Saturday, November 5, 2022

Vietnam Photo Tour: An early morning trip to the flower market

After our visit to Sapa (featured on the last blog post), we took an overnight train back to Hanoi. We arrived at the train station bright and early in the morning (5am) and headed directly to the flower market. 

The flower market was bustling at this early hour, with all the local vendors purchasing their daily allotments.


And like most of the people in the city, the bulk of these merchant traveled on motorcycles or other small vehicles.


These people could transport a lot of flowers on a motorcycle!


The vendors were very friendly and had no problem with us taking their photos.


The colors and assortment were breathtaking. 


I was using a Canon R5 with the Canon RF 70-200mm lens. This allowed me to take wide shots and come in close.


This was the first time that I have ever seen flowers boxed like this. 


Everywhere we turned there was another booth bursting in colors.


Of all the booths at this market, and there were tons of them, this one was my favorite. 


I was blown away by these beautiful arrangements. I asked how much one of these would cost, and was shocked that they were less than $20. I wish I could get this quality and price at home!


This woman was working endlessly to keep her booth refilled.


Amazing, right?


Even though we had spread out across this market, I had a bunch of our photo tour guests with me when photographing this booth. I taught them to shoot wide (like you saw before), but also to get in tight and shoot detail shots like this. I loved the water that was on the rose pedals, and wanted to highlight that in this photo. I took this photo at f/6.3 to make sure that there was selective focus, but not too selective. 


This woman was excited to show us how she prepared her flowers. She even offered to let some of our guests give it a try. 


We were watching the woman cutting her flowers when I looked up and saw this lady walking towards us with flowers in hand. I quickly reframed and shot this photo. Once again, this shows the amazing eye detection focus of the Canon R5.

It was 6:30am and the market was done for the day. We had finished shooting and we were getting ready to get back on our bus. As we stood on the side of the road, I realized that I should have tried motion panning the people as they left the market on their motorcycles. Luckily, there were still a couple of people still on their way out. I saw this man coming towards us and quickly raised the camera and panned at the exact same speed that he was traveling. Shooting at 1/25th of a second, I hoped I could nail this shot. I was very excited to get this motion pan in perfect focus and showing him with a bike full of colorful flowers. I have already made a large 24x36 print of this on my new Canon Pro-4100 printer. I am going to frame it and put it up at the house.


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