1500 photos. That’s roughly the number of photos I brought back from my recent trip to Vietnam. It’s just enormous. I’m talking about the photos I processed in Lightroom. As for the number of photos I took there, multiply that figure by 5. Yes, you’re not dreaming, I must have clicked the shutter more than 7,000 times. In just one trip, my Ricoh GR3 got a bit old …

I made a selection of less than 70 photos to create a slideshow that I’ve posted on my YouTube channel. That’s quite enough and few people will get to the end of it because in today’s world it’s hard to hold your attention for more than 1 minute. My slideshow is over 5 minutes long so people will get bored before the end. It’s a shame because my favourite photo of the trip is near the end!

This trip to Vietnam, like last year’s to Thailand, is a family affair. Which means that I’m snapping as I walk and visit. No time to work on interesting scenes. I had to quickly find the right angle, the right composition.

Which brings me to the almost infinite possibilities offered by the Vietnamese streets I travelled through. I had the impression that every street corner was a scene in itself and there were so many things to photograph that I sometimes got dizzy. Everything caught my eye. The life that was unfolding in front of my eyes was light years away from what I was used to seeing at home. It was all very exotic in a way.

What would a Vietnamese person say if he looked at my photos? Would they see anything interesting or just a succession of banalities without interest? Eveything amazed me in Vietnam. The grass isn’t any greener elsewhere, but what’s certain is that travelling gives me a more curious look. When I’m in Saint-Denis, I tend not to see things any more, because I’ve lost that child’s eye for marvelling at the simplest things.

I named the slideshow shared on YouTube: Vietnam 2025. The title is misleading because it would be pretentious to claim to have captured the soul of Vietnam in these photos. You’d need to spend a lot more than 15 days there to get anything worthwhile out of them. In the end, we visited 4 different places during our stay: Saigon, Cat Tien National Park, Chau Doc, Can Tho and Con Dao Island. That’s a long, long way from representing Vietnam!

I only used the Ricoh GR3 for this trip. I juggled quite a bit between the 28mm and the 35mm, even though most of the photos were taken with the crop 35. I realised that my sensor was a mess. Countless dust particles had decided to take up residence on my sensor. It was when I was retouching some photos that I realised what a disaster it was. Post-processing was very tedious at times. Since then I’ve bought some little swabs to clean APS-C sensors and I’ve taken the camera apart to clean the sensor. The GR3 is still working and there’s not a speck of dust left!

Here I am with an almost new Ricoh GR3. I have to admit that it’s very (very…) hot here at the moment and I don’t really enjoy being outside in the heat… So I’m waiting for the temperatures to drop a bit before I go and hang out in Saint-Denis again. And all in all, this Vietnamese interlude with this photographic orgy has filled me up a bit. I still need to digest it. But I’ll soon be back in the streets of Saint-Denis to share some photos with you.

The photos presented in this Blog are my favourites. To see the rest, check out the slideshow.