August Desktop Wallpaper, Matt Brandon & David duChemin

The free desktop wallpaper for August 2009 comes from Wat Si Saket in Vientiane, Laos.

Vientiane is a lovely, peaceful city situated on the banks of the Mekong. It’s easy to forget that you’re in the Laotian capital city when you’re there. When I first went visited Vientiane, several years ago, it was so quiet that it wasn’t always necessary to look for traffic when crossing the road. Any oncoming vehicles were easy to detect, a distant tractor trundling down the road was the full extent of rush hour. It’s busier now and one has to wait to cross the road these days. It’s still a gorgeous destination though and next year’s photo tour to Laos will certainly include a night or two in Vientiane.

Wat Si Saket is my favourite of the temples in the centre of the city. The central courtyard is lined with rows of Buddha statues, over 300 in all. The Buddhas are made from various materials and hail from different periods. Each has a different and quite unique expression. Some are stone, some wood, others are bronze. Some are over 500 years old and the sense of history seems to fill the courtyard. These benign faces have looked out, motionless, for centuries and it’s hard not to find that sense of calm infusing your bones as you walk around.

It’s a good example of how our approach to photography can – and probably should – be heavily influenced by our surroundings. Here, it’s impossible not to take a calm and considered approach, nurturing every shot and thinking carefully about composition, checking the frame thoroughly before committing to the image. Each click of the shutter takes on greater importance than it does in, for example, a place like Delhi where the hustle and bustle prompts photography that’s more immediate and more responsive.

I hope the Vientiane Buddhas will bring you a little peace and serenity this month.

Desktop Wallpaper Downloads

August 2009 Desktop Wallpaper - 1024x768
August 2009 Desktop Wallpaper - 1280x800
August 2009 Desktop Wallpaper - 1280x1024
August 2009 Desktop Wallpaper - 1920x1200

Matt Brandon

Matt Brandon asked me a few questions in an audio interview earlier this week. We chatted about how I first got into photography, about street portraiture and various other things about my life and work. Matt has an impressively relaxed interviewing style and the fact that we’re friends makes for an informal and, hopefully, entertaining interview.

Twitter followers will already have seen rumours of Matt being recruited to replace Larry King.

The interview appears on Matt’s Digital Trekker blog in two parts:

Matt Brandon interviews Gavin Gough: Part One

Matt Brandon interviews Gavin Gough: Part Two

David duChemin

Talking of bearded, pipe-smoking photographers, I collected David duChemin from Bangkok’s International airport over the weekend, together with his bug-eating travelling companion, Henri.

It’s always entertaining spending time with Mr. Vision himself and, despite their jet-lag, David and Henri joined me for a photographic foray into one or two markets outside Bangkok yesterday. We visited Mahachai, where fishing boats unload just a few metres from the market and where traders offer what must be some of the freshest seafood in South-East Asia. We also got to Mae Klong in time to see the market traders make room for the train that regularly drives through the centre of the market stalls. No doubt David will post the sequence of images that he captured at some stage but here, for your entertainment, is a sequence of him photographing this unusual event. Note the lady in the final frame indicating to David where the train had gone! Clearly, she felt that the train tracks weren’t enough of a clue.

We finished our tour of markets with a visit to the floating market stalls of Ampawa. It’s another relaxed location, rarely visited by western tourists although a common day-trip for Bangkok locals. We took a boat trip to see the impressive array of fireflies that gather above the riverbank after dark. The shot below was taken in the pitch dark with no artificial light whatsoever and shows the pose assumed by a jet-lagged travel world photographer when even the attraction of fireflies can’t fend off the need for sleep. You’ll see that even at ISO 3200 it still required an exposure of 3.2 seconds.

Yet again, the Thai people were the very definition of hospitality and generosity, welcoming us into their working environment with goodwill, laughter and that sense of “Sanuk”, the Thai word for fun, that seems to inform so much of their daily lives. It’s always a privilege to spend time with such charming people and such a pleasure to be able to introduce friends to these locations. More pictures from Mahachai, Mae Klong and Ampawa later in the week.

Posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 2:06 pm. Filed under: My work, People RSS 2.0 feed.