Setting Up at Khao Chamao Reservoir

This is what most of a photography trip actually looks like: a tripod on a lawn, a bag dropped in the grass, and me standing about waiting for the sky to make up its mind. July in Rayong means the monsoon is in charge, and that afternoon it could not decide — big stacks of cloud drifting over the hills on the far side of the reservoir, blue opening up behind them, closing again ten minutes later.

I had set up facing the water with the 23mm on, which is not really a landscape lens, but it was what I had with me and I liked how much sky it let in. The grass was that saturated green you only get in the rainy season, and there was a little steel bench off to one side that nobody had sat on all day.

Then I turned around and realised the setup was the better picture — the tripod aimed off at a view it had not taken yet, the case lying where I had dropped it, the whole thing waiting. So I shot that instead, handheld, and it is the frame from that afternoon I keep coming back to.

The footbridge in the national park is a few minutes up the road from this lawn, in among the trees where the light is a different problem entirely.