By getting down low, moving in, and shooting up with a 24mm wideangle lens, I tried to create a tremendous feeling of authority. Since Buddha represents divinity, and divinity is another form of authority, this effect is appropriate. Once again, this is a three-layer image. The statue, or “image” as it is called in Laos, dominates my foreground layer. But the middle ground layer – a flowing decorative golden panel rising towards heaven, is equally important. Because of this low, close angle, and the distorting optics of the wideangle lens, the ribbon is much wider at the bottom than at the tip. Because of this, it seems to rises toward “heaven,” and as it does it seems to carve an illuminated path through the background layer of darkness. Buddha, the subject, stabilizes the photograph and gives it its identity. But the golden path cutting through darkness on the way to heaven adds critical context for meaning. Without it, it would just be another statue picture.

I carefully used the optics of my 24mm wideangle lens to imply a sense of depth by selecting the corner stall of this market as my subject. It was open to traffic on two sides, and allowed me to move in just behind the corner of the stall, and anchor the picture with the table in the lower left hand corner and the mat at lower center. This foreground layer is very important because it provides a base upon which everything else rests. The subjects themselves dominate the middle layer of this image – the products on sale here are arrayed behind a woman holding an umbrella and her daughter who reaches out to fix something just as a woman walks past – only inches away –with her lunch in her hands. She pays no attention to the stall she is passing, or the people within it. The background layer adds context for the busy marketplace – we see more stalls, people, carts, and umbrellas. The wideangle embraces all of this and more, including plenty of negative space for that woman to walk into. The ebb and a flow of the market itself is symbolized within this little scene.

Laos, like Viet Nam, was once part of France’s overseas empire. The French brought the baguette to Laos, and while its empire is long gone, its bread remains. This picture is a good example of “having your cake and eating it, too” as I indicated in my introduction to this gallery. (I should have said “having your baguette and eating it, too.”) This image offers that “richly layered sense of depth,” I mentioned. By moving closer to exaggerate the scale of the baguettes as my foreground layer subject, I make their textures and rhythms far more detailed. Their stacked vertical placement creates leading lines that draw us into the image. The middle layer remains just as sharp, and features the determined young sandwich maker himself and the fixings he uses to make them. The background layer retains the same level of sharpness and provides context for the market itself. You can see how a sense of depth is implied – the baguettes are larger in size than the boy who runs this stand. And the boy, in turn, is much larger than the people who move through the market behind him. These contrasting scale relationships are the key to suggesting the illusion of depth within a two dimensional image. It is the 24mm wideangle’s control of perspective that allows me to organize this picture in this manner.

This image offers a good example of barrel distortion. Note how the doors on either end bend towards the middle of the picture, and how the sidewalk seems to curve. Actually, the doors stand perpendicular to the ground, and the sidewalk is really straight. To some, this distortion may be a flaw. There are expensive wideangle lenses that do not exhibit such barrel distortion, but not for cameras such as the one I use. I regard such mild barrel distortion as an asset, a form of emphasis. The appearance of this crumbling building in Yangon’s Indian Quarter is subtly altered. It appears to stretch, to be larger than it actually is. Since there is only one layer in this image, the illusion of the curved street serves to imply depth. The only time that barrel distortion is distracting is when a human face or body is bent or stretched out of proportion. Such a problem does not exist here. The three men, wearing longyi sarongs, the Burmese national costume for both genders, are not distorted because of their central position in the frame. Only the information towards the edges of a wideangle image is subject to such bending. These men await customers in front of their paint store, while their own antiquated building, which has seen empires rise and fall in old Rangoon, incongruously very much needs the product they sell.

This is a similar subject to the preceding example, yet it takes advantage of an entirely different use of the wideangle lens. The great reclining Buddha of Bagon was located in very tight building. The wideangle lens allowed me to some how make a photo of it. Yet this even larger reclining Buddha is housed in a massive structure with plenty of space to maneuver. Here the problem was not to somehow fit the Buddha into the frame. Instead, the goal is to stress the huge scale of the Buddha figure itself. The 24mm lens does this very well. I found a solitary monk praying to this enormous figure and used a vantage point that allowed me to create scale incongruity by contrasting scale relationships. I anchor the photo along its left hand edge, stressing the huge arm holding up the head, and I compare that big arm to the tiny monk in the lower right hand corner, who also uses his arms, but for a quite different purpose. The three layers in this image are stacked from left to right rather than from bottom to top. The foreground anchor is at left, the middle ground embraces the head and body of the Buddha figure, and the background features the point of the picture -- the tiny monk praying to the huge sculpture. Another incongruity stressed by the wideangle lens is the nature of the building itself. It could just as well be an industrial warehouse. Yet the Burmese use it as a house of worship. The wideangle effectively frames the Buddha in a mass of girders, panels, and towers, adding one incongruity to another.

An entire block is devoted to selling reconditioned motors of all kinds in Yangon's Indian Quarter. As this street flows on, doctors ply their specialties, Indian foods are sold, and signs featuring plastic letters are cut by hand. To best capture the flavor of this hectic street market, I chose to shoot unobtrusively from waist level, using the Canon G6 with its flip up viewfinder and 24mm wideangle converter lens. These men were looking right at me – I was only a foot or two away from them. But they could not figure out what I was doing, since I did not have my camera up in front of my face like most photographers. I could make eye contact with them, nodding my head and giving them a big smile. I wanted to engage them at close quarters, encouraging a response, and respond they did. Each of them intently studies me, and in turn studies you. And you study them. The wideangle lens used up close like this can be an intimate story telling tool, particularly when used at waist level. The men become the focal point as my foreground anchor layer. The sweep of the street behind them becomes context as the middle ground and background layers are filled with mechanical objects and busy people. It just keeps on going like this in Old Rangoon’s Indian Quarter, blocks and blocks of people doing business from their doorsteps. This image easily could have fallen apart into incoherent chaos, as often happens with wideangle lenses used on busy and complex subject matter. My close up wideangle vantage point, creating this emphatic anchor layer and the diagonal thrust of the image from lower left towards upper right, turns potential chaos into both order and meaning.