Monday, October 28, 2024

Slowing down the shutter speed in Asia and capturing cool photos!

Yikes - it has been almost 3 weeks since I have shared a blog post with all of you! I was traveling through Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia on another photo tour and we were moving fast. There just was no time to write a blog during this time. Then I came home to a ton of work and some jet lag too. But now I am back home (for one week before heading to Costa Rica once again).

I have a ton of images from the last trip and have added them to my "Around the World" web page. If you have not checked that out, you should do so, since I put all my favorite travel images there. 

For this blog post, I thought I would share some of my favorite creative images from the trip that have one thing in common, they were taken with a slow shutter speed. And...just before posting this blog, I learned of this really cool story about the trip which you will find at the end of this post.

And so...here is the new blog post.


Our first stop on this Indochina photo tour was Laos. It was my first time in the country (since we could not get into the country on our last trip, due to the pandemic), and we all loved it. As part of that trip, we visited the Khouang Si waterfalls and they were beautiful. Some waterfalls are amazing but not good for photography, with either too much water or not enough cascading falls. This one had the right elements for great photos. I was using the new Canon R5 MKII camera with the RF 24-105mm lens (with a Tiffen Circular Polarizing filter) and knew that this would be a great combination for photos at this location. I lowered the ISO all the way down to 50 and set the aperture to f/22, which gave me a shutter speed of 1/4 second. I was shooting handheld and appreciated the image stabilization of the camera and lens, making it possible to capture this images without a tripod.


I started taking photos of people in the falls and loved the results. Nobody that I knew but...more on that in a little bit. 

Four of our tour guests were swimming in the water and I asked them if they wanted a really cool photo. I kept the slow shutter speed and asked them to keep very still. This is the resulting image which we all really loved.


Here is another photo from the upper trail of the Khouang Si waterfalls. So pretty!


The next morning we got up early to watch the monks receive their daily offerings from the public who lines the streets of Laos every morning. After getting the "safe shots" I once again slowed the camera shutter (this time to 1/13 sec) and panned with the monks as they walked by.


While in Vietnam, we always make an early morning stop to the flower market. When we were there two years ago, my favorite image was a motion pan taken right as we exited the market. I wanted to try and reproduce that image with even better results. The challenge was on! Did I beat the image from my last trip? Not sure, but I like all of them. (This image was taken at 1/10 second.) 


We saw this guy who was parked on the sidewalk, and he had a ton of flowers on his motorcycle and I knew that it could make a really cool motion pan photo. I really wanted to teach this photography technique to our guests, so we asked him if he would drive around a couple of times for us. This photo was taken at 1/30 sec and captures the guy pretty sharp but did not show enough blur in the background.


On his second pass, I lowered the shutter speed to 1/10th sec as he sped by and got this photo. It is one of my favorite photos of the trip.


On our final day in Asia, we had a really long layover in Bangkok. Since our flight home did not leave until 4am, some of us decided to do a night tour in Bangkok. Go ahead and sing "One Night in Bangkok" of you like, we did. :) 

While walking around, we had a pretty good rain storm for about 10 minutes. It passed quickly but provided some great reflections on the ground. I saw the tuk tuks cruising through the streets and thought that it would make for some fun photos.


For these photos, I kept the shutter speed between 1/15 sec and 1/5 sec.  The lights on the vehicles really made for dramatic and colorful photos.

And now for the last minute story. As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, I wrote most of this post earlier and was about to post it when something popped up on my phone. It said that some person had posted on Facebook and tagged me. It was not a name of anyone I recognized. I decided to click on the link to see what was posted and was really surprised and happy to see this.

Many times when I am traveling and take a nice photo of someone, I get their email address and send them the photo. As it turns out, this guy was one of those people who I captured in the waterfall. There was a quick moment where he stopped, looked up, closed his eyes. It was the perfect moment to capture him still with motion all around him. After he got out of the water, I went over to him and showed him the photo. It turned out that he was from Italy. I got his email address and sent him the photo later that day. When I read his Facebook post and saw that I captured this on his birthday, it was extra special. I ended up giving him a birthday gift, without even knowing that I was doing so. That makes me smile!



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