OMG, a second article written so quickly! Don’t get carried away, I’m about to fall back into my usual torpor and I’ll spare you my mindless posts … The thing is, following a brief exchange with John on my previous Blog, I had the idea of writing something.

I keep saying that everything I do, a lot of people could do the same if they had a solid grounding in Street Photography. It’s not false modesty. I don’t feel I have any real talent for photography. What I can do is observe and transcribe what I see into images.

I sincerely believe that to do Street Photography, you need to educate your eye by looking at lots of photos to dissect the elements that make them interesting. Study the work of the greats to develop your photographic culture. As for the rest, once you’ve got all that down, all that’s left is practice, and I still think that luck and opportunity play an essential role in the results you achieve.

As far as opportunities are concerned, it’s quite simple to understand. Clearly, you’ll have more opportunities in big cities like New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, Saigon and Hong Kong than in towns like Saint-Denis, for example. You know what I mean. Some people who live in these cities say that it has nothing to do with the size of the city. Well, I disagree. OK, it’s not everything, but stop fooling me. It’s infinitely easier to do Street in big cities.

As for luck, well, sometimes you come across improbable situations or characters who are out of the ordinary. That’s just the way it is. Sometimes all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place and you don’t have to do anything but click. But one thing’s for sure, the more you wander the streets, the more often you’ll feel lucky…

On the other hand, if there’s one thing, it’s that you have to make your own luck! A little anecdote from our last trip to Vietnam. We were about to fly from Can Tho to Con Dao Island. A taxi was due to pick us up from the lodge at 11am. As usual, I was up at 6am and decided to go and see the Cai Rang market. This floating market was one of the most beautiful in Vietnam. We deliberately avoided it because I’d read some recent articles that didn’t look too good and said that this market had become a real scam.

So here I am, up at 6am. I try to book a taxi or a motorbike via the Grab app (it’s the Asian Uber) but nothing. As our lodge is on the outskirts of town, I can’t find anyone. A quick check on Maps shows me that the market is 6 kms away… A 1h30 walk. I say to myself that I’m going to go anyway and to come back I’ll take a Grab. After sweating for 30 minutes walking along the main roads being careful not to get run over, I finally manage to order a motorbike thanks to Grab who picks me up on the side of the road to take me to Cai Rang. I arrive directly near the land market, which is super interesting. It’s a bit crazy with so many people there and as far as photos go, I didn’t know where to turn. But I still wanted to go and see the floating market by walking along the river bank to see what it looks like.

I pass very few people on the riverbanks. On the river where the floating market is supposed to be, there are very few merchant boats and a large majority of tourist pirogues. So I’m not at all sorry I didn’t embark on a trip to visit the floating market by pirogue. I arrived at a quay where several boats were berthed filled with watermelons.

They were in the process of unloading them to be loaded onto trucks that would surely be distributing them elsewhere. I stood there for quite a while watching the ballet unfold before me. I was accosted and offered boat rides (again), which I politely declined. For me, this is the place to be. I took what I consider to be my best photo of Vietnam.

I couldn’t have taken this photo anywhere else but on the riverbank. I had to make up my mind at the last minute to go to this market and, above all, kick myself to set off on foot with the prospect of walking 1.5 hours along a road. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find at the market. That’s why I say that sometimes you have to take chances. That’s what I did that day. The rest is just being patient, working on your composition. I already had a raw scene. I just had to wait for all the elements to fall into place before I could take THE photo. It’s not false modesty to say that any other street photographer could have done as well or better than I did. For me, finding a good scene is more than 50% of the photo. The rest depends on the composition and the moment when you click the shutter. Which, between you and me, is just as important as finding the scene! But once you’ve got a situation, it’s just a game of constructing the image by adding or removing certain elements.

That day I followed my instinct to go and have a look around Cai Rang. I did the right thing, and by doing so I brought about an encounter with the people working along the river. I was then able to take the Grab back to the lodge to meet up with my little family, who were sitting down to breakfast before setting off for new adventures on Con Dao Island.

Here are the photos I took (well, the ones I retouched…) on the banks of the Cai Rang river.