At first it had been a dream to travel to Asia for a long time already, even before I discovered photography. I am now 22 years old and I finished my bachelors in psychology. However, along the way I found out that I really wanted to pursue photography, but nonetheless psychology still gave me some really good insights: It never hurts to have some more knowledge about human life in general.

My passion for photography developed as did my plans to travel to Asia; now I did not only want to travel there to experience life of the people who live there, but I wanted to capture everything; the diversity of different cultures, nature, portraits. I just liked the idea of wandering around, experiencing amazing things and document it all.

I booked a flight to Bangkok from the Netherlands (where I live) and started the journey. It brought me from Thailand to Myanmar, where I spent one month in places where I only saw other travelers a few times. Those weeks I will remember best, since so many unique things happened.

I stayed in a place called Mindat for 2 weeks and here I learned that opening up to other people is the key to capturing the good moments. People have to feel comfortable around you so they can express their real feelings instead of their camera face. I ended up at a local celebration where they just slaughtered some cows, which is a great happening of course since meat is way to expensive to eat often. The people drank their homemade rice wine and before I knew it I was dancing around the dead cows with a huge dagger in my hand. To me it felt like such an extraordinary experience and because I joined in for the dancing, people just welcomed me and it was so much easier to capture their portraits.

After Myanmar I traveled to Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia and Indonesia and the amount of things to discover is just overwhelming: A volcano crater with the most toxic lake ever, beautiful green rice fields, impressive rock formations, small welcoming villages…

Eventually this whole journey through South East Asia really helped me to focus on what I want to capture with my photography. The contrast between people and nature, emotions, unexplored areas: there is a story behind almost everything and I want to tell these stories with my pictures.

All pictures are captured with the Sony A7, 70-200 f4 Zeiss lens and the 28-70 kit lens.

About The Author

Chris König is 22 years old photographer based in Tilburg, The Netherlands. Exploring Asia is a photo book concluding his 5 months travel in the land. You see more of his photos on his website and interact with him via his Facebook and Instagram profiles.