A Busy River in Bangkok
Water traffic moves up and down the Chao Phraya river in Bangkok, Thailand, on a typical day.
One of the many things that surprised me about Bangkok was the water traffic. Not being very familiar at all with the city before our trip, I actually didn’t realize that there was a river running through Bangkok, although it does make sense knowing that it is a large city on a coast. After all, large cities don’t form just anywhere on coastlines; they usually grow from from port towns located at the convergence of a river and a larger body of water (such as New Orleans, for just one example).
So although the river made sense, I wasn’t prepared for the amount of traffic on the river. In this photo, you can see just a few of the many boats that were going past us in the few minutes we were standing there. A few of these may have been tourist boats, and we did see one tug boat pulling a large barge, but most of these boats were just local commuter boats, much like people would ride buses to get from one place to another.
And although you can’t tell much about the speed of the boats from a still photo, let me just tell you that they weren’t going very slowly. In fact, most every kind of transportation we encountered in Bangkok was all about speed. Everyone always had someplace that they had to be, and in a hurry, it seemed.
We actually did ride a boat later on during our trip, which I will share more about sometime in the future. But for now, this photo will do.
Also, I like the variety of buildings in this photo. The foreground buildings look pretty much like shacks built over the water with whatever material the builders could find. The buildings in the center of the background look like more modern and “professional” buildings, while the building at the right looks grand in appearance, almost like some sort of religious type of building.
And that was pretty much how it went for all of Bangkok that we saw - some of every type of building not too far from all of the other building types. A very interesting city.
For the record, this photo didn’t turn out exactly like I thought it would, even though I tried several different things in post processing. So it isn’t exactly my favorite as far as the overall look of the photo. But I still like all that it captured, so that is why I am sharing it here. They can’t all be favorites, after all.
About the photo:
A single RAW exposure, processed in Photoshop. Read more about the photo software and gear I use at the camera gear page.
Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M10
Lens: Olympus M.Zukio 25mm f1.8
