At 6 I thought I would be Numero Uno through the door to the breakfast area, but someone beat me! How was that possible. Joined Huebridge (phonetic spelling) and Kathy at their table. He's from Hong Kong and she is from Sidney (she's a citizen of mainland China, from near Hong Kong, living in Australia). Breakfast was good, lots of fresh fruit, cereal, crepes, eggs, etc. Kathy was really enjoying her asian breakfast of noodles in a mild fish broth . Says it's hard to find in Sidney. I passed!
After breakfast Nathan gave us a presentation of various techniques he uses in his travel photography. Very useful, particularly liked his explanation of how to get over the hesitancy of approaching people on the street and getting to have be comfortable with you photographing them. I never thought about it, but the language we use in describing what we are doing when we engage in photography is the language of hunters. We "capture" images, "shoot" pictures, "take" pictures and he contends this subliminally affects our body language when we are doing these things and people whom we are photographing sense that. Also if you are shy and embarrassed at what you are doing, this is conveyed to your subject and affects the way they interact with you. So the solution is to first establish a connections of sorts with them, initially by making eye contact, speaking a few words in their language (Nathan provided us with a few Burmese words) and asking permission to phototgraph them. This results in the usual "smiling mug shot" but once you've taken that they will normally relax and go back to what they were doing, which is what interested you in "creating" their image in the first place. With those words of wisdom we were launched out to "create photographs" along the Ayarwaddy River.
It turned out, that in this culture anyway, it is incredibly easy to photograph the local people because they are so friendly and outgoing. They smile and you can actually joke with them in a "pointy talky" kind of way. Some folks actually approached me wanting their pictures "created", and were thrilled with just seeing the result on the back of my camera. Here are just a few examples of life along the Ayarwaddy.
I laughed with the lady in the next picture because we were wearing the exact same hat.
This proud mom wanted me to photograph her with her son.
After lunch we took a boat ride upriver to Mingun, which is more touristy and where we were assailed by young girls want to sell all kinds of trinkets. The big draw is some temples in the area including the uncompleted one that is part of the McCurry exhibit at Munson Williams. Nathan had also arranged for a couple of novice (young) monks to "model" for us. They were two really cute little boys who were so obedient and willing to pose for us at one of the temples.
Returning to Mandalay, by boat the group dined at a local restaurant on the river, along with our local tour guide, Ko Ko. During dinner, someone noticed a stream of small lights floating down the other side of the darkened river (the sun long down), and asked Ko Ko about it. Apparently some religious festival where they release floating oil lamps up river at night and an endless stream of these things continued for as long as we were there. Unfortunately we did not know about this in advance and were a long way from a place to photograph it.
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