Photographing Thailand

This post is part of our Friday Feeling series. A different take on life from someone at Dentally each week-ish (we're not all about Dental Software!). This week one of our founders, Nick, tells us about his recent honeymoon trip to Thailand.

Outside of work I enjoy photography and I've been getting more involved over the last couple of years. So when I went off on my honeymoon during the first two weeks in February it was a great opportunity for my wife, Sam, and I to take our cameras. I had the aim to come back with several photos that I was really happy with, and try to capture them across different types of photography. So my aim was to take some good landscape/cityscape photos as well as some portraits or street photography that captured the Thai lifestyle.

I'm going to split this across a couple of articles, this is the first on a couple of the landscapes.

Temples in Bangkok

We started the trip in Bangkok so I was keen to get a good sunset picture of the famous Wat Arun, which lies on the West bank of the river running through the middle of the city. Being on the West bank it's perfect to shoot the sunset in the background behind the temple. As it is with my luck we turned up on the first evening to find that the temple was covered in scaffolding for renovations, Not to be put off I carried on and got this shot.

I got this shot in the "Blue Hour", the hour or so after the sun has actually set or the hour before it rises in the morning. I made the decision to shoot this as a long exposure, this helps to smooth out water and creates the colourful light trails of all the boats going by. This particular shot was a 4 minute exposure, ISO 64 at f5.6. We'll just have to pretend that the scaffolding isn't there!

Erawan National Park

Later on in the trip we were hiking up in Erawan National Park in the West of the country. This presented the opportunity for me to explore some of the amazing waterfalls in the region. We walked up several kilometres of trail, quite a challenge wiht about 7-8kg of photography gear in 35 degree heat, and we came across the waterfall just below. Given that we were there in the middle of the dry season we weren't expecting too much, and I'd love the opportunity to head back when the stream is in full flood.

This was shot near the middle of the day, typically this is not a great time for taking landscape photos but taking the opportunity to shoot under the shade of the tree canopy lets you make the most of it. Again this is a reasonably long exposure to get the water all sliky smooth, this was taken at ISO 64, f22 and 30sec. The photo was taken pointing straight into the sun, so I used small aperture of f22 to accentuate the star burst effect and help get the longer shutter duration. At least there's no scaffolding in this pic!

Stay tuned for next's week's blog where I'll be sharing some of the portraits I attempted whilst there.