I snapped this candid pic while on a work-related trip in Hanoi, Vietnam.
No, I wasn’t skiving! It was a coffee break. I was just having a smoke-o at a little cafe across the road from the hotel. It served the local coffee, the thick stuff you can almost stand your spoon up in. I love the rich chocolatey effect of the uber-sweet condensed milk that comes with it.
Anyway, I’m enjoying my coffee and can’t help but notice this woman who’s pretty pregnant. Indeed, she’s both pretty and pregnant. Very pregnant, in fact. “Glowing”. She’s listening to a mobile phone (right ear, obviously), which lends her an air of abstractedness. I take a couple of candid snaps with the little digicam I’m carrying, and I carry on my merry way.
That’s about it, really … I go home, process this pic, stick it on my Flickr account …
And it turns out to be my most viewed pic! That’s not saying much, though. Very rarely does an unwary netizen stumble through the backwaters of my Flickr account. But this pic is the only one that has attracted anywhere near triple figures! Why? Dunno! Maybe people enjoy images of glowing women.
Moving along. The point of this post are the following questions:
What’s the right thing to do when it comes to candid snaps? Is publicly posting pics of people acceptable without their express permission? What do professional and enthusiast photographers do? Do they always ask their otherwise unknowing subjects before publishing? Does the intrepid travel photojournalist carry release forms everywhere? Is there a double-standard where what’s unacceptable at home is considered fair game on foreign shores?
Please! A penny for your thoughts …
Calm water, crisp light, and cotton-candy clouds. My final morning at Waitata Bay, Marlborough, New Zealand was picture postcard perfection.
If you have to travel to the bottom of the world for a holiday, make sure you have more than a week. And if you can spare a week to simply chillax — and you don’t mind self-catering — you could do worse than rent out a cabin from the Brennans.
Tell ‘em ‘The Travel Blog Post’ sent you. If they look at you weirdly it is because they have never heard of ‘The Travel Blog Post’ before. You can explain that it is a corner of cyberspace that is probably quieter and more obscure than Waitata Bay and certainly far less beautiful.
I have very rarely had a bad experience with a taxi driver in my 10 years based in Bangkok. This post is for them!
Some expatriates I know give Bangkok cabbies a very poor wrap, but that’s probably got more to do with their own arrogance than anything that the drivers do or say. Some expatriates have become so cynical that they create their own problems when dealing with Thais of any occupation or social class. And they take great pleasure in describing how they really can’t understand “the mentality of these people”. I can only assume that the feeling is mutual!
Sure, you get the odd taxi driver who tries to take the pish; possibly more frequently with foreigners who look like they’ve just stepped off an airplane. (It always helps to learn a few local phrases, wherever you happen to be in the world.) But the vast majority of cab-men and -women are good people trying to make an honest living.
As it happens, many taxi drivers; possibly a majority, but I don’t actually know; sympathise with the UDD (Red Shirts). Let’s hope for the sake of their taxiing livelihoods that common sense returns to Thai politics!
