Where in the World was Morealtitude?

I admit it: I really haven’t been all that busy this year from a travel perspective, so I don’t really have much of an excuse for not blogging. I’ve only had a handful of trips away from home and the family, and those have all been moderate in length. However it’s still been a pretty interesting year so far, and it ain’t over yet. Here’s a little photographic synopsis:

We started the year with a trip on the Murray River in Echuca, with good friends of ours who own a boat and a couple of wakeboards. At that time of year, the river is warm (but muddy) and reasonably crowded, but if you get out during the hottest part of the day, most people are cowering indoors and you can get some beautiful runs in. This is T doing his stuff.

A work trip to South Africa was followed by a long weekend trekking the bays and clifflines of glorious Wilson’s Prom, on Victoria’s southern coast.

From there, I had myself another work trip, this one out to Kenya, followed by a detour into South Sudan. That was pretty much the last time you really heard from me on this blog, here, here and here…

On my way back, I joined the family in Thailand for a bit of a well-needed break from the southern hemisphere winter, where we pretty much threw Magic into the pool and let her splash around for ten days while we slept. It was a very nice pool though…

I had a couple of trips cancelled after that, so I spent a considerable amount of time hanging out in Australia with the family, which was actually lovely and refreshing. I also hung out at pirate-themed parties…

…and aquariums…

My latest work trip took me to the US, where I was able to swing past Arizona to visit friends

Then to our training base in the backwoods of the Florida panhandle

Before wrapping it all up in Savannah, GA, with a visit with more friends, and a bit of time on the beach.

I’ve got more adventures coming up, but I’ll fill you in on them as the time draws near. Which shouldn’t be too long now, God willing.

In the meantime, I’ve more photos to share from my collection this year which I hope you’ll enjoy, and before long hope to have this blog back up to full steam again.

Peace out

-MA

Photos:

1. Clouds above Atlanta

2. Wakeboarding in Echuca, VIC

3. T lays down some spray

4. Fairy Cove, Wilson’s Prom, VIC

5. Kilimanjaro & Kenyan hill-country

6. Resort Living, Phuket, Thailand

7. X marks the birthday party, arrr

8. Viewers at the Melbourne Aquarium

9. Saguaro cactus, Pheonix, AZ

10. Sunlight catching in pine forest, northern Florida

11. Dune grass beneath a moody sky, Tybee Island, GA

Tasmania- A Placeholder

Just heading off to Tasmania for a few days’ break.  I’m hoping to get some photos while I’m out there- although as always, it’s going to depend on the weather giving us the right breaks, and in southern Australia, you never can tell.  Let’s see what we can come up with.  I hope to have a few more beautiful little corners of this country to share with you before too long.

In the meantime here’s a photograph that has nothing to do with anything except that I like it.

Ao Nang Paddles

About a year ago now (how time flies) I spent three weeks vacation in South East Asia.  A few days I spent down on Railay Beach, in southern Thailand.  I love Thailand- the beautiful lushness of the landscape, the warmth and courtesy of its people, the intense balance of flavours in its cuisine, and the clashing diversity of life in its capital Bangkok.

The scenery around Ao Nang is spectacular.  Railay is a peninsula but inaccessible from the mainland except by powered longtail boat, courtesy of a series of steep karst limestone hills hundreds of feet high which plunge with dramatic certainty straight down into the warm lapping seas.  A mecca for climbers the world over, vast rockfaces hang above green-blue water, dripping with stalagtites.  Tiny outcropping islands- made famous by and subsequently epynomous with James Bond following the release of The Man With the Golden Gun- stand like abandoned collonades amidst the currents, pocked with caves and begging exploration.

This was my second trip to the south of Thailand, but my first to the western side of Thailand’s south.  My first trip, back in 2002, took me to Koh Samet, a little further off the farang cattle track and frequented by Thais on weekend trips from Bangkok.  Koh Samet was overall a pleasant experience, during which I lived in a tree-house for five dollars a night.  The island was laid back and relaxing, and the low point was being vomitted on by a kitten which had decided to share my mattress one night at four a.m.

