Matt Betz Photography

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Matt Betz Photography

Greater Chicago Area photographer capturing sports, editorial, portrait, and travel stories with emotion and authenticity, from WNBA games to global culture.

Open to collaborations and assignments showcasing sports, travel, and genuine human moments.

05/25/2026

May 24, 2026 – Saigon Heat defeat the Cần Thơ Catfish 93–73 at MLC Stadium, moving to 2–0 to open the franchise's 15th season in the Vietnam Basketball Association. Brandis Raley Ross led the way with 21 points, 12 rebounds, and 5 steals.

Saigon Heat

05/23/2026

May 22, 2026 – Saigon Heat defeat the Cần Thơ Catfish 90–64 in their season opener at MLC Stadium, marking the beginning of the franchise's 15th year in the Vietnam Basketball Association.

Saigon Heat

05/21/2026

Phú Quốc, Vietnam 🦪

For most of its history, Phú Quốc was defined by what it produced. Fish sauce barrels fermenting anchovies for over 200 years, pepper plantations in the interior, fishing villages on stilts over the Gulf of Thailand.

It is now one of Southeast Asia's fastest-growing tourism destinations. Over eight million visitors are projected for 2026. APEC arrives in 2027.

The older version of this island has not disappeared. But it is getting harder to find.

05/17/2026

32 – Most of this year spent somewhere in Asia, living out things I've dreamed about for a long time. Planned to be back in Vietnam but visa stuff had other plans, ended up back in Bangkok instead. Honestly not a bad place to land on your birthday.

05/14/2026

Bangkok, Thailand 🌆

Bangkok does not slow down. That is not a complaint.

Most cities have a pulse you can follow. Bangkok has several running at once, and none of them agree. There is a version built for tourists. The temples, the rooftop bars, the markets. There is one beneath it, running on neon and exhaust and people who have somewhere to be.

You do not discover Bangkok so much as you surrender to it.

04/28/2026

Songkran 2026 – Chiang Mai, Thailand 🪣

Chiang Mai carries its history carefully. Temples line the old city walls. Monks walk the streets at dawn. There is a stillness to this place that feels deliberate.

Songkran ends all of that, at least for a few days. Thai New Year is technically a water blessing, a ritual cleansing, good fortune carried in every splash. On the streets of Chiang Mai it becomes something harder to explain. Buckets, hoses, water guns, bare hands. A passing motorbike is an invitation.

There is something freeing about a celebration with no way to opt out. By the second day you stop caring about being soaked. You just become part of it.

04/25/2026

Hanoi 🏙️

The capital has been the seat of power in northern Vietnam for over a thousand years, changing hands between dynasties, colonial administrations, and competing ideologies without ever losing its center of gravity. The French laid boulevards over ancient trade streets. The Americans bombed it. It outlasted all of them.

That history doesn't sit in museums. It's in the lakes and the architecture and the way the city is organized, layers of different eras occupying the same blocks at the same time.

Street commerce still runs on the same logic it always has. The pace is relentless and the noise is constant and somehow it all holds together.

The city has been doing this for a thousand years. It's not stopping now.

04/19/2026

Cát Bà Island 🏝️

The largest island in Ha Long Bay sits at the edge of one of the most photographed seascapes in the world, but most visitors see it from a cruise deck. The same limestone karst that draws them rises inland across the island itself, the national park protecting jungle that was heavily bombed during the American War.

The town at the southern tip is a working place. Fishing boats out of Hai Phong move between the floating villages anchored in the bay, families living on the water the same way they have for generations. At Chợ Cát Bà the morning catch gets sorted and cleaned on the pavement before the heat sets in.

The haze that sits over the bay for much of the year pulls the distant karst into layers of grey. It makes the place feel further from the mainland than it is.

04/15/2026

Ninh Bình 🏞️

In the Red River Delta south of Hanoi, the limestone karst breaks through the flatlands in jagged formations, the same geology that defines Ha Long Bay appearing here inland, rising out of rice paddies and slow-moving river channels. The Vietnamese called this region Hoa Lư, and for a brief period in the tenth century it served as the capital of an independent Vietnam, the first dynasties consolidating power here after a thousand years of Chinese rule.

The sacred and the geological are folded together throughout the valley. Temples and pagodas are built directly into the rock faces, shrines placed inside cave mouths, some of them active for over a thousand years. Pilgrims arrive by the thousands during festival season, moving through the same corridors that monks and royalty moved through centuries before them.

What's been built here has always followed the shape of the land. The karst towers, the rice fields, the river routes. A thousand years of history compressed into a valley most people pass through in a day.

04/08/2026

Sa Pa 🏔️

In the far northwest of Vietnam, Lào Cai province rises into the Hoàng Liên Sơn mountains along the Chinese border. The valleys here sit at elevation, where the air carries a chill even in dry season and haze settles into the ridgelines like it belongs there. The landscape is terraced from top to bottom, generations of labor carved into every hillside.

The Hmong, Dao, and Tày peoples have farmed these slopes for centuries, flooding the paddies each spring and working them by hand through the growing season. What looks like scenery to a visitor is someone's livelihood. The same fields that draw photographers from across the world are where families spend their days.

Life here moves at its own pace, shaped more by the land and the seasons than by anything happening further down the mountain. The infrastructure of the modern state reaches up into the valleys, power lines strung across the hills, the Vietnamese flag visible above the terraces, but the rhythm underneath it hasn't changed much.

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12800 N Lakeshore Dr.
Mequon, WI
53097

Website

https://mattbetz.com/

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