Adam Monk Photo Tours

The second instalment of me reworking already posted images, this one from the same day as the previous post.  Once again this was posted with about 5 minutes work in Lightroom on the laptop (not the best way to do images), and I have since worked it up on the Mac Pro with a bigger calibrated screen, still only in Lightroom though, there may be some more post processing in Photoshop .

Normally for an image like this to print it, I would get to a certain point in Lightroom (when everything starts to slow down), then export the image out as a High Res Tiff or psd (or a smart object) and work on it further in Photoshop before printing.  Well, this image is at the stage of slowing down and not much more is possible in Lightroom (unless you like looking at the spinning beach ball), so the next step would be Export, maybe I’ll show it again later, post Photoshop.

Speaking of printing, I am about to run a photographic printing workshop in August this year, so if you have always wanted to get that desktop photographic printer behaving like the salesman told you it would, come along, you can read more details about that here.

Just like the image from the last post, I shot this from a boat in the Hoi An River on the Hasselblad H4D-60 handheld (at 6am in the morning) while on my last Photographic Tour of Vietnam and Cambodia back in May of this year.  The image on the left above has had about 1 hour in Lightroom, while the image on the right is the original I posted some time back, with about 5 minutes of Lightroom work.  Don’t forget to click the images to get a bigger version.

I’m currently working out a totally new itinerary for next years Vietnam and Cambodia photographic Tour, with a lot more focus on Cambodia and some more remote and Beautiful regions of Vietnam. Stay tuned to this blog for all the updates and book mark this page for all the information about this Photo Tour for 2014.

Just to finish off the series of the Hoi An fishing trip on the recent photographic tour to Vietnam and Cambodia, I have the last images in the series.

After beating the fish out of the sides off his nets and collecting the catch from the bottom, the fisherman came over to our waiting boat to show us what he had caught for the day and to chat to our guide.

He was very shy and obviously not used to westerners with cameras (especially big cameras like the hasselblad H4D-60!), but he knew our guide and we were all polite and respectful so he warmed up to us.

As is the current  custom in Vietnam, we all gave him a small tip, which would have amounted to more than he would normally make in several days fishing, but for us the experience was priceless!

Continuing on from the last post  on the Fisherman of Hoi An from my Photographic tour of Vietnam and cambodia…

The Art of Fishing

As we continued down the river we started coming to more and more of these huge fishing nets suspended between 4 poles, they were beautiful, more like a work of modern art than a fishing net.  Since they were suspended horizontally across the water it was difficult to see how they were used to catch fish… unless they were flying fish!

Patience is rewarded, and after passing many of these mysterious nets we finally got to see one in action.  The fisherman appears in his canoe, standing up and rowing with a single sculling oar, sometimes with his foot… which is an impressive sight.

He paddles up to a small covered platform on stilts off one corner of the net, climbs in and begins peddling a type of windless contraption made of bamboo which winds in a rope attached to one of the four corner posts.

The whole net arrangement tilts sideways and is lowered into the water until it’s completely submerged.  Later on that day he comes back and repeats the whole process, but winding in reverse, which of course raises the net, hopefully with a heap of fish in it.

At this point all the seagulls have a party as the net is completely open at the top and provides an easy meal.  The fisherman then gets back into his canoe and paddles under the net, and using a long stick and his hands – while controlling his canoe with his foot – shakes all the fish down from the edges into the middle of the net, where there is an access hole for him to get them out into his boat.

All these images were shot on the Hasselblad H4D-60 with either the 100mm f2.2 lens (35mm equivalent of about 70mm) or the 28mm f4 (35mm equivalent of about 18mm), hand held of course, as there is no point in using a tripod on a boat!

Don’t forget to click on the images for a much better view of whats going on!  More Hoi An fishing stories next…

Well so much for regular entries whilst on my photographic tour of Vietnam and Cambodia!  There just never seemed to be any time with so much to see and do.  So here I am back in Cambodia again, post tour, researching next years tour… honestly, i’m working!

Hoi An Fisherman

One of the Highlights of Vietnam for me was an early morning river trip we took with a local photographer I found whilst wandering the streets of Hoi An in Central Vietnam.  Thai Tuan Kiet was born in Hoi An and runs a photographic gallery on one of the main streets, that features his own photographic work shot over many years, he unfortunately doesn’t have a website (yet) but his work is beautiful.

I got talking to him and it turns out he does day tours for Photographers in the countryside around Hoi An and particularly up the river to the fishing villages where no tourists go…  Luckily our tour has a lot of flexibility, and everyone was keen to get up at 4am to grab this opportunity… perhaps not keen, but certainly willing… Lucky for hotel wake up calls!

We had a perfect morning for our boat trip, no wind and some beautifully shaped cloud that gave the sky some fantastic personality.  The fisherman were all very friendly and keen to show us their catch for the day so far.

I took the Hasselblad H4D-60 out on the boat and shot all morning with it hand-held, its just such a lovely camera to use I was loathe to put it down.  In fact the only time I used the canon 5D Mk II for the day was when we visited the fishing village and I needed something a bit more manoeuvrable.

All these images have just had a quick workup in Lightroom on the laptop, so when I get home to a nice big screen I’ll spend some more time and refine them further.

To see all the current photo tours I have running go directly to my Photo Tours page.