Archives for July 2013

Photo Wednesday: Langkawi, Malaysia

July 17, 2013 by Kristin Winet 6 Comments

For those of us who are getting married in, oh, 10 days, here are some nice, tranquil photos to get us through the rest of the week. I’m thinking a set of nice, summery, island pictures of boats lapping against the shore, of children playing in the water, of sandy stretches of beach….of everything and anything that doesn’t have to do with arranging seat cards, printing out menus, collecting picture frames, and generally keeping each other sane 🙂 (And yes, this miss is getting married next week!!!)

Here, then, is my stab at photographing the quintessentially gorgeous Langkawi islands. Langkawi, whose more famously known island twin, Phuket, is right across the bay, is located in the northwestern region of Malaysia in the Andaman Sea. Because it’s lesser-known to tourists than its Thai neighbor, these 99 small islands have been able to preserve their natural habitats and celebrate the biodiversity of the area in ways that make me wonder what our visits here might be doing to its delicate ecosystem. In fact, UNESCO awarded Langkawi the coveted Global Geopark status in 1999 (Malaysia would become the first southeast Asia country to receive the prestigious honor). It’s a stunning island chain–as you’ll soon see 🙂

Since I was working primarily with beach shots and outdoor scenes, I focused on brightness and contrast this week. I’ve been seeing a lot of nature photography utilizing the, well, what’s the technical word here…washed-out? look, as in here, from one of my favorite photography travel blogs: http://www.entouriste.com/french-riviera-road-trip/ In the spirit of bright days and calm colors, then, I played around with the brightness and contrast levels in Lightroom–and that’s it. As I get ready to pack up for my destination wedding in lovely San Diego this weekend, enjoy the pictures and wish me luck!

So, now I totally want to honeymoon in Langkawi. Ah, the power of photography 😉

What do you think of the light, by the way?

Love,

Kristin, novice shutterbug maven

Photo Wednesday: Singapore City

July 10, 2013 by Kristin Winet 9 Comments

This week, I decided to try my best at improving my night photography. But why pictures of Singapore? Well, having arrived at 9 p.m. with less than 24 hours to explore the city, I didn’t really have time to do anything other than wander around the streets at night. We flew Singapore Airlines (which, yes, was every bit luxurious as I’d heard), though I know Emirates does have daily flights to Singapore City as well. My two traveling companions, Bill and Josephine, were amazing–though they were both visibly exhausted, having traipsed around the perimeter of Malaysia for nine days, they let me, the young person, sweep them out of the hotel, find a local hakka stall to get some late-night Indian food, drag them through the nightlife at Clarke Quay and Boat Quay, take a journey on the immaculate subway, stroll along the breezy riverfront, ride the elevator up to the very top of the very swanky and wonderfully infamous Marina Bay Sands Hotel, watch me have a cocktail while they both sipped on lemonade, and join me on the long taxi ride back to our hotel. And, though I know they were up to the challenge partially because they had both taken me under their wing during the trip and wanted me to have company on my evening sojourn in a totally foreign city, I think they, too, had a pretty good time partying in Singapore City. As you’ll see in a minute, there’s no doubt I did!

So this week, I got to work with editing my night shots from our whirlwind city tour. Luckily, some of the places we went had some excellent ambient light and some beautiful backdrops. My cityscape scenes, however, leave little to be desired, as I didn’t bring a tripod and my best efforts at standing still weren’t exactly stellar. But, I’m here to show you the process, so let’s revel in the good, the bad, and the ugly, shall we?

Top contenders for this week:

#1: What’s the first thing I do in a foreign country? Find an ATM! Here, I toned down the washed-out look to better enhance the images on the currency 🙂

#2: Taking a walk down Clarke Quay to find a yummy hakka stall for dinner. Didn’t do much with this image, as I wasn’t exactly sure what needed editing….

#3: Singaporean mee-gorung! Mmmm….. – The spicy red noodles are a little blurry, but I like the emphasis on the sunny side up egg and the Coke Zero.

#4: Night street shot in Clarke Quay – I played with the noise levels a little bit to try and lighten up the photo, but it got too grainy, so I left it as-is.

#5: Fanciest shopping mall there is: Marina Bay Sands. I didn’t edit this image at all, as I was surprised how perfectly clear the letters were!

