images.  Lightroom “thinks” the way a professional or enthusiast photographer thinks, and it’s quite intuitive to apply presets and/or automated batch tools to develop large numbers of images at once.  Thinking back on the old days of post-processing photos in a darkroom, I find that the digital counterpart (called “Lightroom” for good reason!) is so much faster, more powerful, and more gratifying.
  5. Instantaneous global sharing: Once our images are looking just the way we want them to, it’s time to share them with others.  Not long ago, this was a burdensome task.  It cost a lot of time, money, and aggravation to distribute just a few images with just a few people.  Now, with digital image capture, the Internet to distribute the images, and mobile devices with social media to view them, the world is at our fingertips.  There is a downside to this ubiquitous image sharing: we working professional photographers see the value of our work eroded by the flood of photos cascading around the world 24 hours a day; but in net this is a profoundly powerful and valuable asset to the art and business of photography.

Almost anywhere in the world we are immersed in a sea of images, making sharing them instantaneous, cheap, and far-reaching

There’s never been a better time to be a photographer (at least from an image capture and sharing standpoint; don’t get me started on the financial aspects), and in this exponentially evolving digital, interconnected world, it’s only going to keep getting better.

What are you thankful for in this brave new world of photographic goodies?  Please share your thoughts here.

Want to read more posts about photographic gear?  Find them all here: Posts about gear.

 

Focus on Vietnam and Cambodia [Encore Publication]: One of the friendliest and most beautiful regions in the world, offering surprises at every turn

A monk pauses to reflect outside Angkor Wat.  After asking his permission, I positioned myself at his level and captured the portrait using a narrow aperture (high F-stop number) so as to keep the temple in focus in the background.  Buy this image

My wife and I recently returned from an amazing 3.5-week adventure traveling through Vietnam and Cambodia.  Operated by Overseas Adventure Travel, the trip’s diverse itinerary took us from the bustling capital of Hanoi to the glorious mountains jutting skyward from Halong Bay, then to the former imperial capital of Hue and the quaint festival city of Hoi An, on to the mountain retreat of Dalat and to modern Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), and finally to the indescribable temple complexes at Angkor Wat in Cambodia.  While it was wonderful to view the region’s gorgeous landscapes and fabled monuments, what made this adventure truly unforgettable for us was its many opportunities to interact with Vietnamese and Cambodian people from all walks of life: a Buddhist nun, an older couple whose homes were confiscated by the Communist Party, a former South Vietnamese soldier who survived the re-education camps and rose to become major of his village, eager students at Dalat’s rapidly growing university, former Viet Cong fighters, and ethnic minority hill tribes rarely contacted by outsiders.  Vietnam and Cambodia are a photographer’s dream, filled with magnificent scenery and friendly, diverse cultures.

In today’s post we will take a look at some of my favorite images from this adventure.  I’ll include some brief discussion about who or what is included in each image and, where appropriate, a few words about how each image was made.

Our north-to-south adventure began in the capital and second largest city, Hanoi.  Hanoi strikes a lovely balance between bustling modernity and soulful history.  Steeped in French Colonial architecture, the city has an old-world charm, and the busy streets are shared by countless commuters on motor scooters and vendors selling their wares from the backs of their bicycles.

A Hanoi street scene.  The city’s cyclo-rickshaws are a great way to photograph local people because you are shooting from eye level and from a relatively stealthy vantage point.  Have the camera set up in advance with a fast shutter speed and a narrow aperture so as not to miss any good shots.  Good street photography requires capturing just the right moment when the people and the places come together in a meaningful way, such as these young people enjoying a meal in front of the advertisement promising such a lifestyle.  Buy this image

Phan Tranh Liem is one of the few remaining practitioners of the 1000-year-old Vietnamese tradition of water puppetry. He makes his own puppets, creates the shows, and performs them with his wife in their home in Hanoi.  To make an environmental portrait like this one, back up a bit to include the elements of the subject’s life in addition to the subject themselves.  Here I used a fast normal prime lens at a high ISO sensitivity setting and a touch of off-camera flash.  Buy this image

