Thailand Tour - A Photography Day Trip

For anyone who has not spent much time in Asia it is interesting to actually see rice in production. Many people have images of terraced rice fields with lots of colorful ladies wearing big, wide-brimmed hats tending the rice by hand. Well, you can find such scenes in Thailand and particularly at planting time there is a lot of manual labor, but most of the time the rice is just growing and very few people are in evidence; additionally, most of the rice-growing in Thailand is done on the highly fertile plains and not on steep slopes.

The photograph above was actually taken at the end of the day, after a wet season downpour had cleared, but I wanted to introduce the rice fields first so I have used it here. You can see how green the whole scene is and, in fact, some of the rice fields are so bright that you would have never really understood what green is until you have seen them.

The other nice thing about visiting an area like this is that you can see lots of scenes of Thai life, village markets, people heading to the temple, people herding animals and suchlike that you do not usually get to see if you stick to the regular tourists routes.

The primary aim of the day was to photograph birds, so that is what we started with. The rice fields around Petchaburi are a good place to see three species of weaver bird; Streaked Weaver, Baya Weaver and the spectacular Asian Golden Weaver.

With May being right in the middle of the breeding season I knew exactly where to go to find nesting colonies of all three species and we used the tactic of driving slowly close to the nests so that we could get as close as possible for photographs. Birds are not as bothered about vehicles as they are of people on foot, so a car or van makes a good mobile hide.

Photographing the weavers took up quite a lot of time as they were fun to watch, busy at their nests, feeding chicks, chasing each other and continuing their nest construction. 

Although it was birds that we had come for it is always nice when visitors are interested in seeing and photographing a wide range of interesting things and as the day progressed a storm made finding birds in photogenic situations a little tricky plus we decided to look for some other things of interest.

This rather impressive lizard showed itself at one of our stops proving that photographers should always be on the lookout for things that they might not expect.

We had our lunch at a seafood restaurant on a beach, a short drive from the rice fields. After lunch we were on our way through an area of salt pans and villages when we came across a very colorful procession of Thai people in traditional dress. Colorful interludes such as these are quite frequent in Thailand and are excellent for taking nice cultural images.

As we stopped I told Michael that Thai people are always happy to have their photos taken unlike in some countries. I was going to ask anyway but as soon as people saw our cameras they gestured to us to take photos.

In the procession was one lady that I knew and she came over to tell me that this was a ceremony for two young men to become monks and they were heading to the local temple. 

As you can see from the photograph below, the people looked great in their colorful traditional costumes, carrying all sorts of offerings for the temple. Michael posed for pictures with one of the pretty ladies and then for a comedic photo with a man who wanted to join the fun. Michael commented on what a fun place Thailand is; of course, like everywhere it has its faults, but he was indeed correct, Thailand is a fun place.

One thing that everybody wants to take pictures of in the salt pans is the piles of salt that have been scraped up and are being collected by hand. Driving along the road through this area we came across such a scene. As you can see this is a tough job which takes a lot of manual labor to get the salt into trucks before it is taken away to be processed.

If you look carefully at the laborers you can see that they wear thick socks and rubber boots to protect their feet from the caustic salt deposits; they also wear hats and cover all their skin to avoid sunburn, not that there was much sun when we took these photos.

Our next stop was just a little further along the road at a little boat yard full of colorful boats, nets, flags and other fishing paraphernalia. We tried taking some photos from a little distance but the scene was a little "busy" with masts and bamboo poles to make a nice shot so we took advantage of what seemed to be a purpose-built photography platform (it was actually something to do with mooring the boats) to get in really close.

With the rain and overcast skies it was actually quite difficult to get a nice photo of this scene with my camera; above is the closest I got to a good shot but I am sure Michael would have done much better with his expensive set up. In poor light conditions that is when you really get the benefit of an expensive camera and lens.

After the monkey temple we made one last stop to take the photo of the rice fields that I have placed at the beginning of this page before we began our journey back to Bangkok. Being a Saturday the traffic was not too bad and I got Michael back to his accommodation at around 6.30pm.