Rice Paddies in the Dry Season

The_Traveler · Mar 4, 2015

Olympus M 5
Luang Nam Tha Province

sleist · Mar 6, 2015

Love the layering in the mountains. I feel like there's a lot of stuff on the bottom that perhaps isn't needed though. Cropping some of that out would also keep the horizon line from cutting the image in half. It's a tough call and hard to say for sure with a small version. If I did crop it, I might be tempted to go mono.

waday · Mar 6, 2015

Very nice. Love the mood.

The_Traveler · Mar 6, 2015

thanks, both of you.
I've been tempted to try this in more of a pano shot, cropping to just above that horizontal green row.

In the north part of Laos, the mornings are like this with a heavy mist that doesn't clear away until about 10:30 and then the sun from then on is very strong.
So what you see in the background is that morning mist clearing quickly in the heat.

It is hard to explain just how undeveloped rural Laos is. Very few paved roads, and even those few are only a layer of gravel held together with tar. Most dirt roads have never seen a grader and thus are heavily rutted.
Not any signage to speak of and once the trees get above eye height, it is really easy to lose one's way but people are friendly and when we got lost (riding on motor scooters, people were quite friendly.)

waday · Mar 6, 2015

The_Traveler said:
thanks, both of you.
I've been tempted to try this in more of a pano shot, cropping to just above that horizontal green row.

In the north part of Laos, the mornings are like this with a heavy mist that doesn't clear away until about 10:30 and then the sun from then on is very strong.
So what you see in the background is that morning mist clearing quickly in the heat.

It is hard to explain just how undeveloped rural Laos is. Very few paved roads, and even those few are only a layer of gravel held together with tar. Most dirt roads have never seen a grader and thus are heavily rutted.
Not any signage to speak of and once the trees get above eye height, it is really easy to lose one's way but people are friendly and when we got lost (riding on motor scooters, people were quite friendly.)

That would look quite nice. If you would do that, would you take any off the sky, as well?

The_Traveler · Mar 6, 2015

Hard to tell; I can't get at it for a while, I am doing a backup of all the files I brought back from Laos to two targets and that takes about an hour or so. I don't want to access those files while in process.

I don't want to end up with this elongated strip that looks silly or exaggerated and I do want to keep some sky to imply the depth of light and space there was there.

It is hard to relate in words what it feels like, riding around in a country like this. If we got turned around away from the single paved (sic) road, it was perfectly possible to go on for 30 or 40 km without hitting another damn thing and certainly not another exit road until the track we were on petered out.

English speakers are minimal away from the few tourist towns and it is quite a lonely feeling to bump along rutted roads into a village and have everyone turn around to look because they don't ever see Westerners there. Gasoline is sold in liter bottles by most stores so we would never run out of gas but we really felt 'alone'.

We did get invited into a Black Thai house to visit and have tea and we were the biggest attraction that town had in a while. School was letting out and the entire primary school stood in the yard and watched us ride away. Our fall back position if we got irrevocably lost was to call our guesthouse, we had a Lao sim card in the phone, and let someone on the road speak to the proprietor and they would send out to retrieve us. This happens often enough that the guesthouse had a standard charge for retrieving people and/or rental motorscooters.

waday · Mar 6, 2015

It sounds like you had a fantastic trip! Can't wait to see more pictures.

JustJazzie · Mar 6, 2015

The_Traveler said:
thanks, both of you.
I've been tempted to try this in more of a pano shot, cropping to just above that horizontal green row.

In the north part of Laos, the mornings are like this with a heavy mist that doesn't clear away until about 10:30 and then the sun from then on is very strong.
So what you see in the background is that morning mist clearing quickly in the heat.

It is hard to explain just how undeveloped rural Laos is. Very few paved roads, and even those few are only a layer of gravel held together with tar. Most dirt roads have never seen a grader and thus are heavily rutted.
Not any signage to speak of and once the trees get above eye height, it is really easy to lose one's way but people are friendly and when we got lost (riding on motor scooters, people were quite friendly.)

That sounds absolutely lovely!!! A beautiful capture, Lew. It's like that every morning?!

The_Traveler · Mar 6, 2015

Except for Luang Prabang, Laos is not really a place to see 'things', like Myanmar or Thailand is. Laos is a severely under-developed rural country with most of its population working at agriculture. Thus there isn't a huge infrastructure to make big, beautiful things to see. There are very few paved roads in the entire country and its attraction is the beauty of its small rivers, the hilltop tribes and the warm open-heartedness of its people.

The pictures I have are of people and experiences that perhaps aren't unique or even that exciting but certainly great memories for me.
I'll probably post them in groups as stories of experiences we had.

The_Traveler · Mar 6, 2015

JustJazzie said:
That sounds absolutely lovely!!! A beautiful capture, Lew. It's like that every morning?!

I've only been to Laos twice - 2007 and 2015, both times in February and the weather was the same both times. Cold enough to wear everything one has at night, several layers in the morning and shirtsleeve weather later in the AM.