Atlanta International Night Market

Chamblee, GA | June 28, 2025

www.atlnightmarket.org

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Performances:

DJ EZZY B • Vince the Voice • Ankita Jaikumar • Laotian American Society (LAS) • Colorful Hat Circus • Damali Bacchus • Ntxhais Hmoob Kajsiab • Alex Ahn

‿︵•‿︵(🌞ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)‿︵•‿︵

Event coverage by Boon Vong

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Hello everyone, thanks for the views on my previous post on the AINM.

For this, the second and last day of the night market I thought I would change things up a bit. Here’s my photo story recap in good old fashioned blog form. Yep you have to read along whilst you scroll to snag a photo or two. 😉

Spoiler alert, it rained yet again! But here’s my day in photo and word form. It was great running into folks, thanks everyone for smiling and wanting to be in photos.

After finishing and posting Friday’s photos at 2am EST I still got up at dawn. After a brief walk at the new Suwanee Park and photos of the sunrise I drove to Oakwood and got an oil change that my car was bugging me about.

Here’s the sunrise at the new Town Center on Main Park. A festival here would be very impressive, but the parking and other logistics would be tough yet again. I guess folks would still have to park at the old one and walk across the street. I know the plans currently only include a small food truck space up in the little cul desac.

Photos of the Park right when it Opened

Photos of the Park at Sunset

Okay, back to the Night Market photo story. I got to the festival around 3pm. After walking from my car near the Marta station I was already drenched. This humidity is almost as bad as Savannah in the summer.

For Saturday I rigged up one of my old cameras up high on the City Hall railing (thanks Josh).  It was triggered remotely with a PW radio trigger and was there to keep me from the trouble of going into the building and all the way up the stairs just for a photo.  It seems like creators these days have a team and I’m just 1 small person so this definitely helps!

If you have any old DSLRs laying around unused, they work great as remote stills only cameras.  Here’s my post on that.

Did I even think about putting a plastic Publix grocery bag (that I specifically brought for today) over the camera before I left? Of course not! This crazy heat really does something to my concentration out in the world.  What happened to the poor camera in the rain, oh you shall see…

Thanks to the Vietnamese tent for letting me use it as a pretty backdrop and cultural mashup!

Nice folks from the Alif Institute. I highly recommend going to their Arab Festival in October.  It’s an outside market with vendors, amazing middle eastern/Mediterranean type of cuisine, and NONSTOP Dancing! Here are my photos from last year. 

I also put the RP on a monopod and triggered it remotely with a PW.  I wanted to shoot a bit different today and the high vantage point and 24mm pretty much gets everything in focus.  I didn’t really shoot too many portraits today as my goal was the colors and vibe. Plus it was easily as hot as Dragon Boat in September–maybe hotter.

So nice running in Christine and Sung! She operates and creates at Rebel Teahouse in downtown Decatur.  Check out the community she and others have helped build and nurture over there.

And oh that “camera emoji” that’s on my lanyard is an actual digicam if you didn’t know!! Here’s my review on it.  I can’t believe it only costed $5 back then. It was available in Pink too.

And here are Vivitar Retro Keychain Camera photos.  The pics are both awful and charming!  The quality is on par with an old flip phone camera, so it’s quite retro.

Photos by Christine and Sung:

Just look at this random couple’s feast!!! Well done sir.

So cool to see these acts.  I know how hard the grind is from the times I provided photography for the Universoul Circus.

Shout outs to this energetic young lady that I bug for photos often now. 😉 Their Hmong Dance group Ntxhais Hmoob Kajsiab is super fun, and my favorite thing are the smiles and fun that they exude in every performance I’ve seen.  Since I’ve covered this stuff for so long, I know the effort it takes to practice, dress up and drive a few hours, find parking, and dance in an un-optimal time window.  It’s definitely a labor of love just to promote and showcase one’s culture and heritage for sure.

My posts on Hmong New Year in Georgia over the years.

Also while we are here, the “H” in Hmong is silent.  Similar to how the “S” in Laos is silent. Or how Khmer is pronounced like “Kamai.” The “K” in Khabib Nurmagomedov’s name is silent as well. He’s the fighter that beat the daylights out of Conor McGregor a few years back.

Why all this? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Because: French/English/Cyrillic/or just written language in general. English is hard enough already right?! I didn’t make up these rules, and am still learning myself daily!

And here are the photos of the Hmong Dance Group with that storm just looming to the east.  What doesn’t make sense is the weather app on your phone is useless in days like this.  Just assume that in Georgia, if it’s blistering hot, and if there are clouds, it’s going to rain somewhere.  Also sorry some of the up close photos aren’t as sharp as they could be, I was shooting with an adapted manual focus Nikon 70-200 on the R8.

After I changed shooting positions, I came over to stage left and saw a RAINBOW in the sky!

I also shot some video on my phone while I was taking photos at the same time.  Yes I know it’s not optimal, but I’m used to it.

By the end of the second dance it started RAINING.

It was too late to run up to save my remote camera, oh well.

🌞‚‘⚡‘‚⚡‚‘⛈️‚‘⚡‘‚⚡‚‘🌞

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks to the City of Chamblee for giving the festival attendees shelter.  That wind and lightning is no joke.

So here’s my poor little Rebel XTi after about 30 minutes of being bombarded by the rain. Is this camera or lens weather sealed? Heck no.  The camera and pocket wizard will probably fail at some point to the water intrusion and corrosion, oh well. They are old tech, and as always I just keep on buying cameras like consumables in a videogame.

The CF card still had the photos on it though, so I made a timelapse “security camera” view of the festival day until the rain came in yet again.

I was hoping the rain would stop and bless us with a nice sunset, but nope.  Folks stuck around though, which was nice.  The colored LED lighting and wet pavement made for some colorful photos.

I’ve been doing this photography thing for a long time, and it’s always good to meet and chat with random people out IRL. For the scant few that are abhorred by having their picture taken, sorry, just doing my job.

It takes a lot of photos to get a good one, and the ugly and unflattering ones (mid eating, weird expression, death stare from many yards out) get nuked right away as I’m going through the culling and editing phase. I totally get it, everyone’s so picky about how they are perceived in online pictures. Myself included. We are all on camera in public spaces every day of our lives in this modern era.  Taking photos at festivals that try to sum up the fun and vibe is always challenging.

Here’s the quiet walk back to my car near the Marta station. Even though I was at Wal-Mart in the morning I totally forgot to buy a small umbrella to replace the one that broke yesterday. If only there was a vendor that sold umbrellas and rain gear…

So that’s it guys, a “brief” recap of this week’s festival. There are many thankless jobs in all facets of any community shared event. I know most folks are busy and consume short form media, but I felt like giving a bit more context and nuance in what it means to be a working photographer here in Atlanta.

If you haven’t already, please view my whole blog/website by clicking on the menu or my name above!

There’s lots more festivals and cultural events and super fun things that I cover in Atlanta.