The village of Tho Ha is 20 miles north of Hanoi but worlds different culturally. We visited the home of a family who make rice paper, the main occupation in the village. Spring rolls are extremely popular throughout Vietnam, so there is high demand for rice paper.  Here, travel companion Mary C. tries her hand at the local craft.  Buy this image

Lion dancers perform for the Hanoi crowds in the days leading up to the harvest moon.  Handheld photography of fast-moving action after dark is challenging due to the need for a fast shutter speed in low-light conditions.  Don’t be afraid to crank up your camera’s sensitivity (ISO) setting.  You can reduce most of the resulting noise using software later.  Buy this image

Leaving behind the urban bustle of Hanoi, we drove to the shore of UNESCO World Heritage Site Halong Bay, where we boarded a traditional wooden junk for an overnight cruise.  Halong Bay boasts some of the most dramatic landscapes anywhere in the world, with more than 1600 jagged mountains jutting straight up out of its emerald waters.  This is a travel photographer’s dream location.

Don’t forget to include yourself in some of your images.  To make this portrait of my wife and me, I set up the camera in advance and then asked a fellow traveler to compose and shoot the image.  Buy this image

Glorious as Halong Bay’s mountainous scenery appears on its own, to make a great landscape image there should be other elements in the frame, too.  Here I waited for a traditional fishing boat to sail across the frame, using a deep depth-of-field (high F-stop number) to allow the whole scene from foreground to background to be rendered in sharp focus.  Buy this image

I hired the captain of our junk to take out the skiff at 5 AM in order to photograph sunrise on Halong Bay.  Any photograph is only as good as the light striking the camera’s sensor, and the light is nearly always best near sunrise and sunset, so sometimes it’s necessary to forego a good night’s sleep in order to capture that “golden hour” light.  Buy this image

En route to the Hanoi Airport for our flight to Hue, we stopped to say hello to several farmers harvesting rice by hand.  Careful attention to composition can make or break a wide-angle portrait like this one.  I found a vantage point that lined up the two farmers and included some of the beautiful green hues of the rice harvest.  Buy this image

We then flew to Hue, the former imperial capital of Vietnam.  This was the seat of the Nguyen Dynasty during a period of great cultural and economic flourishing.  The food, architecture, and performing arts in Hue are unique and very appealing.

Hue’s landmark Thien Mu Pagoda is best photographed from the banks of the Perfume River.  Whenever shooting tall architectural subjects using a wide-angle lens, pay careful attention to the vertical lines, as lens distortion can cause the subject to appear to be leaning.  Buy this image

We had a lovely visit with a Buddhist nun at the convent of the Dieu Thanh Pagoda in Hue. It was fascinating to learn about her life in the convent and her decision process to give up worldly life as a young teen.  This is the sort of meaningful encounter that would be nearly impossible to set up if one were traveling on one’s own.  After obtaining her permission, I made this portrait using natural light only (no flash) and a fast prime portrait lens.  To capture really great portraits, it’s important to spend some time first getting to know your subject and putting them at ease.  Buy this image

En route from Hue to Hoi An, we visited a Cao Dai temple. Cao Dai is a rapidly growing religion in Southeast Asia that integrates teachings from many other world religions.  We were fortunate to have the priest himself tell us about the faith.  I chose a wide-angle lens and high ISO sensitivity setting to capture this image of the priest in the temple’s ornate sanctuary.  Buy this image

Our next destination, Hoi An, is a charming town adorned with tens of thousands of brightly colored lanterns, giving it a festive appearance year-round.  Hoi An is also the gateway to the remarkable Champa Kingdom ruins at My Son.

Hoi An’s traditional central marketplace is a photographer’s candy store, filled with wonderful portrait subjects.  I shot this image of a food vendor using natural light only: she was busy and couldn’t be bothered to pose, so it was important to have the camera set up in advance with a high ISO and a fast shutter speed.  Buy this image

Traditional fishing practices on the Thu Bon River, just outside of Hoi An.  During post-processing, I increased the image’s vibrance a little bit to help saturate the colors.  Buy this image

At My Son Sanctuary, site of the most significant ruins from the Champa Kingdom, we attended a performance of ancient Cham dance.  To capture this image of the lovely dancers, I used a fast portrait lens with a wide aperture (small F-stop number) to freeze the motion and help isolate the dancers from the background.  To further emphasize the dancers and to saturate the colors in their costumes, I added just a touch of fill-in flash.  Buy this image

Heading further south, we next flew from Hoi An to Nha Trang.  The many rivers and rural villages in the area afforded us the opportunity to experience village life and even to visit a floating fishing village.

