Photog Blog!
Travel photography in crowded places can be done well, with no excuses. In early 2018, renowned travel photographer David Lazar took on a 10-day challenge: to successfully capture stunning images in areas of Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia that many consider hopelessly crowded during high season. Ba humbug! David was eager to launch a new Southeast Asia photo tour workshop (which would also include Vietnam). He was convinced the region still had massive value to offer travel shooters, but he noticed that demand from photography enthusiasts had waned for reasons he questioned.
When asked why, photographers usually gave two main issues:
1. They felt they had already “been there, done that bought a dozen cheap T-shirts”.
2. They assumed the sheer volume of tourists since the old days would make real photo opportunities impossible.
As an experienced professional, and proud owner of over a dozen cheap T-shirts, David wasn’t deterred by these excuses. In fact, he was excited to disprove them. As long as iconic travel destinations remain popular, travel and inflight magazines will always demand fresh, compelling imagery of them. Part of a professional travel photographer’s job description is the ability to walk into a crowded, chaotic space and still walk out with a beautiful, creative image. Landmarks like the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower have been photographed billions of times, yet the market never stops hunting for something “new.” True creativity has no ceiling. Facing a crowded location should be viewed as a positive challenge to any photographer worth their salt, not an excuse not to visit, or re-visit. Or buy more T-shirts.
Furthermore, and moreover!, any serious and/or irreverent travel or culture photographer will tell you that returning to the same locations over and over is exactly how you develop your best work. Steve McCurry has been to India close to 70 times! Revisiting a destination for which you have a genuine affinity becomes more rewarding with every trip. While you can certainly snag a few excellent frames on a single visit, your deepest, most impactful work will always emerge when you dig beneath the surface over time.
To prove his point during this 10-day challenge, David knew he had to answer those two main amateur concerns — and the most effective way to answer them was through his images. Selfies excluded. He mapped out an itinerary focused on travel photography in crowded places that included iconic landmarks, while also tracking down promising, off-the-beaten-path locations sitting within two minutes to two hours of the major tourist sites. He then built a specific playbook of field tactics to bypass the crowds.
“I chose the Southeast Asia itinerary based on both iconic and promising off-the-beaten path locations within two hours’ reach of the major sites. Then I made a list of tactics and techniques I could use in order to meet the challenge. Of course more than one tactic and/or technique might come into play in any given situation. I hope you enjoy the results from this trip. They will only get better with each return visit!” –David Lazar
1. Beat the Dawn
The absolute easiest way to defeat the masses is to arrive before the sun does. Waking up at zero-dark-thirty is fun! Plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead. Getting to a location early secures prime positioning and lets you capture pristine light.
• Floating Market at Damnoen Saduak, Thailand: This village near Bangkok is cut through with narrow waterways and is notoriously packed with tourists by late morning. When David showed his local Thai guide a similar shot of the market taken by legendary photographer Art Wolfe, she told him it was completely “set up like Hollywood” and insisted it was impossible to capture naturally today. As primarily a fine art travel photographer, David had no issue with Art arranging shots, but this was not that kind of exercise. Refusing to take “no” for an answer, David headed out well before sunrise the next morning. The guide was dead wrong. The secret here, as with many locations, is simply beating the dawn on the drive over so you are the very first person on the scene. Once the main docks clog up, you can easily find plenty of other excellent shooting opportunities along the side canals where few tourists ever bother to look.
• Sunrise at Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia: At Angkor Wat, everyone knows the sunrise trick. Because hundreds of people are trying to catch the dawn light over the classic lotus pond, you have to beat the crowd at their own game. Arrive even earlier than the rest to lock down a prime physical position for your tripod. Pro tip: bring a headlamp, some hot coffee, and a few croissants to pass the time while you wait in the dark. Pro tip 2: Try you hand at capturing stars over Angkor in the pre-dawn light, as Luminous Journeys’ Sina Falker is the top photo.
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2. Framing with Patience and Precision
A location might have a million people standing in it, but if they are not inside your viewfinder, they simply do not exist.
• Blue Hour at Wat Arun, Bangkok, Thailand: This shot of the temple glowing across the Chao Phraya River was taken from a packed, tight riverside bar. By squeezing the lens directly between crowded tables and shooting entirely handheld without a tripod, the chaotic restaurant environment vanished from the frame, leaving only a clean, dramatic landscape.
