Two meetings in Hanoi

Yesterday I was fortunate to have met two interesting but very different photographers, who happened to pass through Hanoi.

Diego Lopéz Calvin is a professional photographer from Madrid, Spain. He works in the Spanish film industry as a stills photographer and cameraman. For the past 20 years however, he's been developing a fascinating personal project in his spare time called 'solarigrafía' (www.solarigrafia.com). Through the pinhole photography technique he manages to take extremely long exposure photos of the sun. We're talking about 6 months here to create one single image, in which the path the sun follows over this period of time becomes visible as a band of colorful rays. As the camera is exposed to the elements for such a long period of time, things like weather, climate, dust, insects, etc. also affect it, creating absolutely unique images. His idea took off on the internet and nowadays there's a community of 'solarigrafists' that have installed thousands of these home-made cameras all around the world, slowly but surely capturing the sun's rays. Today I've put one of Diego's cameras up on the roof of our house, curious to see what the result will be in 6 months time. I'm planning to build a few of these cameras myself soon, to set up around the city.  

The other photographer I met yesterday is US street photographer and blogger Eric Kim. Eric's in town to guide a week-long workshop from Hanoi to Sapa. He's a real 'hustler' as he likes to call himself on his blog, publishing several articles and vlogs daily, organizing street photography workshops around the world, publishing books and developing photography-related products like camera straps and bags (www.erickimphotography.com). We met up over a coffee and chatted away for a few hours. I'm going to take his cue and blog a bit more in the future. So without further ado, here are a few images I made in Brussels recently.