Raohe Street Night Market, Taipei

Taiwan's night markets are a particular kind of chaos that is very difficult to explain to someone who has not been. They are loud, densely packed, brilliantly lit and completely overwhelming in the best possible way. Raohe Street Night Market in Taipei's Songshan district is one of the oldest and, photographically speaking, one of the most rewarding.

The entrance gate is where you start. It is lit up like a small festival, the traditional Chinese temple-style arch layered with hundreds of individual bulbs and backed by the neon of the surrounding shops. Against a dark sky it is vivid and graphic in a way that feels almost designed for photography, though of course it predates that impulse by decades. I shot it from across the road to get the full width of the gate and some of the surrounding street signs in the frame. The red traffic light in the upper left corner of my wide shot was pure accident and I kept it.

Inside the market the light changes character entirely. The stalls provide their own warm, amber illumination and the signs overhead layer into a dense visual noise of Chinese characters, prices and food photography. The pepper bun stall near the entrance is famous enough that it has its own queue, and the charcoal ovens glow in a way that draws the eye from twenty metres away. The smell, unfortunately, does not transfer to photographs.

Raohe runs for about 600 metres and it is busy for its entire length. By eight in the evening on a weeknight it is shoulder-to-shoulder busy. By nine it becomes genuinely difficult to move. That density is part of what makes it atmospheric but it does mean you have to work quickly and accept that people will walk into your frame constantly. I stopped fighting it fairly early in the evening and started using the crowd as part of the composition rather than waiting for gaps that never came.

Night market photography rewards patience and a willingness to get close. The interesting shots are not the wide street views, they are the individual stall holders, the specific food items, the moments of transaction and laughter that happen between strangers every few seconds all the way down the street. Raohe is one of the most alive places I have ever pointed a camera at.