I bought the camera before I knew what I was doing with it. A Sony A7 III, a 24–105mm zoom, and a 20mm wide prime. Full-frame, serious glass, no idea how to use any of it properly. The plan was vague — take photos on the trip, maybe get good at it, figure it out along the way.
What actually happened was different. Somewhere between the hemp villages of Hà Giang and the blacksmith forges of Cao Bằng, photography stopped being something I was trying to learn and became a way of paying attention.
The Approach
Most travel photography is postcards. Beautiful scenery, golden hour, nobody in the frame. Tourist photography tells you where someone went. It doesn’t tell you what it was like to be there.
What I’m after is different. Each photo paired with the story behind it — who was there, what was happening, what it felt like. The woman drawing batik patterns on hemp cloth in Lùng Tám didn’t know I was taking her portrait. She was absorbed in the geometric precision of her wax lines, and that concentration was the photo. A landscape of the Ðềo Mẻ Pia switchbacks is dramatic on its own, but it means more when you know it’s fourteen hairpin turns carved into a near-vertical mountainside, and you rode every one of them on a rented Honda.
The philosophy: everyday beauty, lived experience, narrative over snapshots.
The Craft Villages
The work that came together first — and still feels strongest — is from the Nùng craft villages in Cao Bằng Province, near the Chinese border. Each village has specialised in a single craft for centuries. One makes incense. One forges knives. One makes paper from bark.
In the incense village, I found a composition that kept recurring. A woman working among rows of sticks, shot through a gap in the workshop walls. A blacksmith at his forge, framed through torn corrugated sheeting. A grinder throwing sparks, seen through a slit in hanging tarp. I wasn’t setting these up — the villages are built around their craft, and the craft infrastructure creates natural frames everywhere. Walls, tarps, roofing, doorways. The through-a-frame motif became a thread running through the whole set.
The hero shot came at the paper making village. A Swiss backpacker I’d been travelling with was learning to make bark paper from a local craftsman. They were lifting a freshly formed sheet from the stone basin, both of them laughing, karst mountains and paddy fields stretching behind them into the haze. The joy of cross-cultural exchange, captured in a single frame. ISO 200, 49mm, f/7.1. Clean, warm, unforced.
More on the craft village sets
The full collection spans four villages across two days of riding in the Phúc Sen commune. Twenty photos covering hemp weaving (Lùng Tám), blacksmithing (Pác Rang / Phúc Sen), incense making, and bark paper production. The blacksmith village has been forging blades since the 11th century — over half the village still works the forge full time.
What holds the set together isn’t geography — it’s the compositional approach. The through-a-frame motif creates visual coherence across different crafts and settings. Rough concrete becomes a portrait window. Torn tarp becomes a natural vignette. The recurring pattern emerged naturally from the environments, not from any deliberate plan.
Learning to See
The camera is a tool for paying a different kind of attention. Before I started shooting, I would walk through a market and absorb the atmosphere. With the camera, I started asking: how would I tell the story of this place? What’s the frame? What’s the detail that carries the whole scene?
Some lessons came from getting it wrong. At the Mèo Vạc Sunday market, I knew the shots I wanted — the Vietnamese squat, the massive cash bundles, the vibrant ethnic minority clothing — but knowing what to shoot and actually capturing it are different skills. Flat overcast light outside, harsh cool-white LEDs inside. Wide establishing shots didn’t work. The viable approach is going in on specific details, framing shots around storytelling rather than scenery. I walked away with nothing usable and a much clearer sense of what to do next time.
The editing side is its own education. I abandoned Lightroom’s built-in tutorials after the first one — they spoon-feed specific slider values without explaining what any of it does. What I wanted was the exposure triangle of post-processing: the foundational understanding of how tonal controls interact, what each one actually changes, and a methodical workflow for approaching any photo. I’m building that understanding collaboratively with AIMe — send a photo, discuss the approach, develop intuition through reasoning rather than recipes.
The Gear
Sony A7 III — Full-frame mirrorless, 24 megapixels, in-body stabilisation. Does everything well enough that the camera is never the bottleneck. The limiting factor is always the photographer.
Sony FE 24–105mm f/4 G OSS — The workhorse. Covers everything from wide landscapes at 24mm to tight portraits at 105mm. Constant f/4 aperture. Almost all the craft village work was shot on this lens.
Sony FE 20mm f/1.8 G — Wide-angle prime for interiors, creative compositions, and low light. The f/1.8 aperture opens up astrophotography and dark spaces where the zoom can’t go.
Where This Goes
The project is building toward a photo book. Not a coffee table book of pretty landscapes — a story told through photographs, voice, and place. The concept started as a Vietnam photo book and grew into something bigger: a digital storytelling platform where each photo is paired with the story behind it, the ambient sound of the place, and the narrative thread that connects one frame to the next.
The physical book is the eventual artifact. But the digital version comes first — photos as key frames for travel writing, stories that breathe with audio and context. The same content could live on a dedicated site, alongside the trip journal, or repurposed for social media. Format is flexible. The material is the constant.
There’s a companion volume in the background too — van life in Australia. The Bunda Cliffs, roadside camps, pub parking lot overnights, mechanic shops, people met along the way. The authentic version of a story almost nobody tells honestly. If both projects come together, they trace a single arc: stripping back from a house to a van to a backpack, shedding possessions and certainty, until you’re just a person with a camera and a bag.