After a number of trips to Latin America together, my brother and I decided to head to Asia for the winter. With Vietnam absurdly in the news all year from the 2004 U.S. Presidential election coverage, and with Pascal beginning his career as an officer in the United States Army, the destination almost chose itself!
(The photos on this trip did suffer from severe technical difficulties...see comments below)
Note: for great motorcycle rental and tours in Vietnam, contact our guide Anh Tuan at www.voyagevietnam.com
We met a professional photographer in Sapa who had 75 rolls of film ruined by a processing lab. Nothing quite that horrible happened to us on this trip...but close.
I let someone else use my camera a week before our trip, and unbeknownst to me this person changed one of the settings, allowing for manual exposure compensation. This was set at the extreme position, so that every single picture I took in Vietnam was 2 f-stops underexposed. In layman's terms, this means they were all way too dark. I would've caught it on the LCD, except that apparently the LCD compensates and shows an optimized image, not the actual image (learn something new every day). It was still foolish of me not to catch it, but hey, nobody's perfect!
Anyway, this meant that I had to digitally lighten and enhance all of the pictures from the trip, which results in some quality and color degradation, as well as loss of detail in the darks of the pictures. Below is a before and after example:
Anyway, lesson learned, and if I keep "building character" this way I'm going to end up with one hell of a personality! ;-)
Gabriel
