It’s our free day in Luang Prang and I could have slept in, but it’s just to hard to resist another 6:30 am parade of monks, so most of us are up and out the door by 6:15. Today, I thought I would try for something different in terms of my images.
Choosing a low angle by placing my camera on the ground, I shot with my 70-200mm 2.8 lens. My settings were ISO 640 (my old Canon Mark II gets pretty noisy at anything above 640) my shutter speed was 1/250 of a second because I needed enough speed to stop the moving feet, the resulting 3.2 f-stop was very shallow as you can see by looking at the pavement. With my focus spot set to just left of center and my focus mode in AI-Servo in order to track the subject, I snapped off about 4 frames of each passing monk. As expected, I had to throw most away, but there were a few which I liked.
A small girl sitting on a tiny stool caught my attention and I watched her looking up at the monks as they passed, her hands pressed together in the traditional sign of respect called the “wai”. I framed the shot by sitting on the ground perpendicular to her and fired off a few shots each time an opening between the monk’s orange robes appeared.
On the walk back to the hotel, I spotted some laundry hanging out on the front porch of a Laotian home. It wasn’t even 7:30 am and I had already shot more than 150 images. It’s just another great start to a phtoto-rich day here in Luang Prabang.
