Bangkok Skyline
Bangkok, Thailand 2007 From the penthouse of the Grand China Hotel.
One of my happiest memories of my visit to Bangkok was having the desk clerk at the Grand China Hotel upgrade me to the penthouse suite for the price of a standard single room. I had a lovely, large room plus a balcony that over looked the city and the Chao Phraya river. Immediately I began shooting the skyline and then, later, when my excitement waned I took a walk on the nearby city streets.
Bangkok’s Chinatown
Nowadays people call walking around with a camera a ‘photo walk’. It’s a good term, I think. Mostly it’s walking not so much photo. You have to be out for several hours and keep your eyes open for color, interesting people, displays of food, etc. I remember there was a lot of trash piled on the side streets and I was also keeping my eyes open for rats. I did see one, BTW.
The photo above needed some post processing or fixing in Photoshop (FIP). There was no focal point until I hit the thing with an asteroid’s worth of color. Now the men carting mountains of cardboard cartons stand out and the blue color of the sky and buildings unites all the disparate items. A good software to take an ordinary photo and make it extraordinary is Topaz. It’s not expensive and it can work miracles in minutes. We like that, don’t we?
It was hard to find a focal point that merited a photo. I tried to look for a ‘minimalist’ view of Bangkok. Bangkok was so full of stuff, that even a minimalist view was difficult. By a minimalist view I mean a photo of a detail on a building, or the snarled electric lines wrapping buildings and street lights. I did like the shabby, old colonial buildings and I shot them, but they didn’t ‘translate’. No life. You’ve got to have ‘life’ even if it is just a shaft of light or smoke or a tattered poster on the wall. Thank goodness for Photoshop. The color brings the scene to life.
‘Life’: Courtesy of the Setting Sun
I did enjoy my one and only penthouse stay!