Bangkok Diaries: Travel Photos And How Not To Take Them

Ah, my first morning in Bangkok! I got up, stretched, and pulled the curtains of our bedroom aside for a spectacular view of this:



Which brings me to my first big segue of this whole Thailand saga. I know, I know... it's unusual to have a segue before you actually begin the saga in the first place, but it's OK. I am a trained professional.

So what I'd like to talk about now is the strange and weird world of amateur travel photography. Because I don't know about you, but whenever I go on a trip, I take what I think are all these great pictures, but when I actually get home and look at them, I'm shocked to discover that all my great pictures have somehow morphed into totally lame ones.

I call this the "what in heaven's name possessed me to think this picture would be cool?" principle. Or WIHNPMTTTPWBC for short.

Now, I don't like to brag, but I feel compelled to confess that I am an expert in taking WIHNPMTTTPWBC pictures. If you don't believe me, just take a look at this:



That is a picture of the BTS Skytrain train tracks in Bangkok. Why, you ask? The answer is simple: I don't know. I mean, it's not like they look really different from train tracks anywhere else. But apparently I thought they were pretty intriguing, because I went ahead and took another picture of them:



And another:



I'm particularly proud of the psuedo-artistic angling of that last one, which I suppose I imagined would distract viewers from the utter banality of the subject; i.e, yet more train tracks. Talk about cool! And notice how cleverly I avoided getting a photo of the actual train in any of these photos. The train sometimes had advertising on the sides, which might have given an insightful and/or entertaining glimpse into Thai culture. For example, I remember one ad that seemed to be for career advancement courses, and which showed a fortune teller as one of many viable career options available to the eager, bright-eyed generation of tomorrow.

But why would I take a picture of something that people might actually want to see? Come on.

I did try to mix it up a bit with the following pic:



Look! Two people on cell phones! You don't see that in the United States every day! (I'm sure it didn't escape your notice that they are on the Skytrain platform. Which is right next to the Skytrain train tracks.)

But my personal favorite of all the photos I took is this one:



If you're at all conscious at this point, you're probably wondering what that is. Well, that makes two of us.

So yeah, while I was busily recording images of train tracks and an unidentifiable flash of light that, if previous photos are any indicator, is probably a train track in disguise, my colleagues on the team were getting photos of monks in saffron-colored robes, gleaming temples, bustling marketplaces, each other, and so on. You know, stuff that would be of interest to other people. Stuff you're supposed to take pictures of. Cool stuff.

All I can say is, photography is clearly not my life's calling.

So tomorrow we'll get back to the story, in writing, thank you very much. Because I may take boring photos, but at least my writing is... hey, what? Are you asleep?

That is so not cool.