While in Vietnam I rented a motorbike to take around for the afternoon.  This was right around the center of Vietnam - outside the towns of Da Nang and Hoi An.  There was lots of activity during the day, a lot of folks out in the fields working the rice paddies.

I saw this hand cart on the side of the road and stopped to take a few photos of it.  I was traveling on this trip with both my 35mm camera as well as my new Digital SLR (the Nikon D70) but for this motorbike ride I brought only with me my 35mm camera, with both black and white and color slide film.

There really is a simplicity to life out in the countryside of South East Asia, which is I know a viewpoint that is hardly original and over-glamorizes the peasant life but it’s hard to escape the feeling, running around in our over-connected lives when suddenly you’re face-to-face with a farmer tending to the fields with his ox-drawn cart.

This image can be seen along with many others from that Vietnam trip, 3 years ago this week.

This is a photograph taken of my niece Ellie, back in 2002. She was only one month old at the time with a head full of black hair.

I like this photo because, if you know Ellie, you can recognize her in this picture even though she is so young. Her cheekbones, nose and mouth still look similar today.

From a classical portrait perspective, this is also a nice shot (if I do say so) with a nice depth-of-field keeping her face mostly in focus but the background, including her seat, out of focus. Additionally, the focus is sharpest on the nearest eye which also has a glimmer of white from a reflection of light. These are all classical elements of a portrait.

I took this image with my Nikon N80 film camera with a Sigma f/2.8 zoom lens - one of their nicer pro-series lenses, but cheaper than the Nikon lenses I have since upgraded to. The Sigma lens was able to produce nice quality images but the feel of the lens didn’t match that of the Nikons or certainly of the Contax lenses that I had recently been shooting with.

A few other images from this day can be seen here, each of which was taken during this week, in 2002.