Covering Shwe Dagon in gold
The Shwedagon Zedi Daw is a nexus point for Myanmar’s Buddhists. It’s history goes back more than 2600 years and it is an amazing place of humanity, faith and spirituality. The main stupa is sheathed in gold foil as are many of the parapets and other buildings on the grounds. I went there twice when I visited Myanmar in 2010 and think I could return many more times and always find new things catching my eye. On my second visit, I watched these workers gilding a new, or maybe restored, tower. It was a hot day and while one gentleman found a ball cap to be sufficient protection, the other preferred a more encompassing head cover. This was detailed work and they were attentive to the task at hand. I had to wait a little while until one of them looked up from the tower and glanced out over the crowds walking around Shew Dagon.
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Yangon’s Chinatown Market
This evening I was working with some images from a trip in 2010 to Myanmar. I put together this small set from a walk along one of the market streets in Yangon’s Chinatown. People worked, shopped, talked and lived on this street. Vibrant, crowded, loud and unusual were some of the thoughts I recall from this stroll on my first day in the country.
(click for a slideshow of the images)
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Mandalay: an afternoon in a street market
Throughout Asia, markets are a big part of daily life in a way very different from our malls. I romanticize them a bit when I’m touring through my memories of trips to and living in Thailand, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Myanmar. However, every time I return, I head straight for the nearest night market, food bazaar, or whatever to get a feel for the place and the people. Just about a year ago, I was in Mandalay in central Myanmar and in a bid to escape the afternoon heat, I lingered in this corridor set off to the side of a very large market in the city.
Just a really cool spot to spend a couple of hours. The kids were a ton of fun but pretty elusive – they welcomed me to take their picture but weren’t interested in staying still for even a fraction of a second. No worries, we shared some laughs and I had some really good tea from the lady with the pink food (but I didn’t give that one a try).
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Street Vendor – a boy in Yangon
This boy was on the edge of Chinatown in Yangon, Myanmar. He was arranging the deep fried snacks in his basket and maybe taking a short break before continuing on. I presumed that he was heading around the corner towards a large crowd was watching dragon dancers perform but did not follow him. Looking at this photograph again, almost a year later, I was struck by a number of the little details – the flip flop sandals, the crease in his shirt collar, the concrete blocks forming the sidewalk, even his raised pinky. It was an interesting scene to revisit.
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2010 Favourite Photographs – People
Nuns at prayer in a convent in the Sagaing Hills in Mandalay, Myanmar in Southeast Asia.
In 2010, I made a goal that I wanted to photograph people more. My first love is nature photography (landscapes and wildlife) but the more portraiture, street and travel photography that I do, the more I enjoy it. To support this extension of my art, I have attended lighting workshops, read a wheelbarrow full of books, tried to spend more time photographing humans and shared some of the knowledge gained with other photographers in my ecosystem.
Much to learn and practice yet but 2010 was a good step forward. I’m excited to build on this momentum and see where the people I photograph in 2011 take me.
Here are some of my favourite images from last year.
My trip to Myanmar in February was a really wonderful experience. Photographically, this land is fantastic for the variety of people, cultures, landscapes and other opportunities. Here I wandered through Yangon’s Chinatown and was able to have a few good conversations with the residents as they spoke Mandarin as a first language instead of Burmese.
I was fascinated by these young men who ran blocks of ice from trucks, up the cobblestone street to these ice crushers and then back down to the dock for the fish to be packed in. Very hard work done barefoot without any breaks through the morning while the fish are being shipped out around the city and beyond.
This marble carver in Amarapura works in his family’s yard along a street filled with stonemasons. These craftspeople create incredible statues from the alabaster mined from the hills in the surrounding Mandalay area. Again, very hard work.
The monks of Southeast Asia are magnets for many photographers, and I was no exception. I thoroughly enjoyed talking with many of these men that I met and loved photographing them in their surroundings.
A very kind man who I gestured and chatted with briefly in Old Bagan after he motioned me over to have a look at my camera. He was happy to let me photograph him and gave this picture a nod when I showed him the screenshot.
Probably the coolest guy I met in Myanmar. This gentleman had a group of younger monks and lay people circling him and they were having an animated conversation which I enjoyed watching as much as I enjoyed making this photo.
The younger monks line up to receive offerings from the community, grateful for the dedication of these boys and men to the faith they all share. The food collected is distributed among the monks and eaten in silence. A large portion is distributed outside the brotherhood to the less fortunate who wait patiently for the monks to hand it out. There is a dignity among even the poorest which can be glimpsed in the photograph of the man below but I was not able to wholly present here.
The monks showered using metal bowls. A fast shutter speed froze the droplets and the motion of this simple action.
In Amarapura while walking through a monastery, I looked in on this monk as he swept the courtyard seemingly lost in the repetition.
My children always figure prominently in what I’m up to and here are just a couple of what could be a near infinite series of photos of them through the year.
A couple of black and white portraits to complete this set.
Thank you for scrolling through a few of the highpoints of the year with me.
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Encounters on Inle Lake
I am preparing entries for the Travel Photographer of the Year contest and reworked some of my images from Inle Lake in Myanmar that I made in February.
