Uploads from TheFella, tagged islamic, with geodata

Jakarta Traffic

nobody@flickr.com (TheFella) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:23:49 -0800

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Most of my Indonesia shots seem to be landscapes and temples.

Here is one of my only cityscapes, taken during a rooftop session with Franciscus Tan, Adri Syahfril Koto Piliang and Citra Dita Valentin a few months ago. It was a pretty weird sky.

With so many things going on, it was quite a hard shot to compose, but I ended up going with this one. Let me know what you think.

Read this on my blog: thefella.com/blog/jakarta-traffic.

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Details
Canon EOS 5D Mark II / ISO 50 / f/22.0 / 17-40mm @ 17mm / HDR

Kuala Lumpur

nobody@flickr.com (TheFella) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 06:31:44 -0800

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My first stop on my tour of South East Asia was Malaysia and my first stop in this country was the capital, Kuala Lumpur.

After researching lots of shots of this fantastic city, I had decided that I had to get the iconic shot of the Petronas Towers (sometimes called the Twin Towers) during the blue hour.
There are very few places to get a good angle and even fewer that are publicly accessible. The best one I managed to find was The Traders Hotel. On the 33rd floor of this is the SkyBar; a fancy, but relaxed bar with a swimming pool right in the middle of it.

Even better (for me) than mid-drink swimming was the massive open windows that faced out towards the Petronas Towers. Although you're not allowed tripods here, the windows, when open, actually form a ledge about two feet wide.

Using a stabilising platform carefully crafted out of my long trousers (for mosque work) and spare shirt, I was able to have my camera steady enough to get seven night-time brackets of the KL skyline.

Technical Stuffs

This was an HDR composed of seven exposures, from -3 EV to +3EV. These were processed in Photomatix, then the original exposures were gradually blended through manually in Photoshop. Areas like the sky and ground are probably 90% one exposure (although not the same exposure).

This was finished off by a lot of colour correction to make it vibrant, but not to make it look wholly unnatural. Nik Software's Viveza was also used to tweak particular parts of the image to my liking.

This is definitely one photo that I'll have mounted and put on my wall at home! (If you want, you can also buy a print of Kuala Lumpur, with plenty of options of materials and sizes).

Read this on my blog: thefella.com/blog/kuala-lumpur.

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Details
Canon EOS 5D Mark II / ISO 100 / f/8.0 / 17-40mm @ 17mm / HDR

Malacca Straits Mosque

nobody@flickr.com (TheFella) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 08:48:30 -0800

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I'm just back from almost three weeks touring around South East Asia. First country on my travels was Malaysia, so I decided to post one of these shots first.

I was mainly staying in Kuala Lumpur, but myself and my good friend and photographer Danny Xeero took a day trip down to Malacca / Melaka to catch the sunset.
I got some standard shots of this, the Malacca Straits Mosque, then I decided I would experiment with my 10-stop ND filter. I've used this a bit in the past, but I've really like the results, so I wanted to try some colour sunset shots with it. I was standing right by this rock and figured it would make some pretty good foreground interest.

This shot is a manually blended image from about 4 exposures. It's mostly one, with others blended in for the water and the bright part of the sky. A final, non-ND shot was used to clean up some noise on the mosque itself.

Last night, I had the privilege of joining a Google Hangout with Jimmy McIntyre and HDR One Magazine. As I talked about my HDR workflow, it prompted me to finally get around to writing a tutorial. I'll spend the next week or so working on it and hopefully release it around christmas time.

Read this on my blog: thefella.com/blog/malacca-straits-mosque.

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Details
Canon EOS 5D Mark II / ISO 400 / f/8.0 / 17-40mm @ 17mm / Manually blended HDR

Worker in the Souk

nobody@flickr.com (TheFella) — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 07:01:09 -0700

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A break from my usual type of shots and a photograph that was actually taken over a year ago during my trip to Marrakech in Morocco.

It was just an off-hand shot that I didn't get round to processing for a while, then when I did, I really liked the black and white version. It was a simple shot to take, but getting to this location was not.

When exploring the souks near the Medina, you can pay for a guide who will show you around, take you to the best places and tell you lots of interesting facts.

On a side not, the winding souks mean that you can follow people with guides and not be readily noticed. Piecing together this two nuggets of information, you can probably guess what myself and Victoria did one morning. That's right, we followed a couple of people and their French-speaking guide!

Sadly, the maze-like nature of the souks also means that it's equally easy to lose people. I'm not exactly sure where the photo was taken or what this man was doing. Needless to say, we were so lost we eventually found our way 'out' after about an hour and then had to get a taxi to part of the city we recognised.

Thankfully the taxis are cheap and you just need to get the right one; petit and grande for those of you interested. The petite ones take you around the city and the grande ones take you longer distances.

Read my blog post at: thefella.com/blog/worker-in-the-souk

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Details
Canon EOS 5D Mark II / ISO 200 / f/2.8 / 50mm / 1/50 second

Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque

nobody@flickr.com (TheFella) — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 04:10:30 -0700

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Looks pretty awesome in the lightbox

This is the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi. We had no intention of going to Abu Dhabi. In fact, we'd no real intention of doing to the United Arab Emirates, but here we are.

This will probably make much more sense if I start from the very beginning.

Myself and Greg thought we'd go to China as part of our continuing plans to travel all around the world and take photos. When investigating flights, I found a great deal from Emirates that allowed a free stop-over in Dubai. I booked this and luckily Greg agreed. So there we were in the UAE, on-route to Beijing. Sitting in the hotel one day, we looked through the guide book and I spotted a photo of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. We have to see that I thought.

Then Greg pointed out that it wasn't in Dubai, but rather Abu Dhabi. He then found out that the capital was only a few hours bus ride away from us and didn't cost that much. Ergo, off we set. We were driven to the bus station by the very kind Mr Manly, where we promptly missed the first bus, as it was too full. Ever-learning, we were early for the next bus and claimed our seats. But a few hours later we caught sight of the SZM and I was actually speechless.

It is quite possibly one of the most amazing buildings I have ever laid my eyes on and I have seen some awesome buildings around the world.

We spend several hours here getting travel photos, candid portraits, architectural shots, you name it! Eventually the face-melting 46 degrees celsius got the better of us and, after our eyes stopped sweating, we headed back to the bus station.

Here, we found a dodgy man who gave us a lift back in his car with a brother and sister from the Philippines. They were a lovely couple, if a little strange. I think the girl really liked me, because she giggled, said something to her brother and a few seconds later he leaned forward to me and asked, "Do you think my sister is beautiful?"

Now, this put me in quite the predicament. If I go one way and say, "Yes, she's a right tasty piece of chicken", the brother might take offence to me liking his sister and defend her honour. On the other hand, if I exclaim she was a hideous troll and I couldn't stand to look at her, then I'm pretty sure he'd also take exception to that. Whilst thinking about replying with some sort of above average 'quite pretty' comment, which she actually was, the taxi driver interjected with some comment that I couldn't quite make out and the brother and sister laughed. Embarrassment averted. Not entirely sure what Greg made of the whole incident.

So, in honour of those siblings, this photo is dedicated to my lovely Filipina friend, fellow photographer and queen of sunsets, Mariá Concepcíon.

Prints of this available on SmugMug:
thefella.smugmug.com/buy/16489458_2ntmff/1955486752_wH7hJVw/

No images in comments please.

Details
Canon EOS 5D Mark II / ISO 100 / f/8.0 / 17-40mm @ 17mm / HDR