Patrick McDermott | Visual Journalist

Over the last three months, I have had the privilege to live and travel in Viet Nam (with a brief stop in Thailand).

It is by far one of the most amazing places I have traveled to. The people are incredibly welcoming and the culture is amazing. Where else can you enjoy a cup of coffee served in a shot glass found within another cup of hot water? (And the coffee is amazing! Something that is extremely important in my professional due to the small amount of sleep I tend to get while on the road.) Or enjoy a bowl of pho on a busy street corner as the constant stream of motorbikes hum by?

It saddens me that I have not produced a body of work during my time here that comes any where near to capturing the aura of this country. But by the same token I was able to take some time away from my camera to do some much needed thinking, and I am a better person as a result. As Chase Jarvis once posted “Live a life without your camera for a predetermined time frame – a month or two or three. For me, this made me miss shooting soo much. I noticed things in the world that I longed to photograph. And when I picked up that camera again, I was hungry.”  So I hope that in the near future I can return and work on some of the stories that are so desperately needed to be told. But for now, check out the work of Justin Mott and Kevin German. Both are based out of Viet Nam and are doing amazing work.

So I’ll end here with a few photos from my last few days in Viet Nam…

In the past two months since I attended the 2010 Eddie Adams Workshop a lot has changed in my life. I realized at Eddie that sometimes you just have to drop everything to go after your dreams. And that is what I did at the beginning of November. I booked a flight to Viet Nam not knowing where it would take me. The last two months have been an amazing experience…through the good and the bad; I have grown as a person.

It has allowed me to reflect on the year that was 2010…it is amazing how 365 days can change everything you thought you knew about yourself and where you thought you would & wanted to be. There have been amazing highs but also extreme low points during that time. At age 26 I had the privilege, and I do mean privilege, to photograph my first Olympics. I gained amazing new friends and colleagues, but also learned the hard way that you have to be extremely careful in who you can put your trust in. And most importantly to always think for yourself and not let anyone else do the talking for you…nothing ever comes good from that. But with that said, 2010 was overall an amazing year.

And as I sit here in a small hotel room in Da Nang, Viet Nam pondering my next move and where 2011 might take me, I would like to take this moment to thank everyone who stood by my side throughout 2010. I’ll make you all proud in 2011…that’s a promise I intend to keep. Whether it is on a motorbike in the switchback roads of the Alps or during the colorful Holi Festival, I will produce photographs like I have never produced before. No more acting like the “DB.” It’s time to get to work and do what I love to do…

As Chase Jarvis recently put it, “the job of an artist is to create change in the world” and hopefully the work I produce during my travels will do just that. Life is too short to worry about things that are out of our control. All we can do is live each and every day as it is our last. Doing anything less is foolish…

Over the past few months, a ton of people have asked me what it is like to do the job I do.  To try to start to answer that question, I decided to pool a collection of fun photographs of fellow photographers that I took during my travels over the last year or so.  Even though these photos show the fun side of the job, it is really a ton of hard work and long hours to get the photographs that we produce day in and day out.  Enjoy!

Decided last minute to head downtown and watch the annual firework display on the National Mall or in my case from the middle of 14th Street NW.  It was pretty funny to watch everyone around me pull out their iPhone or Blackberry to photograph/record videos of the fireworks.