Visiting Dien Phu Kindergarten outside Nha Trang gave us a chance to learn about Vietnam’s education system.  Here the kids greet us as we arrive.  Buy this image

We had a fascinating discussion with the chief of Xom Gio Village, a former South Vietnamese soldier and survivor of the re-education camps who managed to work his way up to a high-level position after the war.  The key to making portraits that truly capture the spirit of the subject is to get to know them first, have your camera all set up in advance, take your time, and shoot plenty of images.  I used a fast portrait lens with a wide aperture to blur the background and emphasize the subject.  Buy this image

Our next stop was Dalat, a mountain retreat popular since French colonial times as a respite from the tropical heat found in most of Vietnam.  Our stay in Dalat was extremely memorable thanks to a visit with university students, a home-hosted dinner with a local family, tours of the region’s thriving agricultural industry, and a side trip to a mountainous village that is home to the Kho Chil ethnic minority.

We spent a lovely afternoon with students from Dalat University. I had the opportunity to get to know English teacher Trung and his bright young students Nhi , Diễm, and Giang.  For this photo we were joined by my wife and several other students.  Buy this image

Visiting the village chief’s home in Buon Chuoi Village. His wife, in her eighties, still passes most days by weaving while smoking her pipe.  Buy this image

Boys from the Kho Chil hill tribe run after our tractor (a “Vietnamese limousine”) as we descend from Buon Chuoi Village.  A fast shutter speed and jaunty camera angle give this image its frenetic and playful appeal.  Buy this image

In the courtyard of the Linh Phuoc Pagoda outside of Dalat, Lady Buddha observes this young woman checking her text messages.  When I saw this special juxtaposition lining up, I moved into a favorable position to capture it and waited for the perfect moment.  Buy this image

Our final destination in Vietnam before flying to Cambodia was the largest city and financial hub of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).  A chaotic metropolis of 13 million people, Ho Chi Minh City is thoroughly modern yet holds remnants of a colonial past.  It is also the location of many of the iconic photographs taken during the Vietnam War.

Saigon’s splendid Central Post Office.  Good interior photographs should have a symmetry and leading lines that direct the viewer’s eye around the image.  I used a wide-angle lens to compose this image, shot parallel to the ground so as not to introduce too much distortion.  Buy this image

The food was uniformly delicious throughout Vietnam, from the most elegant French-Vietnamese fusion restaurants to the lowliest pho shops.  The simple but perfect pho we enjoyed in this small shop in Saigon was the best I’ve ever tasted.  To photograph food, get in close and compose so as to include some contrasting elements of colors and shapes.  Buy this image

Very interesting learning about the wartime experiences of these three former Viet Cong fighters.  They lived for years in the subterranean Cu Chi Tunnels, which they considered much safer than being exposed to US bombing and infantry attacks above ground.  Our travel companion Don, pictured with them here, is a Vietnam War veteran. It was very moving to witness his experience meeting these former enemy fighters.  Buy this image

Leaving Ho Chi Minh City behind, we flew to Siem Reap, Cambodia.  Travelers come to Cambodia primarily to see the justifiably famous Angkor temple complexes, but there is so much more to this beautiful country.  We were fortunate to have time also to explore the rural villages in the region and to get to know some of the people there.