Amazingly I showed enough self-control not to hurl said kitten from the tree-house.

I was less enchanted by Railay Beach and Ao Nang.  While the landscape was far more beautiful on the whole, the establishment of western tourism has left an ugly scar- not just in the hordes of blotchy white westerners who throng on the beaches, but in the attitudes of the Thais themselves.  In vast contrast to the courteous attitude you find in Bangkok, or the warmth and generosity you find in the north, I found the people I ran into around Ao Nang to be brusque, uninterested and generally lacking in any charm, typified by the bellboy who tried to sell me weed within two minutes of my arriving at our hotel.

However getting away from the crowds and onto the water (‘away’ assuming you could avoid being run down by a longtail), you could find some space to enjoy the landscape, so one morning Pam, Lori and I grabbed some kayaks and took ourselves for a paddle up the coast.  We weren’t by any stretch of the imagination the only ones doing so, but it was nice to get intimate with the cliffs and caves of the little islands, and enjoy a slightly different vibe.  The scenery was magnificent even if the light didn’t lend itself to photography (a little on the contrasty side with the reflections on the sea), and to see how Railay looks in more dramatic light, you’ll have to click here.

All up, I wouldn’t go back to the southern beaches unless I happened to be in-country for something else and some friends were going down for a few days.  While you’d be hard-pressed to find more exciting beachside scenery, the vibe and over-the-top tourist presence left me feeling a little flat.  Compared to the peaceful hill-country around Chiang Rai, the frenetic pace and colours of Bangkok or the chilled-out stylings of Mae Hong Son, Ao Nang was a damp squib, and I think Thailand- and indeed South East Asia- has far more to offer than this particular corner of the peninsula.

Moments in Space and Time #10: Pai

Recovering from a tough year in Papua New Guinea, I spent five days in north-western Thailand. Pai sits in the middle of a gentle valley in Mae Hong Son Province, beset by soft rolling hills, hay fields, rice paddies, and a slowly arcing river. Morning mists gave way to cloudless blue-sky days as the air warmed, which in turn surrendered to evenings dotted with fluffy clouds, the better to play in the rays of the lowering sun.

Celebrating the freedom of my little scooter, I found myself exploring the byways around the local villages as the light shifted. It was delightfully peaceful, with nothing to do but sit, read, write, and explore the offenseless countryside. Stopping alongside a farmer’s field one late afternoon, I fell in love with the way the slanting light fell before the hills and played in the smoke from a bonfire, and the way the warm beams lit off the dry grasses in hues of amber and gold. The air stirred slowly and was disturbed only by chirping birds and singing insects, and the sense of peace was tangible like an aroma. I’ve never really been much good at sitting and doing nothing, but I have to say that Pai was the one place I can look back to and say I truly rested there.

The Book of Journeys (repost)

Reposting of an old favourite recounting (in a somewhat heretical way) a particularly unpleasant journey from Papua New Guinea to India for a workshop last year.  The original post somehow got corrupted about six months ago and I haven’t gotten around to reposting it until now.

Sorry for the lack of new material- there’s been a lot going on lately so I hope to have some more things to post before too long.

Cheers.

THE BOOK OF JOURNEYS

Chapter 11

1And so it came to pass, in the last year of Bush the Inadequate, while the nations of the world gathered together to play silly games, that he who was called Verbose travelled in the East. 2On the tenth day of the eighth month, Tristan travelled from the port of Moresby, that most wretched of hovels, to the great City of Angels, which is called Krupthep and Bangkok. Although the distance to travel was not great, the journey was an arduous one, for the travel agent had booked Tristan through the cities of Brisbane and Sydney first, for she was an inept sow. 3And so it was that although Tristan left the Port of Moresby early in the morning, by nightfall the GPS screen on his in-seat flight entertainment system showed that he had only just returned to the same latitude as Moresby. He was watching the GPS screen because the rest of the flight entertainment system had stopped working, and long and arduous indeed was the journey. 4And Tristan cursed his travel agent. But he also rejoiced, for although it was a codeshare flight, he was travelling in a BA jet and not a Qantas one, and thus had no fear that bits would drop off the plane in mid-air.

