Kevin Thom - Hamilton, Toronto, Ontario Photographer

I love shooting at night. It’s quiet, peaceful, and the closest thing to meditation that I do. Tonight’s model was this little tree–a maple, I think–located at Spencer Smith Park in Burlington. I noticed the tree when I was out with Laura last night, and returned tonight to shoot it, for no other reason than I thought it looked cool and ghostly. I love the bending shape of its trunk, and how its leaves were at the point of bursting to life from tight buds. It was lit by a nearby street lamp, which gave it quite a strange orange color. The air was quite still, so even though some of my exposures were nearly 30 seconds long, I was still able to capture lots of tiny details.

You can get some really unusual results when you take long exposures. In reality, the color was most like the first of the three images below. Pulling the white balance way towards the “cool” end while processing the third photo made the tree look a bit more like its real daytime color.

Maybe these aren’t the most exciting photos in the world, or the most elaborate I’ve ever taken, but often I find the joy of photography in the act of pure creation, with no goal other than to see something familiar in a new way.

It’s been a pretty busy couple of days here in Bangkok. I’m doing my best to help with the wedding, which is turning out to be a massive affair. Today, I was part of a really beautiful traditional Thai engagement ceremony. I don’t have photos of it, because I was part of the groom’s engagement procession, and was carrying a bag full of diamonds. There was no way for me to shoot as well.

Yesterday, I helped the groom, who’s my best friend from high school, at his rehearsal with the Thai Philharmonic Orchestra. They’ll be accompanying him as he plays a song at his reception on the piano. There are going to be a couple of thousand people there, so he’s understandably a bit nervous about it all.

At night, we went to a meet and greet at a restaurant that boasts of being the highest al fresco restaurant in Asia. It’s not hard to believe, since it’s on the 64th floor of an enormous hotel, and has a magnificent view of the city from its terrace.

Anyway, here are a few photos from the last couple of days’ events. The actual wedding happens tomorrow afternoon.

It’s been a long day! I started shooting around 9:30 this morning, and just got back now. It’s just after midnight and I’m ready to finally pack it in. This was my full day in China, and I felt rewarded with this gorgeous weather. After I shot those blue sky photos from the previous entry, Dad and I departed to explore the city a bit. We hit a hutong neighborhood, which is a classic Chinese residential area built in a series of alleys. I’m caught off guard by things that make perfect sense to the very pragmatic Chinese, like a leg of pork hanging to dry with the laundry. I mean, why not?

We wandered for hours, eventually finding ourselves in a major tourist area and then at a bus stop. After studying the various out-of-date maps posted for everyone’s inconvenience, we worked out how to get back to the hostel on the bus. I find these little adventures to be rewarding.

Dinner tonight was Peking duck. No visit to Beijing would be complete without the city’s famous roast duck recipe. The food was so good last night that we decided to eat at the same restaurant again. The chef and owner of this restaurant clearly appreciates that having good Chinese food doesn’t mean you need to have a dismal dining experience to go along with it. The presentation and service were top-notch, and the price was very reasonable. There was even a dude who stood by our table and patiently wrapped and served us the traditional “duck burritos” that are an essential part of the Peking duck experience. I remembered to bring my camera this time. No, the wriggling still-alive scorpion skewers are not from our dinner. They were from a local street-food market. I was gratified to note that everyone, including domestic Chinese tourists seemed grossed out by the scorpions.

Immediately after dinner, I set out to the Olympic park to try again at shooting the “Birds Nest” stadium and “Water Cube” aquatics centre. This time, I had better luck and managed to score a few shots of these iconic structures. That’s good, because between walking and the subway, it’s about two hours each way to get to the Olympic park.

Now it’s time for bed. I’m leaving for Bangkok tomorrow. More thoughts about China later.

I did a little walking around Beijing today. During the day, the smog is astounding. China has made some truly impressive efforts to reduce pollution and energy consumption, and the message is constantly hammered home by the media: use less energy and water, live in harmony with the environment, use public transit. However, the fact remains that there are just too many people here, and despite the fact that each person uses far less than we do in North America, the cumulative effect of so many crammed into such a small space is catastrophic to air quality. Anyway, as it pertains to me, it’s hard to take photos during the day, because everything more than 50 feet from you is shrouded in a hazy white veil.