In a small village outside of Siem Reap, an elder greets us.  This portrait is a favorite of mine because of the beauty and personality of the subject, but it’s also successful because the background is clean and uncluttered.  Always pay attention to your backgrounds, especially when shooting people and wildlife, as unwanted background elements can distract from the power of the image.  Buy this image

Visiting the floating village of Mechrey on the huge freshwater Tonle Sap Lake, we got a closeup view of lives lived entirely on the water.  As we floated by this family’s houseboat, I captured this image of their daily life.  Buy this image

At last, we toured the world wonder of Angkor Wat.  I’m always on the lookout for unusual vantage points to shoot iconic monuments, so as to avoid the dreaded “postcard shots”.  Here, I framed the temple complex in the window of an ancient outbuilding across the moat from Angkor Wat.  The compositional elements from front to back include the window frame, the Cambodian people sitting on the wall, the reflection in the water, and the temple itself.  Buy this image

Angkor Wat Temple is by far the most visited of the temple complexes around Angkor, but the others are well worth a trip.  Unlike Angkor Wat, which has been cleared of vegetation and excavated, the nearby Ta Prohm Temple has been left mostly in a state of nature.  A key scene in one of the “Indiana Jones” movies was filmed here.  Buy this image

I arranged a visit to a performance of traditional Cambodian Apsara dance. In the days of Khmer empire, only the king and queen were allowed to see these dances.  When shooting indoor dance performances, I use one of three different fast prime (non-zoom) lenses, opened up to a wide aperture, and a high ISO sensitivity setting.  This ensures a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the action even in the low light conditions of an indoor venue, since flash is almost never allowed during live performances.  Buy this image

In Siem Reap we learned about the traditional art of folding flowers to present at the Buddhist Ang Chorm Shrine.  The young daughter of the flower stall owner demonstrates with these flowers she folded herself.  Buy this image

Have you visited Vietnam or Cambodia?  Please share your fondest (and least fond) memories here, along with your thoughts about how to capture the region’s vibrant diverse scenes in images.

Want to read more posts about travel photography destinations?  Find them all here: Posts on Destinations.

 

Please Come to Our Arts Benefit today in San Francisco: Helping those Impacted by the recent Natural Disasters

SF Bay Area friends: Please come to our Arts Benefit today (Sunday, December 3, 2017) from 12-4 PM at the Polish Club in San Francisco. The proceeds will go to help the children impacted by the Northern California fires and the recent hurricanes. I am one of the featured artists. A large print of my Travel Photographer of the Year award-winning image will be presented to the winner of the raffle, and I also will be selling prints of many of my favorite images to benefit the kids affected by the recent natural disasters. There will be food, music, art, and fun. Please drop by if you can!

Click here for more details and to purchase tickets: Arts Benefit info and tickets.

Focus on Tourettes without Regrets [Encore Publication]: Adventures shooting a long-running underground performance event in Oakland

When I’m not traveling, I am fortunate to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where there is never any shortage of amazing photographic subjects.  In a typical week I conduct about 3-4 shoots and I’m always on the lookout for new experiences that will enhance the diversity of my portfolio.  Recently I was invited to shoot the latest monthly show of Tourettes without Regrets, a long-running underground performance held in Oakland, California.  Attracting an extremely diverse and hip young audience, Tourettes presents a completely different variety show each month that can be described as equal parts comedy, poetry slam, circus, battle rap, and burlesque.  While the show is remarkably edgy and raucous (this is a PG-13 rated blog, so you’ll have to visit my main portfolio website to see many of the edgier images), in true Bay Area style it never puts anyone down and instead celebrates all of our differences.  A hot, smoke-filled, jam-packed warehouse, entirely dark save for a few bizarrely colored LED spotlights, is not an environment that is particularly photography-friendly, but I was able to make some nice images through perseverance and creative post-processing.  In this post, I share some of my favorite images along with a bit of discussion about how they were made.

Emcee and Tourettes without Regrets curator, Jamie, introduces the show.  The warehouse was so packed with young spectators that I had to shoot around them with a moderate, fast telephoto lens.  In post-processing, I cropped the image to remove unwanted elements and adjusted the shadow tones to darken the background.  Buy this photo

This month, the show’s theme was “F*** Valentine’s Day”, so each act consisted of a pair of performers.  These two ladies presented an aerial act that was mesmerizing but challenging to shoot due to the long distance to the subject, low light conditions, and strangely colored LED spotlights.  I cropped the image in post-processing and converted it to black-and-white to avoid the strange color cast.  Buy this photo