Click here to keep reading…

Flowers of Pai

I’m not a great one for flower shots.  It’s not that I don’t like them (within reason) or that there aren’t some really fantastic close-up shots of flowers out there.  It’s just that, well, they tend to be cliched, and often quite uninteresting.

Maybe, much like they have introduced Extreme Ironing, they should introduce Extreme Flower Macros, which would involve taking technically competent close-up photos of flowers in dangerous and exotic locales, like on cliffsides, or in Antarctica.

If they have flowers in Antarctica.

However, every now and again (generally when I am a little bored) I will go for a wander and take some flower shots.  I tend to like flowers when they’re part of a landscape (try here, here, here and here)- they add a flash of colour, contrast and depth.  However occasionally they can look quite nice by themselves.

I went for a number of morning rambles when I was staying in Pai, in Mae Hong Son Province, in north-western Thailand.  I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Pai.  It was peaceful, and there was very little for me to do, save read, write, take photos, and potter around narrow country lanes on my scooter.  I slept well in the cool mountain air in the hut I was staying in, and I would often wake early(-ish).  The days would dawn misty, which would burn off by mid-morning, after which a warm sun would dominate a blue sky until sunset.  Hard to find a more affable climate.

My early morning walks were more limited in subjects, therefore, due to the mist.  It made landscapes hard to capture, and there wasn’t a lot else happening out there.  However the flat, gentle light was perfect for macro photography.  Much like portraits, flowers can be captured in a variety of moods, but the way in which the photographer chooses to do that will be dictated by the light.  Strong overhead light tends to flood colours, and also makes it difficult to avoid the photographer’s shadow becoming part of the frame when trying to take a close-up.  Evening light can be warm and pretty, but often adds an orange cast to petals while trying to capture the richness of the natural colour, and can also be contrasty, destroying fine detail.  By contrast, in a morning mist, light scatters off the very water-droplets in the air, which is why although the total level of light in the mist tends to be lower, the effect on a camera’s exposure meter is not dissimilar to shooting into backlight, resulting in poorly-defined silhouettes, as the light is bouncing off the very air in every direction.

In portraiture and close-up photography, this is kind of like having a zillion tiny little strobes, and can often lend a very pleasing, gentle cast to images that makes them ideal for capturing detail without unnecessary contrast or hue (though beware of using any flash, for the same reason!).  And so I wandered down some of the flower gardens close to where I was staying and investigated the way the dewdrops hung from the petals, and trying to capture the subtleties in the textures and tones of the buds and leaves.

The Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM that I have for my Canon EOS 400D (seriously, Canon should be sponsoring me) is a joy for this kind of work.  Not only is the 60mm a suitably fast lens at f/2.8 (the 1.6 crop factor makes this a 96mm equivalent on a full-frame 35mm camera), giving fabulous sharp depth-of-field and silky-smooth bokeh (the blurred effect you get in the background of close-up shots of this sort, produced by shooting on a shallow depth of field- that is, wide aperture or low f-stop value), but the macro function is fantastic, and enables incredibly close photography and fabulous details.  Even on a 10 megapixel sensor this allows for some super enlargements, and my biggest regret with this lens (as I’ve lamented elsewhere) is that I can’t stick this lens onto my 5D due to a different mount.  Shame, as I don’t have a macro lens for the full-frame yet, and it’s sorely missed.

Anyhoo, you won’t see many flower-shots in my portfolio, but I did enjoy these ones from Pai.  Hope you do too.

A Photographer’s Journey

This website has quite a strong focus on photography (no pun intended) and so I suppose I don’t talk quite as much about my early travels. In fact, it was my earlier travels that pushed me into photography. I started to go places- beautiful, interesting, exciting places- which I wanted to be able to communicate to my friends. I decided that photography was an ideal medium to let this happen (and have more-or-less simultaneously developed my travel-writing portfolio to compliment it).