I have done a couple of posts (here and here and here) on these fishermen before. I still really enjoy this collection of images from the three days I spent on the lake.
Very good people I met on the water. I look forward to the next encounters I have on Inle somewhere down the road.
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People of Myanmar
I put together this set of images for a gallery show I may have the chance to do. It was fun to look through these images of people I met and was able to photograph when I went to Myanmar in February.
It’s a big world filled with incredible people, I’m looking forward to meeting some more of them soon.
Here’s the link to the webpage with the gallery of images.
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Split Toning Images in Adobe Lightroom
With this photograph, I used the split toning controls within Adobe Lightroom’s Develop Panel to make a different looking image. I converted the image to black and white then used the split toning section to set the colours that I wanted to use to tone the image (a grey-blue for the shadows and a grey-gold for the highlights). Using the sliders to tweak the hue and saturation of these tones, I was able to bring a subtle, metallic sheen to this monk’s skin. I had this look in mind recently which has a very different feel from the original, colour image which has warm earthy tones.
Here is a more typical look that I like in my black and white work
In the original, the dust in air has warmed the light and given a glow to everything.
I like how you can use great light to create different versions of the same image. I’m still not sure which one I prefer. Colour is pretty consistently a main theme in my images but I like the glow and the slightly metallic look in the split toned edition.
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Ice Flow at the Thiri Mingalar Fish Market in Yangon
I went down to Thiri Mingalar fish market and dock area located in the Kyee Myindine township of Yangon just before sunrise. The early morning haze coming off of the Hline river and the low cloud cover diffused the sunlight and spoiled me with great light to photograph with.
The market was a cacophony of people, fish, boxes, chattering, yelling, smoking and running. All of this began well before daybreak and was in full swing, flowing all around me as I wandered along the cobble stone streets and concrete docks.
I spent most of the morning following the flow of ice around the dock and the market. Given the heat and the few refrigerated trucks, ice is understandably the grease that keeps the wheels spinning down there.
Large blocks of ice arrive in the back of covered trucks and get slid down a plank onto two-wheeled carts that are then pushed up about a block to a shed. Inside, there are a couple of old contraptions that crush the ice. Men shovel the ice into crates which are then loaded onto another set of carts. Men, mostly young guys, run these carts down the street, past the truck, and onto the dock. The whole operation is built on the enormous effort (and undoubtedly sore muscles) of these men and provided me with another definition of hard work.
The fish get sorted as they are unloaded and sit in baskets and coolers covered with ice until they are sold. After watching the fishermen and the wholesalers for more than an hour, I can assert that the fish baskets do not sit for long. Once they are sold, they are either carried by another group of runners to a truck, motorcycle or cart for delivery around the city or they are packed into sealed crates with fresh ice. I couldn’t confirm, but I am guessing they were being sent a bit further afield or were purchased by higher end customers who paid extra for the relative luxury of clean, cold transport.
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Marble Carvers in Mandalay
Mandalay is known throughout Asia for their artisans. The area’s stonemasons have earned a reputation for their exquisite work with marble.
Our guide took us to a street in Mandalay that is a centre for marble carving. The street is packed with workshops with carvers mostly working on Buddha statues of all sizes.
The statues are lined up, in various states of completion, at the front of most of the shops.
Masks are not part of the uniforms and the fine dust created by the power chisels and grinders they use hangs heavy around most workshops.
Marble is mined in quarries near Mandalay in the Sagyin hills. The best of this stone is alabaster, very fine quality marble which most of these carvers were working with along the road.
When a statue is ready to be moved for painting or to be delivered nearby, a cart like the one below is often used.
For shipments to more distant clients, the statues are framed in wood and then wait to be loaded on flatbed trucks.
At one end of this road, a low slung building housed woodworkers, which provided the single exception to the marble work packed on this dusty street running for several city blocks in the middle of this sprawling city.
Here too Buddha remained the focus of most of the carvings, but there were a few different statues lined up on one wall outside.
One more incredible location in Myanmar that I am already looking forward to getting back to again.
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The Edges of the Day – Sunset on Inle Lake
This is the second part of the Inle Lake Edges of the Day series. These photos were taken around sunset during two evenings spent out on the water.
It was a lot of fun working with the falling light levels and exposing to reveal different amounts of detail from pure black silhouettes to overexposed reflections in the water. Many different ways to shoot these scenes, I could stay there for another couple of weeks and not get bored just working with these guys.
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The Edges of the Day on Inle Lake
a smoke break on the water
Inle Lake is a lake unlike any I have been to before. I was there for three days in February and each morning I went out on a longtail canoe on the smooth water and explored the lake, looking to capture some of the stillness and calm that preceded the sun climbing over the hills that rise above the eastern shoreline. Here are some of the images from those mornings on the lake with the fishermen.
We maneuvered our canoe around the fishermen to work with and into the light. Using longer lenses, we kept far enough from the men that we were not affecting their fishing. Through our guide, we were told that these gentlemen did not mind us photographing them, they just thought it was strange that we found them so interesting. Seeing the world through the lens continues to be an amazing way to experience life.
Christopher Martin Photography 