• Rooting for the Buddha, Ayutthaya, Thailand: The ancient UNESCO World Heritage site of Ayutthaya is constantly filled with visitors. This specific Buddha head wrapped in banyan tree roots was famously photographed by Steve McCurry decades ago when the site was virtually unknown to outsiders. Today, you are restricted from getting close, and people are constantly posing in front of it. This is where patience outweighs everything else. David chose to shoot slightly wider, giving himself plenty of empty frame space to crop out edge clutter later. He knelt down and waited. When a monk paused for a small crowd to move on, David seized the split second as the monk walked past the shrine.
• The Bayon, Siem Reap, Cambodia: Avoiding massive crowds during the high season around Angkor Wat is nearly impossible, but you wouldn’t know it from a tightly framed shot. In reality, there were dozens of tourists taking selfies directly beneath the bottom edge of this frame. Please note that recently this level of the Bayon has been mostly off limits top tourists.
• Monk Exiting Monastery Temple, Luang Prabang, Laos: This picturesque town is the most popular tourist stop in Laos, but careful timing keeps the chaos out of your image. David watched a monk enter the temple, envisioned the exact exit shot he wanted, pre-focused on the doorway, and waited. The trick is holding your position and hoping a rogue tourist doesn’t wander into the frame at the absolute worst second.
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3. Go Against the Flow – Travel Photography in Crowded Places
To find the best shots, you have to be in choice places when others are not. If the tourist crowd typically heads to a specific spot at a specific time, go somewhere else entirely. You never know what unexpected gems will reveal themselves when you break away from the schedule.
• Kayan Woman Framed by Her Creations, Northern Thailand: This hill tribe cooperative sits directly on the commercial tour bus route, but the heavy crowds don’t usually arrive until late morning or afternoon. While a small group was present when David arrived, they all headed left—so he immediately headed right. He didn’t see another tourist for an hour, allowing for a completely relaxed portrait session.
Note on the Kayan Communities: It is incredibly rude and inaccurate when critics dismiss these communities by calling them “human zoos.” The Kayan (often referred to by the more restrictive term “Padaung”) are refugees from Myanmar who have resided in Thailand for decades. While it is true they have formed cooperative villages with other hill tribes to benefit from tourism, they do so entirely by choice. While the Thai government enforces strict regional restrictions on these tribes, the families choose to stay because managing a working artisan village is far safer and more sustainable than subsistence living deep in the mountains or facing the harsh realities of a border refugee camp. These are real communities where people live, raise their kids, and craft their wares. When you visit, do not go as a staring bystander. Go to respect, engage, buy their art, and share a genuine human connection.
• Hidden Moments Near Hotspots: Just a two-minute walk away from the swarming masses at the Bayon or the main structures of Ayutthaya, you can find quiet paths where local Khmer pilgrims receive water blessings, or Buddhist monks walk in total isolation. While the crowds focus on the primary spots, welcoming, rarely visited tribal villages sit just outside the town limits of places like Luang Prabang.
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4. Events: Blending Crowds with Shooting Techniques
When avoiding a crowd is completely impossible, stop fighting it. Instead, use your camera gear to creatively turn human movement into an artistic asset rather than a distraction.
• Shwedagon Pagoda, Yangon, Myanmar: Moving slightly east of the core trip itinerary to highlight this technique, David utilized intentional motion blur to blend a heavy crowd into a smooth element of visual energy. By locking his camera onto a sturdy tripod and dropping his shutter speed down to 5 seconds, the moving worshippers and visitors blurred into ghostly trails. When shooting slow-shutter images in crowded areas, the key is waiting for at least one subject to stand perfectly still, creating a sharp, striking point of contrast against the motion around them.
• Zoom Blasting and Panning: Beyond long exposures, you can use techniques like a “zoom blast” (changing your focal length mid-exposure) or panning with a moving subject to intentionally blur out surrounding pedestrian chaos.
• Isolating with Depth of Field: Using a fast prime lens (like a 50mm or 85mm shot wide open at f/1.4 or f/1.8) lets you compress your background. This turns a distracting background crowd into a beautiful, creamy bokeh blur, keeping the viewer’s eye locked firmly onto your primary subject.
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5. Get Off the Beaten Path
Ultimately, the best way to avoid a crowd is to look where others aren’t looking. Every major, over-photographed landmark has a perimeter. If you wander just a kilometer or two away from the designated photo spots or tourist drop-off zones, you will almost always find authentic daily life, stunning landscapes, and quiet moments that tell a much deeper story of the region than the iconic landmark ever could on its own.
The results from this 10-day challenge prove that the world isn’t too crowded to photograph — we just have to be more creative in how we approach it. And those shots will only get better with a return visit. Our Southeast Asia Unleashed! photo tour workshop runs every January.
• An earlier version of this strategy profile by Bennett Stevens was originally published on Photography Life. It has been updated here for our Blog’s readers.
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