#6: Self-portrait of me in famous shopping mall – warmed up the lighting, as it came out a little blue (I think that’s because I was inside under fluorescent lighting)

#7: Opera House along the Singapore River – Any idea how I get the green light to be, well, less green?

#9: Cityscape of downtown Singapore – Fisheye lens supplement, anyone? 🙂

#10: Impossibly hard shot to get atop the Marina Bay Sands Hotel….but at least you get the idea of how awesome the view was!

#11: Macro attempt – see this delicious list of cocktails? At the bartender’s recommendation, I had the Tony Stark’s Pepper…and it was the best 20 Singaporean dollars I’d ever spent.

#12: Marina Bay Sands rooftop bar – the uplighting on these umbrellas was unbelievable! I didn’t edit this at all.

#13: Bill took this pic of me and Josephine – and I’m putting it here just because I wanted you to see this awesome cocktail 🙂

#14: And now, bedtime! – This pic was pretty easy to take, as I simply adjusted the white balance on my camera to account for the lamp light. No editing needed!

So, what would YOU do in Singapore if you had 12 hours? (And which picture do you like best?)

Love,

Kristin, novice shutterbug maven

___

(By the way, I LOVE Julieanne Kost’s Lightroom How-To Videos!!) If you’re learning along with me, here’s what I used to import my images from my external hard drive without actually downloading all of them to my desktop’s hard drive:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/lightroom/using/WS427A4C94-2499-456d-8E17-AE09D3316A03.html

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/getting-started-with-adobe-photoshop-lightroom-5/lightroom-5-exporting-images

Photo Wednesday: San Diego

July 3, 2013 by Kristin Winet 6 Comments

As some of you know, I am totally and inescapably obsessed with my new DLSR camera (yes, yes, I know, I’m a little late joining this revolution, but in my opinion, a little late is better than never!). For the past few months, I’ve been promising to teach myself something new about photography every week, in the hopes that 1) I can learn the joys of photography on my own, and 2) that my paltry point-and-shoot photos can go from fun Facebook albums to actually publishable-quality prints. In reference to point #1, my curiosity to learn digital photography came out of the fact that I’ve been traveling with some a-ma-zing photographers lately and have been finding myself annoyingly glued to them and obsessed with the deft way they control all those buttons and accessories on their sleek black cameras. Secondly, as I am loathe to admit, I’ve been told by an editor that my photos just don’t make the publishable cut. And in this world, if you’re not a writer and a photographer, well, you’re a little bit out of luck (see my recent interview with media mogul Lisa Lubin on why a travel writer has to also be a photographer and videographer now). So, with both artistically curious and professional fires under me, I finally went out and purchased my first DSLR camera–a Nikon D3200–and a 55-200 telephoto lens. After all, if I was going to spend $700 on a camera body, I might as well just totally max out my credit card and get a nicer lens, too, right? (Downward purchasing spiral, anyone?)

To start my digital photo revolution, I took the camera on a few trips, playing around with the buttons and dials and just trying to keep my photos from being fuzzy, noisy, or just plain awful. I tooled around with Photoshop for a while, blindly clicking buttons and watching as weird things happened to my photos, and I put some on my blog to see what people thought about them. (Did you see my portraiture study from Colours of 1 Malaysia?)

And just this week, I decided to download a trial version of Lightroom, Photoshop’s companion software and excellent photo management and editing system. If you’re interested in finding out the major differences between the two programs (as my baffled self most certainly was), try reading this article, which I thought was a nice introduction to how these two powerful programs work. Now, don’t let me fool you–the only reason I downloaded Lightroom and not Photoshop at this point is purely financial: Lightroom has a thirty-day free trial before prompting you to spend the $79.00 while Photoshop is, like, hundreds of dollars. If I suddenly come in to some unexpected money, I might try Adobe’s new Creative Cloud service, which for students is $29.99/month, but I don’t see that happening any time soon. For now, I needed something quick, cheap, and easy. So Lightroom it was.

Since getting in to a discussion about the interface of the program is something for an entirely different post, today I wanted to start off my digital photo revolution with a weekly installment of the photos I’ve been working on. As I was visiting lovely San Diego last week, I thought I’d start with some lovely beach shots to start this series. I’m hoping, weeks, months, even years from now!, that I’ll be able to see what I’m learning through this visual archive. Come and join me–and let’s start a digital photo revolution of this beautiful planet we all live on.

This week’s top contenders: