I don’t often take photos of strangers when I’m travelling. Mostly because it makes me feel really awkward. But every now and then, there are just moments that I can’t pass up. It’s also different taking photos of people without shoving a camera in their face, which lets you capture them doing their usual thing in their usual environment anyways.

This photo was taken one morning wandering the streets of Hoi An in Vietnam.

I’m always on the lookout for solid blocks of colour in photos. You see it in nature lots, and buildings and streets in towns often make this easy. Some of my favourite pictures only have one colour in them. A close up shot of a sunflower that fills the frame with yellow, an aerial shot of a forest that is all green besides a thin line of a dirt path, or in this case, an entranceway that is all different shades of blue. When this happens, it’s like your eye doesn’t have to work hard hunting around to find what to focus on, you just focus on the details, and anything that isn’t blue becomes the focus and stands out even more. Just imagine if there was a bunch of yellow, green, and red in this photo. Your eye wouldn’t be drawn to the Vietnamese woman sitting on the step in nearly the same way.