Adam Monk Photo Tours & Images Gallery

Halong Bay in the far North of Vietnam has got to be one of the wonders of the world, especially when it puts on a rainstorm like this  as it did when we arrived at the tail end of my Vietnam and Cambodia Photographic tour a few weeks ago.

When we arrived at the dock and got onto our boat the sky was mostly clear with a few clouds on the horizon… those clouds very quickly overtook us and put on this spectacular show…

These images were all shot hand held with the Hasselblad H4D-60 and a combination of the 28mm f4 and the 100mm f2.2  More images of Halong Bay to follow

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.

Travelling through Vietnam right now on my Photographic tour of Cambodia and Vietnam.  We left Cambodia a few days ago and I have just a few minutes to put up a couple of images from some of the temples of Angkor.

We spent 3 days in Siem Reap exploring some of the ancient site of Angkor which is over 400 square km, so we didn’t get to see all of it.

Some of the temples in the complex are over 1500 years old and the amount and complexity of the carving is outrageous, the Khmer builders  decorated nearly every square cm with intricate bas relief carvings, so while the sheer size is impressive, its the level of detail that really captures my imagination.

Angkor was also a great place to play with the Hasselblad H4D-60, and here I finally put it on a tripod!