By the time I was eighteen I had already visited over fifteen countries (as far as I can recall). On the one hand I think I knew that that was quite a lot compared to your average eighteen-year-old, and yet given the context I grew up in (the international community of Geneva, Switzerland) I felt fairly average in my travel experience. In some ways, I was seriously deficient, in that the entirety of my third-world travel was summed up by one night in Bangkok (Chess, anyone?), and by living vicariously through my parents’ tales (and slide-shows) of living in Peru, Bangladesh and Afghanistan in the 1970s, before I was born. That my Dad could not cite with any degree of confidence the number of countries he had visited towards the end of his career with the World Health Organization didn’t help. Meanwhile many of my own friends had spent years living in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

My parents’ slide-shows and stories were more than a little influential in my development, of course, and I can remember them well. I don’t doubt they contributed to my branching into photography, as well. While Afghanistan was still a grey spot on geography text-books at school throughout the eighties and nineties, for me it was a place I desperately wanted to visit, and when it suddenly jumped to the tip of everybody’s tongue after late 2001, I felt terribly disappointed that my own personal Shangri-La had become uber-chic to talk about. I still haven’t made it there yet (unlike a very large number of my friends and colleagues today) and this irks me greatly.

Not so my parents, who are quite content that I keep my distance for the time-being. They would not be thrilled with me if I decided to retrace their own footsteps through the Khyber Pass, which was a dodgy enough prospect when they drove it in ’77. But the way I see it, I’m a product of my own parents, so what can they expect?

I realise when I have kids of my own I will rue these words.

Given that from my middle teens I knew I wanted to work in developing countries, it was pretty clear I needed to change my overseas experience. Brief trips to Poland and Turkey expanded my horizons slightly. On the former I shared a queen-sized bed in a tiny hotel room in Warsaw in December with a very large Russian gentleman who snored like a TVR on nitro, while the latter I accompanied my Dad on an all-expenses business junket to Istanbul where we shared a pleasant suite in the Swishotel overlooking the magnificent Bosphorus in crisp springtime air. But neither one was exactly going to cut me out for aid-work.

My first solo trips were to Kenya for 2 months during the summer of 2001, and to Thailand for a similar amount of time a year later. They were both trips rich in experience, joys and hardships, and the knowledge and memories I gained on each have stayed with me over the years. Because I don’t have as many photos from these days, I tend to forget about them when I share my travel stories, but that’s not to say I don’t have some and don’t want to share them. This is just one of the traps of photography. In addition, on both trips I journalled quite extensively. Perhaps I need to revisit the old exercise books and rehash a few of my memories.

My 2001 trip was couched neatly between an early summer trip for my mate’s wedding in Arizona, and a family trip to New Zealand and Fiji. That summer I ended up with photos from the Grand Canyon, the Jura Mountains of Switzerland, the top of Mt. Kenya, bushwalking in Aotearoa’s North Island, sunsets over Fiji beaches, and even several landmarks in downtown Seoul, stolen during an extended lay-over- all up, five continents in the space of four tumultuous and memorable months which I’ve had a hard time matching for pace since (though I try my best…). I travelled with a waterproof Minolta APS camera- that horrendous automatic camera film which stored whether the camera was set to normal, wide or panorama mode and changed the aspect ratio on the resulting prints (but off the same teeny-tiny negative, so picture quality was horrible). I’d fallen in love with the camera hanging out with my buddy Mackie in the Rockies the summer before, where we’d taken some stellar photos of hijinks in the high mountains, boot-skiing and swimming in ice-filled lakes and jumping off canyon walls and generally being idiots. It was a great sports camera. And thoroughly rubbish for landscapes. My Dad took one look at some shots I’d framed of shafts of moody sunlight from the Desert View watchtower on the south rim of the Grand Canyon and firmly pointed out that my photographic eye had exceeded the confines of the camera, and that I needed something better.

