I’m sure that many of my readers will be familiar with the prestigious annual Travel Photographer of the Year competition and if you’re looking for inspiration for your travel photography then the winners’ galleries are a great place to start. Better still, the organisers of the TPOTY contest have published three books featuring compilations of the best images, the latest of which is entitled Journey Three, so you can keep your inspiration near at hand.

I was pleased to see an e-mail from the organisers drop into my Inbox a few weeks ago: “I am very pleased to let you know that you have been included in the new Travel Photographer of the Year book, Journey Three, the latest book of images from the TPOTY awards. The book features the winning images from the 2007, 2008 and 2009 competitions.“

The Journey books are all beautifully produced and include an inspiring selection of the very best travel images submitted from hundreds of thousands of entries and would be a great addition to any travel photographer’s library. You can order copies online at the TPOTY web site for £25 each.

However, in a quite uncustomary outburst of generosity, I am offering one lucky reader the chance to win a copy of Journey Three!

The rules of entry are as simple as 1-2-3. Or 4.

1. Leave a comment in this blog post, below. Include your name and e-mail address (which won’t be published).
2. Wait a week and I’ll post the name of the lucky winner on my web site.
3. If you are the winner, wait another week and your copy of Journey Three will arrive in the post.
4. If you’re not the winner then curse your poor karma, then go online and buy your own copy.

You don’t need to write anything witty or clever, just “I want to win that lovely book” will suffice although you should bear in mind that the winner will be drawn by one of my staff using a entirely random process that we’re calling “Who do we like most?”.

Probably.

Good luck. The comments link is just down there ↓.

“Sanuk” is a Thai word that translates as fun or enjoyment although it’s meaning goes deeper than that in Thai culture. It refers, in a wider sense, to being jovial and, I guess, to looking on the bright side. There’s no literal translation into English.

Simply put, In Search Of Sanuk seeks to blend that sense of fun with the more serious business of supporting deserving causes.

“In Search of Sanuk (ISOS) is a community where people can collaborate on ways to change the world around them. We hope to encourage travelers to open their eyes, equip expats for self-activism, and challenge organizations to invest back into society more creatively. We’ll share advice, point out some great causes and invite you to participate in our own ongoing projects.”

The Saturday teaching programme, Sanuk My Saturday, began in a small, neglected area on the outskirts of Bangkok and has recently expanded to include a community who live beside the train line in Bangkok. And when I say that they live “beside” the train line, I mean that most residents could reach out of their front door and touch the train as it passes.

Here are a few photos from last Saturday, some from the train-line community in the morning and some from the more established project that we visited in the afternoon. If you would like to get involved with the project, whether you’re a Bangkok resident or simply passing through, then you can volunteer or offer a donation.

If you were to be in search of sanuk then you wouldn’t need to look further than these uplifting projects. Joining in on them was the most fun I’ve had in… well, in a long time. By the end of the day I was very hot, very tired but very, very happy. We may have taken food and offered teaching and a safe place to play for a few hours but what we took away from the day was of much greater value. The kids are amazing, so full of life and energy, so inquisitive and trusting, it’s hugely uplifting and enormously refreshing to have the privilege to spend some time in their company. Although I was one of the volunteers doing the “giving”, I was the one who came away the richer.

If you’d like to know more about In Search Of Sanuk then you can follow on Twitter or subscribe to the RSS feed. Better still, make contact and offer your support.

I arrived in Bangkok’s Chinatown shortly after lunch to find the crowds already growing and people in traditional costume standing beneath red lanterns. A low perspective eliminated the crowd and brought the lanterns into the shot. I rarely use flash but found that it was necessary for much of what I was shooting, although often powered-down to between -1 and -3 stops. The aim of the afternoon was to capture new images to be sold through my stock library partners but these shots are a few of my own favourites.

As a Travel Photographer, you can’t ask for a much more colourful subject than a Chinese Opera Singer in full costume with make-up and you can’t ask for a much more engaging subject than a small child, dressed in traditional Chinese costume and held aloft in his father’s arms. I took a few shots of this friendly father and son pair but especially enjoyed this shot where the father is looking at his son with what seems to be a mix of pride and adoration. I also love the protective arm gently shielding the boy.

There’s a certain quirky comic value to this shot. An everyday scene apart from the dragon, striding purposefully through the store. A visit from the dragon is considered to be great good fortune for the store owners for the year ahead, although the man behind the counter seems anything but impressed.

