I hope you have a great one! My entry is a little short tonight… I’m up late building things!
I visited this area of Jogjakarta day after day to get different light and different conditions. This is the old temple of Borobudur, and each of these “bells” is a stupa-cage that protects stone buddhas that sit inside.
I wanted to get a photo of the inside, but it’s extremely difficult… so you’ll just have to take my word for it! 🙂
We had a huge response to the last free newsletter! It went out on Christmas Eve and was full of cool stuff. You can still get it if you sign up (it’s free). The welcome email has a link to all the newsletters, including the most recent, #20. Looking at the stats, our newsletter is opened up by well over 125% of the people to which it is sent! That means that many people forward to friends and family… that’s great! It’s helped us grow well beyond expectations!
Today, we’re showing a new photo from Indonesia – the unique temple of Borobudur. This was taken prior to sunrise, when a thick layer of damp fog covered the mountain lowlands, where this temple is located outside of Jogjakarta. It was one of those very wet mornings when there is really no appropriate attire. It’s not too cool and not too hot – but just “uncomfortable.” I was listening to my music to make me forget about that nonsense though… it helped quite a bit!
And then, sticking to the theme of this week, I included a whole raft of photos I shot while in Indonesia… it just reminds me of how much I want to go back and explore more of that country!
This is from an awesome monument in Indonesia called Borobudur. There are about five ways to spell this temple, at least when I spell it. But, you get the general idea.
I’ve re-mastered this one by using the textures from the Textures Tutorial. This one is actually featured in the video. I have a non-textured version of this which is also interesting… and I think I explain in the video that the use of these textures doesn’t necessarily make something “better”, but what it does do is make something else that is equally satisfying in a different way. So then, at the end, you have two photos, rather than one, each one different and nice in its own way (if that makes sense!).
The morning fog coming off the top of the jungle trees was not like anything I had seen before. There was just enough morning light to give everything a twilight blue and paint the mountains in the distance a deeper color.
I tried something a little bit different with this photo. I was holding two flashlights to help me climb the temple in the morning. I think I got there about 5:30 AM when it was still pitch black, so the flashlights helped me find the right footholds and whatnot. Anyway, this was an extremely long exposure, so I used some of that time to “paint” the inside of the bell cages with the beams of my flashlights. Each of those bell cages held a solitary outward-facing Buddha. I’m glad I was there alone, because I’m sure I looked like a loon running around shining the flashlights in patterns to illuminate the Buddhas inside.
One thing we always ask for, as part of the deal, is for the companies to send us a copy of the final product. So we get several of these kinds of things a week, and it is always cool! I get excited and giddy to see my work used in creative ways across many mediums. Here is one we recently got of a poetry book that used on of my Indonesian pics on the cover. I put the orig below, along with a few other shots from that temple.
I end up throwing all of this stuff into these giant boxes in my office. I don’t know what I will do with them! They just kinda pile up… I should have a giveaway some day! 🙂
I arrived at the temple of Borobudur a little after 4 AM. I had a tiny disposable flashlight, and, other than my driver idling about a mile away, I was the only person here. In fact, it was my second day in a row to do this, since I had so much fun the first. I was there with my friend Will, and he decided to sleep in the second day… but I had a few shots in mind I wanted to grab before the sun came up.
There were these strange argon lights around the temple to light up areas of excavation. They cast a gloomy and surreal light on the Buddhist reliefs that make concentric circles up to the top. I was able to get about 45 minutes of nice darkness with unexpected light until the sun started to appear over the nearby volcanoes and jungle mist.
Each of these “bells” is really a stone cage that houses a seated Buddha statue, facing outwards. At this time in the morning, you can take little flashlights and peer inside the cages. It’s all very eerie and fun…
In the distance, you can see a few volcanoes poking through the mist.
I have been working on a new batch of shots from Indonesia which will be coming up soon, but in the meantime I was looking at how dramatically the light changed on one day I was there in particular. These two shots below are from different parts of the country… One was taken around 3 PM and the second was taken around 7 PM.
The morning in Indonesia seemed to change every 5 minutes from blue to pink to purple then back to blue again. I could hardly figure out where to point… Framing these Buddhas in the bells at Borobudur was a fun exercise in composition and patterns.
This girl had traveled from a remote part of Indonesia to visit Borobudur. She had never seen a white guy in person before… I told her that I might be kind of a disappointment since I am a fairly average white guy. She saw the freckles on my arm and asked if I had a disease…