Slow to learn, I travelled next year to Thailand with the same camera and a backpack full of film canisters, more determined to take lots of photographs but not fully understanding what could not be done with an automatic film compact. Flat monsoon lighting scuppered virtually every shot I took of hilltop temples, cloud-swathed peaks above the Mekong River, and the Burmese borderlands north and west of Chiang Rai. I came back with three or four photos I liked, plus a handful more I could use to illustrate my masters thesis with, but nothing that was going to win me a Pullitzer.

It was the end of that summer that my Grandfather dug up his old Canon T-70 from some musty bag, film still in place from its last use some time at the end of the 1980s, and stuck it in my hands. I went for a couple of walks around my grandparents’ farm in the English Lake District, shot that single roll of film, had it developed, and landed half a dozen shots I was chuffed with, including three colour-saturated sunsets that must have been graciously developed by the chemist because there was no way that colour was straight out of the air. However it’s a good thing he did, because spurred on by my initial success, I threw myself full-tilt into the hobby, and by Christmas must have dropped three hundred quid in development costs (weren’t those the days, guys?), invested in a set of Cokin filters, and was well on my way to boring everybody I ran into about the joys of photography. I received a simple teach-yourself-photography book for my birthday that year, read it cover-to-cover (the closest thing I’ve had to any training), and haven’t looked back since.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the traits that defines my personality is my love of diversity. I think this is why I like photography- and why I like travel. They’re both open-ended hobbies. You can never get everywhere. And even if you get to a lot of places, those places always change. Nothing’s ever quite the same twice. Likewise with photographs. No two are ever identical. There’s always a new angle on the same subject, or a different play of light, or a variation on the camera settings that lets you do something slightly fresh. It’s quite literally an endless, ceilingless hobby, and each time I think I’m getting somewhere, I realise there’s a whole new level I can take myself to.

Photography isn’t an end in itself. It’s not the meaning in my journey. But it’s certainly a very engaging companion to take along the way.

Photographs (all early attempts with the T-70):

1. Coastal Track: A meandering footpath among yellow flowers at Cape Foulwind, South Island, New Zealand’s most westerly point, November 2002.

2. Dewdrop DoF: Playing with the macro end of the little 35-70mm lens that came with my grandpa’s T-70.

3. Winter Sunset: The 75-300mm Miranda zoom that came with the T-70 catches a cold sunset in the Lake District, December 2002.

4. Lakeland Sunset: Photo scan of a shot from the very first roll of film I shot on the little old SLR, August 2002.

5. Grandpa at Gunamatta: Mid-2003 on an Australian beach.

6. The Sheep: Iconic shot of mobile mutton.  Lake District, December 2002.

7. Matterhorn Emerging: September 2002, an early photo-shoot taking a road-trip down to Zermatt from my parents’ place in Geneva for a couple of days.  The hut you can see on the near shoulder is where my afternoon’s hiking brought me (after which I missed the last lift back to the valley and had to hike all the way off the mountain again…)

Streetside Chiang Mai

I liked Chiang Mai.  It wasn’t all it was hyped up to be, the chilled-out backpacker Mecca that people seem to talk about, but it was a pleasant enough place.  I had been expecting something less urban and more relaxed, and not a scaled-down version of Bangkok without the skyscrapers.  But that said, the northern pace of life definitely came through.  We stayed at a beautiful little riverside hotel close to the central night bazaar, and it was a very gentle getaway.

For a tourist spot I was a tad disappointed, but then I suppose it’s all about expectation.  My only previous trip to northern Thailand was in 2002 to the steamy hills around Chiang Rai, a good deal further north, and a truly chilled-out destination (or at least it was in 02).  Chiang Rai was small, quiet, with little going on, and white flecks of monsoon cloud clung atmospherically to the side of steep forested hillsides nearby, the whole damp and moody.  The Mekong River snaking a short distance away, and a heavy sprinkling of Chinese, Lao and Burmese influences along the tripartite border zone added an extra slice of ambiance that helped Chiang Rai personify a real south-east Asian flavour.

