The best thing about travel is that you get to see vast amount of different cultures and different people. In many respects that influence the architectures in their respective areas, which is the subject of today’s post.

The photographs that I wanted to present today were taken in Indonesia and Singapore. This was taken late last year during my holiday but have left unprocessed since my Macbook Pro broke down.

In many respects, Singapore is in my opinion much more modern and organized than Indonesia, most of the buildings are of modern designs (eg. ION Orchard). On the other hand however, in Indonesia one can find many heritage buildings granted you go to the right places.

The photo on the left is taken from Marina Bay Sands (on the Sky Park), where most of Singapore can be seen clearly from above (here’s a link if you are interested about the building). It was an impressive view, buildings as far as the eye can see, a lot of development in progress and busy industrial ships. You’ll be able to see more shots from Singapore in the gallery below. Oh, and there are some shots from Singapore Universal Studio too, great place to have fun for a whole day!

During my short holiday though, I also went around in Indonesia, in particular Solo and Semarang city, both cities are located in Central Java. While Solo is very rich in its heritage and history of the old royal families and government, Semarang is a more populated area and is the capital city of Central Java. Visit these wikipedia article about Solo and Semarang if you are interested.

One of the most interesting photo in Solo is the interior of the meeting room in Solo’s Mangkunegaran, it consisted of great detailed and beautiful interior suited for royalties. You can see the photograph on the right. I won’t write more about the Mangkunegaran because obviously history isn’t exactly my expertise. I did had a bit of historical tour about the complex from the local guide though and it was very insightful!

On the left, is a photo of Semarang, taken from Gumaya tower and Grand Candi. Great scenery from up there, you can also see how populated the area is by looking from the photos.

All in all it was a great trip and it was great to see all the different cities and their unique cultures. Next time you visit different countries and cities, it always pays to learn a bit of its history from the locals.

Some tips and techniques when traveling around

1. If using an SLR, make sure to bring a wide angle lens (about 18mm would be enough), it’s handy when photography the cityscapes. If it’s a point and shoot, try to use one with wide angle lens, I think most point and shoot these days have these lenses.
2. When photographing architectures, when possible try to use smaller aperture, about 11 and above would be good. This is a good way to preserve all the details of the scenery.
3. Depending where you shoot, a tripod can be handy, especially at night time. In my case however, since I mostly photograph during the day, hand-held was enough.

The architecture photographs gallery

It’s been a while since I did my last photo hunting session. However, the sun was finally up that day and so myself and a friend decided to go to Hampton beach and walk along the beach to Middle Brighton, snapping possible objects and sceneries along the way. It was quite a bit of walk, but the weather was very nice and photography is always a fun thing for me. I’m glad to say that there are  quite a few good shots that I can add to my gallery today.

The gear that I brought with me  was my Nikon D300s, 90mm macro lens, 70-300mm telephoto lens and my trusty 18-50mm lens. Along with all the gear I also brought my Holga, but obviously it’ll take a while to develop the negative since no one seems to to 1 hour development anymore these days. There were a lot of things that can be taken on that day, the weather was very nice that it was perfect to snap pictures. The light wasn’t too harsh but not dark either, it’s like having a giant softbox illuminating all the objects.

This resulted in great lighting condition to take macro photos such as the one on the left (click on the image to show larger size), there  is not a hint of harsh light which I really dislike in macros. The photo was taken using the 90mm macro lens, handheld with manual focusing. The original flower was quite small, however as with any macro photography, it always pays to have a closer look at the things around you. Such as the dried (seed pods?) in the gallery below or the photo of seeds which is my personal favorite in this gallery.

When walking around places like the beach and taking photos of the scenery, it always pay to have both wide angle lens and telephoto lens. Most of the sailing boats photos were taken using the wide angle lens, however the boat with the orange sail in the gallery below were taken using the 300mm lens. The photo of the dog was also taken using the telephoto lens, obviously there was no way to come closer without drenching the equipments. I had to actually switch the telephoto lens to manual focus mode in order to shoot the dog properly since the focusing system was not fast enough (it’s an older lens).

The Processing Tools

This is an interesting portion of the post that I wanted to discuss. I have recently migrate my desktop into a Linux system since I’m a software engineer and it’s really so much easier to develop on it. However, image editing in Linux is not exactly everyone’s cup of tea, even for me. I remember a few years ago, opening RAW images and processing it with the available open source programs was really difficult.

As it turned out, there are really good software these days that one can use under the Linux environment to organize RAW files and edit them. All the images in this post’s gallery are edited under a Linux system. The setup that I have are: Ubuntu 10.10, RawTherapee 3.0 alpha for RAW files processing and Gimp 2.7. Granted both of the image processing software are on it’s development stage and by no means stable, however I have no issues whatsoever editing all of these images today. I think when the two software matures, they will be great. RawTherapee is very intuitive, reminds me a lot of Adobe Lightroom and it’s very efficient and quick. Gimp 2.7 although not available through the normal download has a lot of user interface improvements, the one that I love most is the single window mode, no more 3 separate windows open together (you’ll have this “issue” on Gimp 2.6).

If anyone is interested to get the tools, here are the ways, again, the software versions that I listed are on development, so proceed with caution:

RawTherapee: available via software center

Gimp 2.7: You will have to add the development repository first, then run the install command

remove any other versions of gimp

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install gimp

The Gallery

The Melbourne Moomba Festival 2011 is not something to be missed. This was the time to have some fun and enjoy the festivities. For 3 days, the people of Melbourne gathered and enjoyed rides and fireworks. It was great to see that huge number of people from different background enjoying the festival.

Obviously this is always a good time for anyone interested in photography to get out there and grab some photos. I went and did all the photography handheld at the time (I should have really brought a monopod at least, perhaps next time), there were too many people around to be lugging my tripod. Plus I didn’t go to the festival solely for photography reasons, I went there with some friends to have some fun too. Anyway, my gear at the time is just my Nikon D300s and the Holga.

As a plus, there is always a Moomba parade on the last day of the festival. During this yearly parade, we have the opportunity to see the participant from many different cultural backgrounds. Unfortunately I didn’t get a front spot at the time due to some prior appointment. otherwise there would have been more shots from the parade.

Checkout the gallery below, oh, and I’m sure you’ll be able to spot which ones were shot with the Holga.

On the more technical side, all images were post-processed ever so lightly using Nikon View NX, Holga negatives were scanned using Canon negative scanner.