Portfolio / Saigon Traffic

 Saigon Traffic

60 seconds worth of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) night traffic. Trying to grasp the hundreds of simulatanious movement live seems impossible, but here in post it is fun to find all the weird traces which seem to ignore all traditional constraints of traffic flow besides a certain tendency to avoid obstacles. As far as I could tell no two vehicles touched during this exposure, but it's hard to be sure. Sidewalks are often considered a slower parallel road (as can be seen on the far side of the crossing). Naturally bigger vehicles enjoy more respect. Thus nobody tried to convince the fuel truck to diverge. A detail which is interesting but was wiped away in the long exposure is that a police man walked up slowly to the middle of the crossing and trying to ... well, I don't know. Anyway, he walked off the crossing at the same pace (fast walking is really suicidal) without any noticable change to the whole situation.

btw: I purposefully included the mesh of electrical wires in the foreground as they seem to follow a similar principle than the traffic below.

For reasons of noise reduction, the picture has been exposed as three 20 seconds frames and overlayed in post. [30mm, 3*20s, f22, ISO100].

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Keyword tags: Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon, Vietnam, Night, Traffic, Crossing, Tran Hung Dao, Nguyen Thai Hoc, District 1, Motorbike, Long exposure, Traffic flow