Mike Langford tells the story of a remarkable photo he shot while travelling through Eastern Myanmar by train.
I took this shot while travelling by train between Pyin U Lwin and Hispaw in Eastern Myanmar. The train had departed Mandalay in the small hours of the morning so everyone was looking pretty tired by the time I climbed on board.
I shot this on my Canon EOS 5D Mark II using a 16-35mm Canon f2.8 USM lens at f/8 in order to make everything as sharp as possible as well as giving me enough depth of field. My shutter speed was one sixtieth of a second so as to stop the movement of the train. To achieve both these setting I had to raise my ISO to 800 – which is pushing it just a little. I also chose to shoot monochrome picture style with Sepia tone, as that is how everything felt. Everything in Myanmar at that time felt old as it had just started to come out of more than 50 years of being isolated from the world and many things, such as the public transport, felt old and neglected.
It’s important to me to be able to respond to my thoughts and emotions when I’m photographing, as opposed to trying to second-guess those feelings when I return home and I’m sitting in an air-conditioned room in front of my computer. I shoot both Raw and JPEG so I can change my mind if I want to, but more importantly it’s the decisions I make at the time of shooting that really count and I usually end up just using the JPEG, as it reflects exactly my thoughts and emotions from that moment.
Mike Langford’s awards include Australian Geographic Photographer of the Year, AIPP Landscape Photographer of the Year and AIPP Travel Photographer of the Year. He is also President of the New Zealand Institute of Professional Photography and co-director of the Queenstown Centre for Creative Photography with his wife Jackie Ranken.
DETAILS: CANON EOS 5D MK II WITH CANON 16-35MM, F/2.8 USM LENS. EXPOSURE: F/8 @ 1/60S.
Article first published in Australian Photography + digital (September, 2012).