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At 5pm, my classmate, Keith the ozzy guy that is also big time into photography, and I met in Hua Lampong Station and walked towards the river. Our plan was to photograph Wat Aron at sunset. The walk though China Town is longer than we calculated and I was starting to think that I was going to collapse under Bangkok’s heat just when we made it. I wanted to photograph the Temple from a restaurant across the river that I found the previous Sunday. But Keith pointed out that the sun was setting slightly to the right of the Temple so we needed to find a location a little bit East from it. We walked through some interesting local wholesale markets and temples but purposely ignored all of them. We were on a mission.
We tried to locate the temple from a couple of spots but we were still a bit too far, we could only see the top point of the temple. We kept walking for a while…Sunset in Bangkok this time of the year is at 18:44 so we must have walked about 1 hour and a half. Finally we spotted an area that looked just
fine. We tried to take a small road along the river but there is not a riverside walk. We had to go back in and around to get to the next possible spot. Finally we found a spot that we were happy with. We set up the tripods and waited not to long until the sun went down. The night was clear and cloudy which gave the photographs a little bit of drama. Keith’s idea was to capture an interesting foreground and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. All I knew is that I wanted to see the lights on the temple at night. I love boats from my other life and I couldn’t resist to photograph all of them: barges, passenger boats and ,of course, the traditional long boats with a tiler. Once the sun went down I just played with settings to get the night-lights. I guess I was lucky the night wasn’t so dark and I didn’t need a remote and 1/10 sec was the top I needed. My 71-210mm surprised me with the results. It is a lens that I have had for a couple of years and I harly use.
Wat Arun at night in Bangkok
...can you see the movement of the clouds and the water.....captured with very slow shutter speed Once it got dark we wrapped for the night and headed out to find a bus to take us back to the city. The river is in an area of Bangkok with no direct access from the subway or skytrain. Well, there is a BTS (Skytrain) station at the south area of China Town that connects you with the lines of Express Boats that take you up and down the river. We thought those services finished at 6 pm and were determined to find the bus. I knew bus 47 goes back and forward from the city to the area and one of its stops is close to Wat Pho Express Boat Stop. Going towards it, out of curiosity I told Keith “lets go check out that restaurant with awesome view of the temple where I wanted to take the photos from” ….we did and it was closed! And locked with shutters so Im glad that we didn’t go there to photograph the temple from. Once there, we found out that the last local boat was going to the central station where we could walk to the BTS (Sky train) from and for only only 15 THB!!! We had
a fast ride down the river and both were relieved we didn’t have to take the bus….
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
WOW
Perfect