This skit depicts a woman breaking up with her boyfriend, who then tries to win her back with tears, money, and even a marriage proposal.  Nothing works, until he begins to treat her poorly, at which point she decides she wants him, after all.  The image captures an apt moment in the drama.  Buy this photo

A Crocodile Dundee-style knife thrower and his lovely assistant prepare to terrify a volunteer from the audience.  To capture this act I had to use a high ISO setting and fast lens due to the low lighting and the requirement for a fast shutter speed.  During post-processing, I converted to black-and-white, increased the contrast and adjusted the color channels to enhance the dramatic feel, applied noise reduction to reduce problems associated with the high ISO setting, and cropped to remove extraneous elements.  Buy this photo

A hip hop dancer amazes the crowd.  A fast shutter speed was essential to freeze the motion.  Obviously, to achieve a fast shutter speed, I needed to use a fast lens and high ISO setting.  Shoot lots of frames in situations like this one, because you can never be sure when the best exact instant will present itself.  Buy this photo

This scene from a battle rap, where two freestyle rappers trade insults, captures the essence of their interaction.  Note the shallow depth-of-field places the emphasis on the performer not rapping at the time, with only the outstretched left arm of the other rapper in focus.  I then converted to black-and-white to remove the color cast and cropped tightly using a square aspect ration to achieve an edgy Instagram-style image.  Buy this photo

What are some of your favorite subjects to shoot in your neck of the woods?  What events epitomize for you the area in which you live?  Please share your thoughts here.

Want to read more posts about what to shoot while traveling or near home?  Find them all here: Posts on What to Shoot.

Faces of Vietnam and Cambodia, Part II [Encore Publication]: Showcasing the diversity of Vietnam and Cambodia’s people

My wife and I recently returned from an amazing 3.5-week adventure traveling through Vietnam and Cambodia.  Our itinerary took us from the bustling capital of Hanoi to the glorious mountains jutting skyward from Halong Bay, then to the former imperial capital of Hue and the quaint festival city of Hoi An, on to the mountain retreat of Dalat and to modern Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), and finally to the indescribable temple complexes at Angkor Wat in Cambodia.  While it was wonderful to view the region’s gorgeous landscapes and fabled monuments, what made this adventure truly unforgettable for us was its many opportunities to interact with Vietnamese and Cambodian people from all walks of life: a Buddhist nun, an older couple whose homes were confiscated by the Communist Party, a former South Vietnamese soldier who survived the re-education camps and rose to become major of his village, eager students at Dalat’s rapidly growing university, former Viet Cong fighters, and ethnic minority hill tribes rarely contacted by outsiders.

Yesterday’s and today’s posts showcase some of my favorite portraits, some of them not yet previously published, featuring a wide range of people we met during our adventure.  The portraits will be presented as a photo essay, but I will include brief descriptions of each and occasionally some commentary about how they were made.  You can click on any of these images to view or purchase them and many more from the Vietnam and Cambodia trip.  Yesterday’s post featured Part I, and today’s post comprises Part II.

A wonderful visit to village of Buon Chuoi, home to the Kho Chil ethnic minority. We were among the very few foreigners ever to visit this hill tribe area.  Kids are great fun to photograph.  The key to making authentic portraits of kids, as of adults, is to make a personal connection before starting to shoot.  Get to know your subjects first, be playful and interactive, and only then take out your gear.

School was not in session due to parent conferences when we visited the mountain village of Buon Chuoi, so many of the schoolkids were playing in the courtyard.  I captured this portrait of a girl with her little brother during a game of marbles.

Visiting the village chief’s home in Buon Chuoi Village. His wife, in her eighties, still passes most days by weaving while smoking her pipe.  This is one of my favorite portraits from the whole trip, because it truly captures the spirit of the subject, offers a rare view into rural Vietnamese village life, is illuminated by lovely natural light, and represents a memorable and striking image.

Kho Chil boys run after our tractor as we descend from Buon Chuoi Village.  Not all portraits need to capture a stock-still subject.  This portrait gains its vitality through the boys’ motion, and its jaunty, slightly off-kilter composition adds to the sense of kinetic energy.

