What to Expect

Long Bien bridge and the morning market offer an abundance of photography opportunities. Wide angle street shots and portrait photography are prevalent on this tour. With the hustle and bustle of the inner areas of the morning market we can get up close and personal with vendors and buyers haggling over produce. Long Bien bridge also offers fast paced motion shots as commuters and trains travel into the city during the low-lit hours of the morning.

You’ll learn how to compose pictures quickly, choosing the point of focus, capturing movement. We’ll explore detail and portrait shots, with market goods and workers as our subjects. For the portrait shots, we spend time looking at different ways to approach people to get the photos we want. There are many ways to achieve this, and different methods work for different photographers.

At the end of the session, we leave the market and head back into Hanoi’s Old Quarter. The sun is up and the streets of Hanoi are awake now, offering plenty of opportunities for colourful pictures of daily life. As our city tour of Long Bien comes to an end we’ll find a nice local coffee shop to relax and review our photos.

Capture one of Asia’s most vibrant markets at dawn

Join us before sunrise at bustling Long Bien Market, as thousands of deliveries from the provinces and farther-flung regions of Vietnam provide the traders with stock.

From century-old Long Bien Bridge, we learn how to introduce a photo story with a ‘context’ or ‘landscape’ shot. Our vantage point gives us a stunning view over the brightly-lit market, traders, couriers and customers barging this way and that between the stalls. Then we’re down into the market, rubbing shoulders with the locals and exploring portraits and relationship shots. There’s a great deal to explore, with colourful fruit stalls, workers unloading trucks, and a fish and meat market with some very talkative traders down by the river

As the sun rises, the market slows down, and we’ll catch shots of the locals doing their morning exercises near the city’s Water Tower. We finish up with a delicious bowl of local ‘pho’ and a strong Hanoi coffee while we review our pictures from the tour.

Learn the art of great travel photography while exploring one of Asia’s most exciting markets.

The tour runs from 4:30 – 8:30am, and begins under Long Bien Bridge, Yen Phu Street. Hotel pick-up starts at 4am.