Motorcycles in Thailand – The ExhaustNotes Blog

By Joe Berk

I mentioned Thai motorcycle taxis in an earlier blog, and on the way back from Wat Arun today, Sue and I grabbed a few photos just outside our hotel of young ladies riding moto taxis sidesaddle to points unknown (points unknown to me; they knew where they were going). It’s an interesting take on Thai life in the big city. I’d seen this moto taxi business in China 30 years ago, but not anymore. In China today, you just don’t see motorcycles in the big cities. And you sure don’t see anything like this in America.

The photography challenges were interesting. I couldn’t get close to the bikes (it was a wide and busy avenue in downtown Bangkok), the bikes were moving, and the lens didn’t have a lot of reach (it was the 18-55mm Nikon kit lens, an inexpensive lens not nearly as sharp as Nikon’s pricier offerings). I cranked the D3300 camera’s ISO up to 800 (even though I was shooting during the day) to get the shutter speed up (to freeze the action), and then I relied on Photoshop to do the rest (the rest being cropping, adjusting the levels and the curves, adjusting for shadows, adjusting vibrance and saturation, and finally after sizing the photo to the sizes you see here, adding a touch of sharpness. I think they came out well. Consider this photo from the above collection:

Here’s the original photo it came from before all the above adjustments:

If I had a bigger lens (say, a 300mm), I would have had a larger and sharper original photo, but as Donald Rumsfeld liked to say, you go to war with the Army you have. I had my 18-55mm lens with me. And I have Photoshop on my laptop.

I shot all of the photos above and a bunch more in the space of maybe five minutes (Bangkok’s Asok Street is a very busy street), and then I spent maybe another hour selecting the ones I wanted to use in this blog and Photoshopping them. You can have a lot of fun with a camera in Bangkok.

Regarding the safety implications of what you see above, what can I say? The riders had helmets. The passengers? Not so much. We weren’t not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

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By Joe Berk

On our next day in Bangkok, Sue and I visited the Wat Pho Buddhist Temple. There are numerous Buddhist temples in this fine city, and on this (my third trip to Bangkok), the nod went to Wat Pho. The colors and the views were stunning, and my 8mm inexpensive Rokinon wide angle manual everything lens earned its pay yet again. I think it would be hard to find a Buddhist temple in Bangkok that was not impressive.

Wat Pho is one of Bangkok’s oldest temples, and it is one of six temples considered to be of the highest grade Buddhist temples in Bangkok. It is a royal temple.

Wat Pho has the famous reclining Buddha, which is 15 meters high and 46 meters long. It is one of the largest statues of Buddha in Thailand.

Colors abound at Wat Pho. It is a photographer’s delight.

A colorful tapestry inside the Wat Pho temple.

We later walked around town a bit, including a visit to the infamous Soi Cowboy area (it’s right around the corner from our hotel). I will post a few evening Soi Cowboy photos in a later blog.

Thailand is two-wheeler territory. Motorcycles and scooters are everywhere. There’s more to come on this topic, so stay tuned.