For years, the best photographs from our Cuba and Vietnam workshops have lived on hard drives and in personal folders. That always felt like a missed opportunity — so we’ve launched x-peditions.com, a dedicated gallery showcasing work made by our participants across Havana, Hanoi, the Long Biên Market, the craft villages, and the countryside around Ninh Bình. Every image here was made by someone who showed up and pushed themselves, and this site is our way of celebrating that.

Most photography workshops don't come with an editor. Assignment Vietnam does. Molly Roberts spent more than 30 years shaping visual storytelling at National Geographic and Smithsonian. She reviews every participant's portfolio before the trip, runs working edits from the field, and guides the final sequencing that becomes the published zine. We asked her what separates the photographs that stop her cold from the technically competent ones that don't. Her answer starts with four words: show me something new.

Most photography workshops give you a city and send you into the streets. Assignment Vietnam gives you an assignment — a single documentary theme, a veteran magazine editor in your corner before you land and while you're shooting, and a printed zine to show for it when you leave.

It started with a mistake — specifically, the time I rented a premium wide-angle Nikon lens for a trip to Paris. It was a marvel. It was also roughly the size of half a bowling ball. That lens was one of many hard-won lessons that shaped how I think about travel gear, and why I started sharing what I actually use.

A family vacation to Marrakech doubled as a scouting trip for a potential X-Peditions workshop location. The country delivered on every front — the light, the architecture, the landscape. The street photography question is more complicated. Here's what I found.

Ibarionex Perello is known as a street photographer. Fair enough. But the workshop he leads in Hanoi isn't really a street photography workshop — and the difference is worth understanding.

Midweek, we leave the city.

Three hours south, the rice fields give way to limestone peaks rising straight out of the water. You ride through cave passages in a narrow wooden boat, rowed in silence by a guide who steers with her feet. You climb 500 stone steps to a summit where the valley spreads out in every direction.

Then we drive back to Hanoi, and you see the city differently.

It's 2 a.m. and the bridge is already moving. Not traffic — everything. Baskets, bodies, motorbikes, boxes of dragonfruit piled so high you can't see the riders beneath them. Long Biên wholesale market runs on a schedule that has nothing to do with the sun, and if you walk in here for the first time with a camera, you will almost certainly freeze.

Most photographers pick up a camera and aim it at things that interest them. Ibarionex Perello teaches something harder — to see the world before you start reacting to it. A profile of the photographer, educator, and podcast host leading X-Pedition Hanoi 2026.

Larry Gassan showed up to his first X-Peditions workshop in Havana in 2018, not entirely sure he belonged in the room with better photographers. Seven trips later — two to Cuba, five to Hanoi — he's a different person behind the camera. We sat down with him on WhatsApp to find out what happened in between.