Showing posts with label Jakarta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jakarta. Show all posts

Thursday, April 23, 2009

It’s our second wedding anniversary!

Let me greet my wife a Happy Wedding Anniversary! It’s our second year since we walked down the aisle of St Yosef Catholic Parish in Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia and pledged eternal commitment.

Two years and one Cacing later, here I am reminiscing the fateful day and what better way than publishing previously unseen pre-wedding pictures. As budgets go, I am no spendthrift. Throwing a wedding in Bali was costly enough – honestly, we estimated we would have spent more had we gotten married in Cebu but that’s another story – so we weren’t about to shell out precious rupiahs to a professional photographer in Bali, Indonesia’s most expensive city only to do all those corny and scripted poses.

Our thinking was, if we were to shame ourselves, we’ll do it at our convenience and our irreverent choreographed way.

So here goes nothing!

at our room in Ayodya Resort Bali
This was my best attempt to look pensive. I had the camera set on remote and took some pics at our room in Ayodya Resort in Bali.

at Ayodya
Same room but we made use of the bed’s gigantic headboard for drama. I think we sat on a pile of pillows to get a clean shot.

dining out in Frangipani (Bali Collection strip mall)
This was just a snapshot after dinner. I remember getting some curious look from other diners of the Frangipani restaurant in Nusa Dua’s Bali Collection strip mall when I set up the tripod.

inside the Moena Es Teler Denpasar
I guess I am too tall for the low-hanging bananas on display at the Moena Es Teler in Denpasar (photo by Ketut).

shopping for gifts at a watch store in Denpasar
This is another photo taken by my friend Ketut. Dia and I were buying wristwatches as gifts to my friend who opened his house for the lunch reception in Bali.

before Nasi bungkus stand
A feeble attempt of local color. We were buying nasi bungkus lunch packs when we had Ketut take the photo.

the fabulous Kuta beach
How could we omit the fabulous Kuta beach? We merely stopped for a few minutes and had Ketut take the picture and then off we went.

before a Saraswati procession at Seminyak
As luck would have it, in a short stopover in the temple of Seminyak, there was a Saraswati ceremony attended by some high school kids. (photo by Ketut)

at the foot of Pura Seminyak
I wanted to have a photo of us in front of a temple and this was the nearest one in the vicinity after our short visit at Kuta beach.


bussing at Warung Kartini, Kuta
The quaint Warung Kartini in Kuta was deserted so we played bussing lovebirds

posing with the Garuda
The giant sculpted figure of Garuda was too colorful and large for us to let it go. There was a couple of chairs too so who were we to deny the photo op?

also at the Mandarin Oriental
Also begging was the empty flight of stairs at the Mandarin Oriental where we stayed when we made the requisite personal appearance at the Philippine Embassy in Jakarta

posing at the Mandarin Oriental grand lobby
The lobby of the Mandarin Oriental became fair game for us too.

a corny version of the sunrise silhouette
This is a more corny and stiffer version of the sunrise silhouette

at a fabric shop in Kuta
Shopping time is posing time. Here in a sarung store in Kuta, we struck a pose.

at Warung Kartini
My knowing expression here still makes me laugh.

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Tuesday, December 30, 2008

having fun with flower macros

I have an avowed lackadaisical disinterest with flower macros. I’ve seen simply too many sensational flower macros in flickr that I don’t think I can add more to this colorful form of entertainment. On occasions though, when I am idle and when other photographic subjects are not available, I give in.

kamboja macro
a kamboja (frangipani) macro in Sukawati, Gianyar, Bali, Indonesia
Canon EOS 350D Digital, 1/200s, f/2.8, 100mm, ISO 400, -1.0EV


As I would find out, macros, even when using the dedicated 100mm f2.8 macro lens, presented special challenges.

Composition. To remove extraneous elements which are distracting, I filled the frame entirely with the flower. Natural colors cannot be beat anyway and the hues of the flowers could be without comparison. I focused on an interesting point, say the pistil of a bougainvillea, the inner heart of the frangipani, or the petal edges of the gerbera, and had them swim in one singular color. I also flushed the focal points off-center to ensure more dynamic interest as a full central symmetry could be too static.

bougainvillea macro
a bougainvillea macro in Selong, Lombok Timur, Indonesia
Canon EOS 350D Digital, 1/80s, f/2.8, 100mm, ISO 100, -1/3EV


Exposure . In this age of digital photography, the exposure of a photograph can be calibrated countlessly and in real time. I chimped a lot, which meant that I checked the output in the LCD of my camera immediately after taking the shots and did the adjustments thereafter. What I found out was that sometimes I had to underexpose the shot by several stops to get the right amount of light.

As in most of photography, daylight is your best friend. I could not shoot with a flash anyway as I often leave my Speedlite 380x behind when I travel. There is one indoor macro here though – the mum macro in Jakarta – and I had to jack up ISO to 1600. I was not about to setup my tripod inside the restaurant where I was having breakfast.

mum? macro
gerbera macro in Jakarta, Jawa Barat, Indonesia
Canon EOS 350D Digital, 1/60s, f/2.8, 100mm, ISO 1600


Manual focus. The macro lens has a pinpoint plane of focus and beyond this plane, the foreground and the background come to a blur. Autofocus then becomes a problem as the lens had trouble delineating sufficient contrast. I had to go full manual. To select accurately the focal point that I wanted, I had to move towards or away from the subject. This to me is the greatest challenge.

"bangkok" trumpet flower macro
adenium macro in Pantai Mengiat, Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia
Canon EOS 350D Digital, 1/500s, f/2.8, 100mm, ISO 100


Although I still don’t find flower macros a photographic pursuit of my choosing, I have to confess that the pictures come out appealing, especially with the collage of the four macros. A final homage to the visual power of flowers I say. T’was definitely fun, if I may complete the verbal pun.

flower fun
a collage of the macros presented below using picasa3

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