Tonight after a delicious and artfully prepared meal at a restaurant down the street (sorry, I wasn’t expecting it to be so good, so no photos), I went out to see what I could shoot. I decided to hop on the subway and try to get myself over to the Olympic park to have some fun with all those celebrity buildings, like the National Stadium. I’m truly amazed at the changes to the subway system in the last two years. When I was here in 2007, I had to battle a crowd to get to this little cage containing a woman selling paper tickets. You then had to battle a crowd to get to a guy who would punch a hole in the ticket and let you down the stairs to the trains. There were four very limited subway lines open, covering a small part of the city. That’s all changed. Now, you buy your re-usable plastic subway tickets from a bank of bilingual touch-screen terminals, and pass through automated gates to get to the trains. There are nine lines now, with 147 stations all over the city. The cost has also changed. Instead of three to five Yuan (about 50-80 cents) that it cost in 2007, it’s now 2 Yuan (about 36 cents) to ride anywhere this massive system goes. According to Wikipedia, the system is still under massive expansion, with plans to double its current size by 2012. This is why I’m baffled that Toronto can’t build proper public transit to Pearson airport. It’s all about priorities.

So, I rode the subway for quite a long time, transferring a couple of times to get to Olympic park. It took about an hour to get there because it’s pretty far, and I kept missing my connecting trains. By the time I arrived at the Olympic park station, it was about 9:35pm. I was surprised to discover that the Olympic park closes at 9:30pm, so I was just in time to see the security guards let the last people out, and slam the gate shut. Also, it started raining.

I chalked it up to experience, and comforted myself in that I’d at least figured out where the airport express subway line started, and headed back to the hostel. When I came out of the subway, the rain had pretty much stopped. The reflections of the buildings in the wet pavement made me feel like doing some long exposures. Earlier in the night, I’d been shooting this old church that was sandwiched between a giant hotel and a mega-ultra-modern department store in the busy Wangfujing shopping area. It looked amazing reflected in the wet pavement.

Just as I was getting into shooting this, and finding some interesting angles, someone abruptly turned out all the lights on the building. It took a moment for me to realize how awesome this was. I truly believe that to get great night shots, you have to shoot what seems impossible to shoot. There are so many photographers who can easily recognize the photographic potential of brightly lit night scenes, and will get out the tripod to take some very ordinary shots. However, I want to make it my mission to capture those rarest of photons, because the fewer there are, the more potential they have to make night photos that really shine. After the lights went out, those remarkable photons were reflecting off of the moving clouds, creating a surreal backdrop. The sparse light from the shops across the street provided ample fill for the building itself, even though the scene at the time looked almost totally dark.

I only have one more night left here in China before I head over to Thailand. In some ways, this trip has seemed to have flown by so fast. In other ways, I feel like I’ve been here a lifetime. In either case, I’ve done my best to make it memorable.

The title of this article rhymes, if you say it right. I’m finding it a lot easier to get around in China with my little bit of Chinese. Just the small matter of knowing how to pronounce the name of a place when buying train tickets to that place saves me a lot of time miming and staring at puzzled faces.

I didn’t write anything yesterday, mainly because I didn’t do a lot of photography. The day was devoted to recovering from the last couple of days of strenuous activity and body-clock adjusting. Dad and I took a river cruise to see Shanghai from a different perspective. The amount of development evident in the city is astounding. There’s a neverending stream of barges heading up-river, carrying loads of construction materials. At any time, and in every direction, there seem to be dozens of skyscrapers under construction. In the run-up to the 2010 Expo, Shanghai is fully caught up in a frenzy of transformation.

In the evening, we got dinner and massages, which is probably about the best way you could spend an evening. After the very vigorous massage, I feel ready to tackle the rest of the country.

This morning, we checked out of the hostel and taxied to the train station. The high-speed train to Suzhou was a snap, taking about half an hour. Suzhou is one of many canal towns in this region. I use the word “town” lightly, as there are almost 6 million people living here. Considering Shanghai’s ballooning population of 19 million, it’s all relative, really.

The hostel is charmingly located on the edge of a canal, along a pedestrian street of renovated Ming Dynasty buildings. It’s been renovated, and has plenty of character, although some things don’t work. Some of the fancy light fixtures in here remain stubbornly dark when you flick the switch.

I took a few photos around the neighbourhood around dusk, and then later on in the evening. The town is pretty lively. There was some sort of dance warmup or rally in front of one of the local businesses. That’s a pretty cool marketing trick!