Dalat is much cooler than the rest of Vietnam. This mom and her daughter are dressed appropriately for the higher elevations.  Busy backgrounds can distract from a good portrait, but here I mitigated some of the distraction by using a shallow depth-of-field and by applying a bit of post-crop vignetting during post-processing.

In the courtyard of the Linh Phuoc Pagoda, Lady Buddha observes this young woman checking her text messages.  Good street photography is characterized by capturing just the right viewpoint, framing, and moment (what Henri Cartier-Bresson called “The Decisive Moment”) when the people and the space come together, and I believe I caught that conjunction nicely here.

A young Buddhist monk-in-training.  Often, the person appearing in a portrait is more colorful than the background elements, but here the opposite is the case.

At Saigon’s Post Office, I asked this lovely young woman to model the traditional Vietnamese costume, the ao dai.  I made no attempt through depth-of-field, supplemental lighting, or vignetting, to set off the model from the cluttered background.  That’s because I wanted to feature the glorious French colonial architecture of the post office as much as the model posing before it.

Preparing to board our sampan on the Mekong Delta.  The weather was overcast and rainy, so I used a slower shutter speed (1/50 second) and fairly wide aperture (f/4) to saturate the colors.

Ben Tre Village is famous for its coconut plantations.  We enjoyed coconut meat, coconut milk, coconut whiskey, and of course coconut candy.  I used a small amount of fill flash to fill in the shadows on the subject’s face and to help set her off from the background.

A stall-keeper at Saigon’s bustling central market.  I used a fast portrait lens at a wide aperture along with a high ISO setting in order to soften the busy background.

Very interesting learning about the wartime experiences of these former Viet Cong fighters. They lived for years in the Cu Chi Tunnels, which they considered much safer than being exposed to US bombing and infantry attacks above ground.  This portrait is effective because it captures the officer in a candid moment with beautiful available lighting and sets him against a solid colored background.

We visited a farm outside Siem Reap, Cambodia, where women still thresh rice by hand.  The farm family’s six-year-old daughter stopped by to check us out.  

We are welcomed to a small village outside of Siem Reap by this elder.  I made an environmental portrait showing her in the context of her work weaving baskets.  The image works very well because the composition is intimate and engaging, telling the subject’s story in a concise way, and because the simple solid contrasting color of the wall behind her offsets her colorful clothes in a pleasing manner.

Visiting the floating village of Mechrey on the huge Tonle Sap Lake.  I made this image of a local family in their houseboat as we sailed by.  By placing the family in the context of their home and daily activities, the image serves to capture a slice of life rather than to feature any individual member of the household.

A monk pauses to reflect outside the Angkor Wat temple complex.  I spoke with him (using our guide as a translator) to make a personal connection and to obtain his permission to make the portrait.  The contrasting colors and textures of the monk and the temple buildings, as well as the leading lines that guide the viewer’s eye from front to back, make this a memorable portrait.  I made the image using natural light only and incorporated a polarizing filter to deepen the colors and add drama to the sky.

At a home-hosted lunch in rural Kravan Village, I made portraits of the whole family. Here is the oldest daughter, Lia, a flight attendant and gracious hostess.  Classic portrait techniques applied here: make a personal connection first, use a fast prime 85mm lens at a wide aperture, and light the subject with the most beautiful light available in the situation.  

I arranged a visit to a performance of traditional Cambodian Apsara dance. In the days of Khmer empire, only the king and queen were allowed to see these dances.  During live performances, use of flash is almost always prohibited (and almost always rude), so use a fast prime lens, a high ISO setting, and a steady hand.

We learned about the traditional folding of flowers to present at the Buddhist Ang Chorm Shrine in Siem Reap.  The young daughter of the flower stall owner folded these flowers herself.  While a bit on the busy side, this portrait succeeds by capturing a riot of colors and an intriguing story.

Have you visited Vietnam or Cambodia?  What were your favorite photographic subjects?  Please leave your thoughts here.

Want to read more posts about what to shoot while traveling?  Find them all here: Posts about what to shoot.

All of these photos and many more from Vietnam and Cambodia are available for viewing or purchase here: Vietnam and Cambodia image gallery.

Missed Part I of this story in yesterday’s post?  You can read it here: Part I of this story.