Photo idea: Shoot your nighttime long exposures in black and white.
Here are a couple gorgeous ones of Seoul and Hong Kong by Martin Stavars.
Colombo | Sri Lanka
Shoeshine
The waiter at Colombo put down my breakfast and said he hoped I would have an enjoyable day. I told him I was going to make a pilgrimage to the grave of my father-in-law who had died in Ceylon during the war.
‘By God,’ he said at once, ‘that’s good, that’s very good - parents is bigger thing than the Lord Buddha himself,’ and picking up my shoes, to clean them for the occasion, he bowed gracefully and withdrew.
Passing the nut
I was trekking alone between Namche Bazaar and Thangboche, in the Nepali Himalaya. I was walking fast, in pleasant heathland country, and presently I saw far ahead of me another solitary figure, moving in the same direction. It was a robust Sherpa woman, wearing long aprons and a high embroidered hat. As I passed, however, her left hand suddenly shot into mine. For a moment we touched. Neither of us spoke, and I was too suprised to stop, but I felt some small hard object pass from her hand into mine. I looked down to see what it was, passed so strangely from traveller to traveller, and found it was a small brown nut. When I turned around to thank her for it, she grinned and nodded and waved me on.
A royal court
I had an introduction to a Mogul princess, of the dynasty which made Delhi its capital in the seventeenth century and built the very walled city in whose labyrinthine recesses she lives. Forty or fifty souls constitute the Begum Timur Jehan, and through it she moves commandingly in green trousers, issuing instructions, reminiscing about emperors, traitors or ladies of the harem, and frequently consulting her high organized notebook, all asterisks and cross-references, for addresses and reminders.
Advice
By and large, it seemed to me, British businessmen in Hong Kong pursued their various careers in a pleasant state of half-speed ahead, eating well, enjoying their friends, gossiping in the club bar, taking the junk out on Sundays — “Whatever you do,” they used to tell me, “don’t go out with Bill (or Simon, or Ted), you’ll be drunk before you get out of the harbour.”
In a trance?
When I was alone in the Himalayas one day I saw a man. I saw him first at an extreme distance, across an absolutely blank snowfield at about 19,000 feet….He was a holy man, wandering in the mountains, I suppose, for wandering’s sake….I greeted him as best I could, but he did not answer, only smiling at me distantly and without surprise. Perhaps he was in a trance.
1960s Kabul
Kabul in the 1960s is a tense, nervous, shifty capital, and edgiest of all at night, when the streelights are dimmed, the brilliant Asian stars come up above the hills and only a few shrouded watchmen are left brooding on the doorsteps.