I succeeded in getting a few shots that revealed the eyes within the dragon’s head (right) during the afternoon. A quick burst of fill flash (set to -1 1/3 stops) with the flash held at arm’s-length and fired remotely was sufficient to pop some light in through the dragon’s mouth.

Such character. This friendly man and I had both paused for a thirst-quenching bottle of Chrysanthemum juice at a street stall and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity for a quick portrait.

I love my 85mm f/1.2 lens for street portraits but my first love was a 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L, which I was using when I caught this little girl, thoughtfully standing in front of Chinese lanterns which matched her bright, red dress.

The amount of light in the sky is inversely proportional to the level of my enthusiasm for photography, which means that at noon I’m listless but at dusk I’m like a cat on a hot tin roof. I especially enjoy the way that the diffused light from uncovered tungsten bulbs on makeshift street stalls can illuminate a face whilst the ambient twilight is sufficient to illuminate the rest of a scene.

OK, I try to resist but the temptation to end the day by spending an hour on a street corner and panning the passing tuk-tuks was too great. These shots are considerably slower than my preferred panning speeds of 1/30th or 1/15th of a second but a burst of flash freezes the action. This was shot at 1/2 second. The white arrow on the tarmac was, I have to admit, simply good fortune at first but once I’d seen it in the frame, I was glued to the spot.

Slower still, this was shot with a shutter speed of 1 second but the flash burst has caught the tuk-tuk and driver. This is a great example of one of the things I love most about Thailand: the warmth of the people. Even when zooming around a corner at speed, tuk-tuk drivers will give a broad grin or a thumbs-up if they see a gurning loon with a camera (me!). It’s kind of humbling, really.

Finally, on my way from Chinatown back to Hualamphong train station, I pressed the camera hard into the camera bag resting on my lap, stuck a wide-angle lens on, set the shutter speed to 1 second and the flash to -1 and crossed my fingers. This is Khun Buddee, a Bangkok tuk-tuk driver originally from Roi Et province. Hoping that one of my slow shutter-speed images had worked and despite it being after midnight, Khun Buddee and I had a quick chat at the station and he kindly agreed to sign a model-release form for me. There’s two morals for the aspiring travel photographer in that tale: 1. It’s never too late and never too early to be working and 2. Learn how to explain the concept of a “Model Release” in the local language.

Khun Buddee quickly became the centre of attention at the station tuk-tuk rank as the two of us sat in the back of the tuk-tuk completing the Model Release form. The other drivers were fascinated and he seemed delighted to have found a little local celebrity.

I hope that the Year of the Dragon brings good fortune to Khun Buddee and that you too are blessed with good luck and great light. Cheers!

P.S. If you’re interested in learning more about some of the techniques used to make the photos in this post and you live in Bangkok then check out next week’s Creative Photography Course. Saturday is full but there are one or two places open on Tuesday. See Bangkok Photo School.

More pictures from Bangkok’s Chinese New Year celebrations coming tomorrow.

“When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favour in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetised rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.”

It was with these words from Stephen Pressfield’s excellent “War of Art” book ringing in my ears that I sat down and did my work. All weekend. Non-stop. Despite being in one of those grumpy moods that cartoonists depict by drawing a black cloud above somebody’s head, I took Resistance out behind the wood shed, blackened its eye and made it apologise for good measure.

For those of you who haven’t yet read Pressfield’s book, it’s central premise is that Resistance is a ubiquitous force which seeks to prevent us from realising our creative potential. Resistance comes in many guises, is persistent and pervasive and will “reason with you like a lawyer or jam a nine-millimeter in your face like a stickup man“. The only way to outsmart Resistance is to work. You must put your nose to the proverbial grindstone and Get On With It.

So that’s what I did. All weekend. I cleared an e-mail Inbox of a substantial backlog, tidied files, scanned letters, wrote proposals, processed images, drew up plans, compiled notes and cleaned my camera gear. And when Monday morning came, guess what…?

Yep, I still had an enormous black cloud hovering overhead. But I was organised and up-to-date. Resistance and I were even on points going into the twelfth round.

I’m working on a multimedia project at the moment. It requires me to take a series of street photographs in my neighbourhood. I’d booked some time in my diary to shoot some more material this afternoon but found myself finding reasons to put it off. Pressfield would argue that Resistance is “not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy within.” Well, with nobody else to blame I realised that I’d better pick up my camera and get out the door a bit sharpish. So that’s what I did.