By contrast, Chiang Mai is a busy, bustling city.  The real south-east Asia.  It fills a wide valley and is a dense network of chaotic, traffic-clogged roads which at the wrong time of the day or year (such as 10pm on New Year’s Eve, which was when we landed), it can take a long time to get anywhere.  I had been expecting something more sedate.  Instead there were bustling multi-storey shopping centres, a sprawling night-market district full of all the same stuff you find in Bangkok (and apparently some items you can’t get in Bangkok either, but I didn’t hang around the stalls long enough to find out), and plenty of travel outfits offering overpriced ‘adventure’ trips, elephant rides, hilltribe tours and any other assortment of typical backpackeresque attractions.  In short, nothing too exotic then.

Where Chiang Mai’s charm and interest kicked in for me was the more relaxed hangouts.  Little coffee shops and quiet restaurants dotted around were ideal to settle back and have a read (or a write) while letting the town’s life slip by.  It’s not my premier destination, in Thailand or anywhere else, and although I can understand why it’s become a jumping-off point for travellers in the north of the country, myself, I’d probably give it a miss next time unless logistics insisted I spend a night there before stepping out on my onward journey.  But like other places in Thailand, it’s an easy and well-serviced destination where you can get anything you need.  And as I discovered to my dismay with my then-travel-companions, if shopping is your thang, apparently it’s a blast…

*sigh*

I didn’t do a whole lot of photography in Chiang Mai, as for the most part the city wasn’t that picturesque or photogenic.  However I took these two shots at different times one morning and quite liked the theme- I should have done more.  There’s something quite charmless about south-east Asian shophouse architecture, but it’s quite recognizable.  Really I just liked the bold colours- red and white stripes, blue sky, yellow signage…

An Afternoon in the Valley

Pai is a sleepy little town in Mae Hong Son Province, the north-western shoulder of Thailand that rolls along the Burmese border. It draws backpackers like metrosexuals to a hair salon, for its simplicity, its charm, and for the chance just to be somewhere and do sweet very little. I went there for R&R. A year in PNG had left me wanting some down-time, and a few days of rest-and-recovery-and-relaxation-and-rehabilitation-and-recuperation and whatever other ‘R’s you can fit in there were just what I needed. I went on the recommendation of some expats I’d met- friends of friends- while on Railay Beach a few days earlier who told me it was a gentle place ideal for sitting and letting the soul breathe deeply. One thing I’ve been learning over the last couple of years of intensity is that the soul needs those times- and those places.

I also went there to learn to ride a motorbike.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I didn’t actually go there to learn to ride a motorbike. But I got there, and found myself booked into a little guest-house six k’s out of town with nothing around me, so the only way I was going to get to see the place was if I found a bike. I’d never driven a bike before in my life. My motorcycle-riding experience to that date was largely relegated to journeys on the back of moto-taxis: Nearly getting flipped off them in the sands of Agadez, or the hair-raising, traffic-dodging, adrenaline-squeezing, knee-risking variant of Sukhumvit Road and its many tendrils (those of you familiar with Bangkok know exactly what I’m talking about).

I didn’t, of course, tell the girl renting me the motorbike that I had no idea how to drive it. I simply rented it. Then, paperwork signed, I sheepishly asked her to show me how to turn it on. To her credit, she paused for about a second and shot me a look. Then she walked me over, showed me how to fire it up, where the brake and accelerator were, and off I went. Pai is a gentle little place, a network of backstreets with not much traffic, which is good, because I shot into the street like a stung horse, wobbled my way up to an intersection, etched a shaky loop on the asphalt, then jerkily returned to the shopfront.

“Slowly,” the girl at the bike store said to me, then turned her back and walked inside.

Of course, after an hour or so of puttering around, I fell in love with the little scooter. By that afternoon I was exploring dirt trails into the hills, and I spent the next five days happily cruising up and down the highways and byways of Pai valley, enjoying the cool wind on my face and the bright sun on my arms, and feeling freer than I’d felt anytime in the last twelve months. Again, you bikers out there know where I’m coming from.

