Outside of Central Market in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. A tuk tuk driver chatting with a rickshaw driver, I was glad they let me take their photo, they seemed super chill. In my opinion Cambodians were the friendliest people I met in SE Asia, although I might be biased. Cambodia holds a special place in my heart as I was playing poker there during the (USA) winters for three straight years before Covid hit. It was mostly fueled by the Chinese and I’m still kinda bummed that I can’t go back. The Chinese players always liked me because I was the only white person who could speak any Mandarin (not much, but enough to make some jokes) and a lot of them were making insane $$ in Cambodia and didn’t mind paying off the laowei (foreigner)
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I don’t have my laptop on me, so I’ll do one from my phone. This is scuba diving in the Angelita cenote near Tulum, Mexico. The white stuff is a hydrogen sulfur layer, and it’s trippy af. Definitely some major ‘upside down’ vibes ala Stranger Things!
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Well, I will contribute something, not because I think I have much that holds a candle to anything ITT but because I want other people to join in, and also because I thought I’d accidentally deleted all my photos from my recent trip to Hilo, but I found them today:
This isn’t necessarily the best photo from the trip, but it’s the one that best encapsulates the short story in a single shot. I had some time between the end of work and my flight out, and I didn’t know what to do, so I poked around on the internet a bit and saw something about this tropical botanical garden that seemed like a unique way to kill a bit of time. It was a gray and rainy and kinda sullen day, just like every day of my trip there, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. It ended up being a blast. The flora there were seldom native. Most, actually, were collected from all over the world: Indonesia, Africa, South America, etc. And it seemed like I wasn’t necessarily there at the best time of year. Things that were highlighted as if they were beautiful flowering plants weren’t flowering, but also, there were random ass orchids growing happily from a little nook in the side of a tree in full bloom. Two are here. I followed a meandering path through the jungle down to a volcanic coastline in the pouring rain, and then I went back up the hill.
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Thanks for posting Wookie, really nice stuff! I know it kinda feels like I’m dominating the thread, but I’d be happy if other people posted as well :)
Post worse photos and we’d feel better about it. ;)
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Well that’s not gonna happen 
But seriously I don’t want this to be my thread, I’ll post everyday but I’d like anyone else to feel free to post here too!
The boatsmen taking us around the Okavango Delta in Botswana. The water is shallow enough where they basically push the boats along with those long sticks. Traditionally the locals use a wooden dugout canoe called a makoro, but these ones are not. There are plenty of hippos in these waters and it does make you a bit uneasy with such small boats! This was part of a 20 day overland truck group from Cape Town to Victoria Falls, which was a lot of fun, but also wayyy faster paced than I’m used to.
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Walking around the streets of Old Cairo. I know lots of people hate Cairo and it is polluted and the traffic is horrible, etc but the some of the parts of the old city with the crumbling 300 year old mosques and old dudes just hanging out on the streets sipping tea and smoking shisha I found to be extremely cool for wandering around. I also kinda like smoking shisha, but some of the stuff they smoke there is just so harsh on the lungs!
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What camera/lens are you shooting most of these street scenes with?
It’s a Canon 5d mk 2, most of these are with my 17-40mm f/4 L, and the other is my telephoto a 70-200mm f/4 L.
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I should post more shots with the telephoto lens. This was from driving my scooter around the island of Lombok in Indonesia. Tons of people were all driving across this empty field to same spot, so I was curious to see what was going on. Turns out it was horse racing! And not only that, horse chariot racing. Yes please. So here’s two guys grooming their horse. The racing was intense, and there was a lot money being wagered. They let me bet on it too, which didn’t go very well, ha.
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How do you even shoot that first one with the backlighting? Did you use flash? Or do some heavy post-processing to balance out shadows and highlights? I’m amazed at the detail you get on the horse and the faces shooting straight into the sun.
Yea it was just shooting in RAW, no flash. I’m sure on camera the faces were too dark and the sky was kinda washed out, so I had to bring up the shadow detail and bring down the highlights when editing. Shooting a full frame camera in RAW is very helpful for this sorta thing!
Yeah I wish I hadn’t waited so long to start shooting in RAW. Up until a few years ago I was just doing JPEGs out if the camera. Would love to have some of the old photos back to touch up a bit.
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Yea for the shots especially with a high dynamic range, it really does turn a mediocre looking photo into something that pops. I’m continually impressed by how well camera phones do it nowadays. Younger people don’t realize how much work it used to take to get a great sunset photo with the sky and the foreground properly exposed!
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beautiful 
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Some shots from riding a scooter around the Thar desert near Jaisalmer, India. Definitely no passenger limits around here! The whole state of Rajasthan is immensely photogenic, but I think my favorite parts were the western outskirts, the desert fortresses of Bikaner and Jaisalmer, the sand dunes, the camels, some funky temples (rat temple!) and the contrasts of the dull brown backgrounds to bright colorful salwar kameez’s.
Supposedly the Thar desert is the most populated desert in the world, and it does make you wonder how people survive living in these mostly barren outposts. For the women in the villages, it’s a seemingly large portion of their daily life walking to the wells with those silver pots which they carry on their head. Men tend to the livestock, but mostly seemed to sit around all day and drink tea!
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The yurt camp a few us stayed at for the night at Lake Songkul, Kyrgyzstan. Three of us took horses to the lake and one couple opted to hike in, got lost, and ended up getting taken in for the night by a nice family up in the hills. Which they said was great, but we were pretty worried at the yurt camp! Anyway, the scenery was amazing, Krygyzstan is so lush and green during the summer. There wasn’t exactly a lot to do, but the family made us a nice traditional spread in the dining yurt for dinner and it was cool seeing this type of lifestyle up close.
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