The first hour was mostly unproductive. I’d walked along a couple of familiar streets but found nothing of any great interest. But I made myself take frames, made myself work on composition, check exposures and vary my viewpoints. Eventually, things started to gel. A car mechanic working on a disemboweled tuk-tuk greeted me enthusiastically and I crouched down beside him as he drained oil from the sump. I took a few portraits, hobbled around on my knees to lose the distracting background and found a composition that worked.

Then I was off. Not flying exactly but plodding my way around the streets, making frames, working at them, getting them to work. Resistance was on the apron and the Ref was counting to ten.

I found quite a few of the images that I need for my project. It’s a step forward. But the best reward for my efforts came on the way home when I found a group of boys larking around in an alley outside their home. Never one to knowingly turn-down an opportunity for a bit of larking around I joined in and between us we soon had a series of images that made us all smile. So I thought I’d share them with you as proof of my winning bout with Resistance.

I receive, on average, two e-mails each day from photography students in various parts of the world asking for my advice on some aspect of working as a professional photographer. After my initial surprise that they’ve written to me at all and having checked that the e-mail wasn’t intended for David duChemin, I do my best to answer as many of them as I can. I’m pleased to offer what little advice I have but what I really want to say, but rarely do, is that photography is like any other creative endeavour. The technical stuff will fall into place and the rest you can make up as you go. The crucial thing has to be to keep working. Every day. And that’s the moral of my little tale. No more. No less. Keep making frames, keep checking your backgrounds, adjusting your composition, watching your histograms and engaging with your subjects. There’s really no secret. It’s just your job. Get On With It.

The EOS E1 plug-in uses FCP’s Log and Transfer functionality so that we’ll be able to mark, edit and ingest footage whilst it’s still in the camera. I say “assume” because it’s yet to go live and I’m not sure if the change in format and frame rate will be done automatically. If anyone knows…

When the EOS E1 plug-in goes live it will appear on the Apple web site.

More exciting even than the release of the EOS E1 is news of our new One-Day Creative Photography Courses at the Bangkok Photo School. These exciting, new courses will see us exploring themes such as “What makes an engaging image?” and “What do the pro’s do?”. The one-day class is divided into morning and afternoon sessions. In the morning we’ll spend time in the classroom, looking at great images and examining the elements that went into making them sing more sweetly than others. After a break where participants can enjoy the culinary delights on offer at the British Club, we’ll re-convene in time to catch the best light of the day and spend the late afternoon putting the theory into practice.

Dates: Saturday 20 February or Tuesday 23rd February

Morning: 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Afternoon: 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Course Fee: 5,000 Baht

The ever-popular visitor’s guide to Bangkok, the Bangkok 101 magazine, is about the most comprehensive guide to what’s hot and what’s not in Thailand’s colourful capital.

This month’s edition features a series of my images made recently at the 24-hour, Pak Khlong Talat market. Most of the images were made between the hours of dusk and dawn.

February’s wallpaper comes from Hoi An in Vietnam.

I photographed this lady in 2003 when I first visited the town and immediately recognised her when I was back in Hoi An last year. I can’t say the same was true for her. On the most recent occasion, she was helping her friend sort through a basket of fruit that they were selling to passers-by. She was already seated on the steps so I sat beside her and bought a bag of fruit. I can’t remember exactly what the fruit was but it may have been strawberries. Maybe plums. I showed her some of the photos that I’d taken so far that morning in my camera LCD screen and she nodded approvingly at one or two. People can be so fabulously hospitable and it didn’t seem to phase her at all that I’d decided to sit and eat my strawberries/plums/whatever on the steps beside her.

After fifteen or twenty minutes I’d finished my bag of fruit and the lady and her friend were paying little attention to me. I asked if I could take a photo before I left, knowing that the background would provide lots of colour and interest. I found a position on the opposite side of the narrow lane from where my perspective wouldn’t see the lady’s conical hat (it’s called a “Non”) infringe on the blue window-frame. If you look at the shot and picture how it would look if the hat crossed over the window-frame, you may see that even such a small overlap would make a big difference. It was important to position the lady and her hat inside the space between door and window.

All of which probably sounds a little pedantic but, as friends will tell you, I’ve never been one to shy away from a little pedantry.

Download the Free Desktop Wallpaper for February 2010

Much of our photography, especially when we’re starting out can be a little aimless. We don’t think of it like that of course, we want to produce beautiful images and that’s probably the full extent of our  stated aim – if, indeed, we ever declare it at all. However, it’s an aim that struggles under the weight of its own vagueness and which doesn’t give us any direction.