Pai is a beautiful confluence of geography and society. The town- it is a town now, but by south east Asian standards it’s a pretty little one- is a handful of blocks seperated by winding streets. A couple of minutes’ riding in any one direction takes you out of the built-up area and into the countryside, which is stretched out in a long wide flood-plain, and consists of paddies, fields, and stands of thick lush trees. During the mornings, a cold grey mist rises from the river and blankets the place from before the dawn until around nine in the morning, after which time the warm winter sun burns the mist off, and the sky becomes a deep azure colour which lasts until the sun dips below the western hills around six in the evening. Villages dot the valley, pleasant contemporary houses with colourful flowered gardens and speckled with ornate temples whose spired roofs frame themselves against the cloudless skies. The hills are wrapped in a thick blanket of deciduous trees. The temperature sits at around twenty-seven degrees with a light breeze moving through the valley, and it’s hard to imagine a more ideal climate.

One afternoon I stopped along a roadside not far from the town and wandered into the fields. A little track took me down to some haystacks, and a shack a little further down. The late sun was warm and insects ticked and birds flitted between branches of a stand of birch trees. Smoke rising from a farmer’s rubbish-burn gave the air substance that trapped slanting sunbeams. Aside from the occasional scooter heading back into Pai itself, the place was devoid of obtrusive noise. I snapped some shots, and enjoyed just being. It had been a while since just being was enough to make me happy. But Pai is the sort of place you can just be.

Go sometime.

Note: Pai is a tourist town. There are lots of backpackers in the town itself, and Thais go there for holiday too. Around New Year the place is allegedly packed. I was there in early January, and there were plenty of white faces on the streets, but it didn’t feel full- or particularly busy. If you’re really wanting to get away, make sure you book into one of the little ‘resorts’ outside of the town itself which are dotted along the various access roads. They’re quieter and you won’t feel intruded upon. At other times of the year, I’m told the farang population lulls and it can be quite secluded. I have a hankering to check it out during the monsoon, and just enjoy the sound of tropical rain hammering on the thatched roof of my little bamboo bungalow…

Ethereal

On the beaches of southern Thailand, clouds swirl around a setting sun.

I’ve always enjoyed long-exposure photography.  Taking a photograph is all about capturing the light, and by capturing the changes in light over time, we see our world from a different perspective.  The classic examples of this sort of photography are star-trail shots, where points of light blur into lines that streak like shooting-stars across the night sky, and shots of highways in the darkness, where headlamps and tail-lights merge into flowing rivers of yellow-white and red.

The key to taking long-exposure shots is of course limiting the amount of light that gets to the sensor so that it doesn’t ‘burn out’ (go all white).  That’s why most shots are taken in low-light or night conditions, of relatively small light-sources (stars or rapidly-moving headlights that leave a very brief impression on the sensor).  An alternative is the Neutral Density filter, an [ostensibly] colourless filter that blocks out light coming into the camera, artificially darkening it.  An ND2 filter cuts out the light by a factor of 2, or half as much light, meaning ceteris paribus, you can leave the shutter open for twice as long and acheive the same exposure.

My personal favourite is the ND400 filter.  It’s a rare and relatively extreme filter, but the long and short of it is that I can shoot long exposure (30 seconds +) frames in broad sunlight if I want to- and for far longer in lower lighting conditions- giving all sorts of interesting effects.

This sunset, near Krabi, was quite pretty, although the hues were a little subdued.  Shooting it over a couple of minutes however has added some drama and interest, blurring out people moving on the beach so that most of them vanished and only those who were still remining like ghosts where they perch, and leaving streaks in the sky as the clouds slowly track.  It’s captured a lot more violets and tobaccoes in the hues, due partly to the tint that the ND400 unfortunately lends to the shot, despite the claim to be colourless.  The sea becomes a little misty up close.  All up, the effect leaves a sort of ethereal flavour over anything that isn’t absolutely stationary.  This isn’t the greatest long-exposure shot I’ve taken in daylight, and I have tons more work to do in the technique (mostly it’s about picking a good subject in the right light, and having the time and inclination to frame the shots, which can take three, four, ten, sometimes forty-five minutes to set up and execute).  But I’m quite pleased with the mood on this one.

Have a great day.