Mandalay and an Old British Hill Station

As I write this I am sitting on the plane flying from Yangon to Bangkok. The 2011 Myanmar photo tour is over now, however I have several additional blog posts that I would like to share with you. The reason that these blog posts are coming after the tour is finished, is due to the fact that while I was in Myanmar, access to my own blog was being blocked. The only way that I was able to blog during the trip was by e-mailing images and text to a friend outside of the country, who then posted them for me. So, I have a little catching up to do. The next 5 blog posts will be retrospective, and of course chronological, following the locations that my photo tour visited.

The images below were made on our last morning in Mandalay, and our final excursion from Mandalay; a day trip to Pyin Oo Lwin, it’s an old British station where stagecoaches ply the streets and unique architecture can be seen.

On the way to Pyin Oo Lwin we stopped at a roadside restaurant and I spent most of my time panning the waitresses as they took food from the kitchen and delivered it to the tables. Panning is a way to show motion in your photographs and it’s fairly simple. In these images I selected a shutter speed of a 15th of a second and then followed the waitresses as they walked past me. Panning is easy once you get the hang of it, but even in the best of times about 50% of the shots go straight into the garbage because they’re just not sharp enough. Really, it’s a numbers’ game, you need to shoot a lot in order to get a few good ones.

We also made a short stop at a flower market and due to the overcast conditions the fruits, vegetables and flowers were quite colorful. I always explain to my tour guests that overcast skies often work to our advantage, certainly when it relates to people photography and also still life. Without the harsh lighting conditions of midday sun and shadow the photographic possibilities of an overcast day provide tremendous advantages.

Doris and Jerry who appear in one of the photos below asked me to take their picture for this year’s Christmas card, so I just asked them to sit in one of the stagecoaches that we use to tour the city. Doris and Jerry have done a lot of international travelling and they came on my tour to improve their photography. Although they didn’t bring a laptop with them, I was able to requisition their SD cards and make a selection of about 40 images for our last night’s slideshow. Everyone was quite impressed by Jerry and Doris’s images!

Elaine, who we aptly named the Energizer Bunny, and her friend Barbara were on my Vietnam trip earlier this year; both of them decided to join the Burma trip as well. Elaine is the one swinging the imaginary tennis racquet in front of the blue wall and Barbara can be seen (above in this post) showing one one of the vendor’s the photo she just took. Both Barbara and Elaine are well traveled, enthusiastic photographers.