Without constraints, without parameters, our images can be constructed in an infinite number of ways and that range of freedom can be so extensive that it actually becomes suffocating. There’s too much choice and we don’t know whether to shoot portrait or landscape format, wide or close, quick or slow, fixed or panned. It can become difficult to make a compositional choice because we’re worried about making the wrong one and missing the decisive viewpoint.

Here’s a selection of images taken, mostly, with a specific purpose in mind at the time of capture. These are all landscape format images that would be suitable to use across a double-page spread (DPS) in a magazine. Many have a single subject or single point that grabs your attention. It might be a human figure or a price label on a basket of mussels but most have a main subject. Many have space for text copy or at least an area of continuous tone that a designer could use to place some introductory text.

Shooting to purpose is very much an essential skill for anyone photographing on commission or shooting speculative material which they hope to market through an image library. And with constraints come freedom.

A recent commission for Vanity Fair magazine in Bali brought me a great deal of freedom in this respect. As you’d imagine for a prestigious publication with a certain style to maintain, their needs were very specific, which was tremendously liberating. With the help of their Picture and Supplement Editors, I was able to draw up a comprehensive list that really helped when it came to snapping frames: “No sunrises, no sunsets, no panning shots (Gulp! I’m sorry, do you know who you’re speaking to?), no models but faces with character, a front cover and a double-page spread”. These were just a few of the things that defined the style for the second, long list of subject matter.

Knowing that I needed to supply an image suitable for a front cover and another suitable for an introductory double-page spread gave some helpful definition and direction to my efforts. Knowing that these images would require space for copy and that they shouldn’t be cheesy lifestyle shots helped too. No shots from sunrise or sunset (although I still photographed then, for my own enjoyment), no blurred shots… it all helped. Not only did I rarely spend very long pondering on how to shoot a scene but that direction got me moving on to a new location as soon as I felt that I’d got “the” shot from where I was. I saw a lot more, shot a lot more and achieved a lot more than if I’d been shooting with my usual aimless and poorly-defined objectives.

You don’t have to be shooting for Vanity Fair to have direction. You can give yourself assignments that bring the constraints that will ultimately free you. Go and shoot a front cover image of your street and you’ll only be shooting in portrait format. Pick a space on your kitchen wall where you’d like to see  a triptych of colourful food shots and you’ll be thinking in primary colours, in close-up and with some kind of cohesive structure. It doesn’t really matter what constraints you employ; students at my workshops are often encouraged to spend two minutes shooting only red things or only circles or only from below the knee or from a wide-angle; the point is that by introducing limitations you give your poor, overworked brain a chance to focus.

What limitations do you find beneficial when you’re photographing?

Gaby is the wife of professional photographer Leen Thijsse and, as she explains on her web site, “was able to co-assist and co-produce on several of Leen’s assignments around the world, meeting a lot of inspiring and talented people“. Clearly, being able to work alongside and learn from an experienced professional has given Gaby a wonderful sense of light and enabled her to bring a photographer’s eye to her compositions.

I especially liked seeing this beautifully-observed image of a couple in the market admiring a poster of the King of Thailand. The King is greatly revered in Thailand and almost every shop and market stall proudly displays a poster like this. The King is also a keen photographer and many official portraits show him with an SLR around his neck. It’s a common scene but one that tells us a lot about Thailand.

Another favourite is one that will be familiar to many of the students who have accompanied me to the Pak Khlong Market. Deliveries of huge blocks of ice are made to the market by truck and Gaby has a lovely series that document one delivery and which capture the young men whose job it is to unload the truck several times a day.

You can find Gaby’s website at www.gabythijsse.com and I particularly recommend that you take a look at her galleries of Urban Life at the Market and at Chinatown, both of which are populated with images taken during a single photo workshop day. Seeing Gaby’s beautiful images reminded me of what a pleasant time we’d enjoyed during her workshop and of just how much ground we tend to cover in a single day, photographing in Bangkok.

Finally, I’m delighted to see that Gaby will be joining Matt Brandon and I on our forthcoming Kumbh Mela trip in April. Only one place remains on this trip so please let us know soon if you are interested in joining. As you can see from Gaby’s images, we manage to cover a lot in one day so just think what we’ll achieve in two weeks in India during the Kumbh Mela. I can’t wait!