Photographing Bhutan’s wild rivers

November 12th, 2013

I have just returned from my latest Bhutan Photo tour where I spent 15 days photographing, teaching and learning. The great thing about running photography tours is that I learn as much from the participants as they learn from me, not just about photography, but about people skills, diplomacy, about myself and how I react to certain situations. It really is an illuminating experience that I hope makes each tour better and better.

Ideal Light for Landscapes

Bhutan is always a magical place and this year was not disappointing, the weather last year was all blue skies and sunshine, which is very nice, but this year turned on some magic moody skies and some great overcast days with some lovely soft light for more landscapes, and photographing Bhutan’s wild rivers like the images to the left and below.

The rivers in Bhutan all run straight out of the mountains, usually from snow melt, so they are all rapids and waterfalls, blue and very cold! The coloured Prayer Flags add a lovely cultural dimension and really place the image firmly in the Buddhist Himalayas. The Bhutanese, who are almost exclusively Buddhist (Buddhism is part of their constitution) place the prayer flags in many natural beauty spots, particularly high passes and across river valleys.

They are really a great form of labour saving device, the prayers are written on the flags, which are made in such a way that they unravel in the wind, releasing the prayers as they disintegrate.

I took the Hasselblad H4D-60 along on this latest photo tour (as I did for my tour of Vietnam and Cambodia earlier this year), its not really an ideal travel camera, being rather heavy… But its such a pleasure to use, and the images are so sharp and clear that I cant say I regretted it for a minute… Except when I had to carry it up the mountain!

Images shot on the Hasselblad H4D-60 and Hasselblad 50mm f3.5 lens.