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Bon Touriste

Inspiring Beautiful Travels

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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!

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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

Filed Under: Asia, Photography, Travel Writing Tagged With: AEROMEET 2013, Langkawi, Photo Wednesday, Tourism Malaysia, travel photography

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:

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#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 🙂
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#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….
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#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.
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#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.
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#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!
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#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)
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#7: Opera House along the Singapore River – Any idea how I get the green light to be, well, less green?
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#9: Cityscape of downtown Singapore – Fisheye lens supplement, anyone? 🙂
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#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!
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#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.
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#12: Marina Bay Sands rooftop bar – the uplighting on these umbrellas was unbelievable! I didn’t edit this at all.
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#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 🙂
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#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

 

Filed Under: Asia, Photography, Travel Writing Tagged With: 24 hours, AEROMEET 2013, Photo Wednesday, Singapore, Tourism Malaysia, travel photography

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:

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#1: Solana Beach shoreline – worked on pumping up the contrast, highlighting the yellow and orange colors in the bluffs, and emphasizing the sand gradient 🙂
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#2: The famous Hotel del Coronado – worked on eliminating the fog in the picture by deepening the red hue and adjusting the white balance. Also, I just noticed the half-body I forgot to crop out in the left-hand side, but, well, I’m learning!
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#3: Solana Beach coast–didn’t have to do much with this one! I adjusted the white balance and that was it.
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#4: Coronado Beach (with Point Loma in the background–I’m getting married on those cliffs!) — with this one, I’m still trying to figure out what to do with the fogginess in the front. Thoughts?
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#5: Solana Beach – love the bird formation in this one. I probably would have left more beach in the bottom right to balance out the composition, but otherwise, I’m pretty happy with this one.
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#6: A pretty flower – basically working on depth of field here. Love the colored edges of this blossom!
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#7: One last Solana Beach shot – I really like this one. But, would it be better if there were more attractive swimmer bodies on the right-hand side?

Now, which one is your favorite?

Love,

Kristin, novice shutterbug maven

 

Filed Under: Photography Tagged With: beach, California, Photo Wednesday, travel photography

Photo Essay: Colours of 1 Malaysia Festival

June 10, 2013 by Kristin Winet 7 Comments

The Colours of 1 Malaysia festival, which was held on May 25th, 2013 at Dataran Mederka, Kuala Lumpur, is hard to describe in words. Founded in 1999 to reflect and celebrate the cultural, racial, sexual, and economic diversity of Malaysia, the event has become an enormous parade, complete with thousands of dancers, costumes, floats, props, and waving hand-clappers for the audience members. This year, I–along with the rest of the international group I’m traveling with–had the enormous honor of attending this event, and while I tend to fall asleep at most parades, I didn’t find myself fidgeting until the ninth segment about three hours in (which was, by the way, a segment highlighting Malaysia’s shopping–complete with dancers dressed as price tags waving signs with discount stickers on them). To their credit, though, I’d definitely never seen shopping done so artistically before.

So, to truly honor this bonanza of international proportions, I thought I’d let my photos do the work for me. Enjoy the colorful brightness that is Malaysia.

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A special thanks to Tourism Malaysia and AEROMEET 2013 for graciously hosting me on this trip. All photographs are the author’s own.

Filed Under: Asia, Photography, Uncategorized Tagged With: AEROMEET 2013, art, Colours of 1Malaysia, culture, Tourism Malaysia

One Question with Wendy Gunderson: Photographing People

February 22, 2013 by Kristin Winet 1 Comment

Wendy Gunderson, a freelance travel photographer, has devoted much of her work to the Caribbean, a place that, in her words, has helped her attain a true sense of irie, which in Jamaica means “an overall feeling of well-being.” (Love it, wish I had it). Today, she inaugurates our new One Question segment in which I ask a writer or photographer to reflect on one aspect of her or his writing, life, or photography. As a photographer who still feels incredibly awkward asking people if I can take their photo when I’m traveling, I wanted to know how Wendy deals with the delicate and often difficult task of meeting people and asking to capture them in a moment in time. Enjoy!

As a photographer, how do you best approach people you’d like to take pictures of when you travel? And do you think being a female traveler affects the way you interact with people you’ve never met before, and if so, what advice would you give to budding photographers?

One of the hardest things to do is to approach a stranger to take their photograph.  Photography often attracts people who would rather be on the outside observing, rather than actually engaging people, however, I have found that my best images of people are captured by engaging those people in conversation first, and taking photographs later.  As a woman, I think it’s easier to start the dialogue.  Women are viewed as less threatening, particularly by other women.  While a woman may not feel comfortable if a man approaches her to take her image, a woman approached by another woman will feel more at ease.

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Rodney Elliott, owner of Rodney’s Cuisine on Nevis
©2006-2013 Wendy G. Gunderson

While being a woman may make engaging strangers easier, it is not always easy to initiate the conversation.  I find that people like to talk about their country or their business first, and then they will ease into more personal discussion.  While in a restaurant, engage people by remarking on what you love about their country or the area.  Once they know you appreciate their place in the world, they are more inclined to talk, and will offer many more things about the area than you may have imagined.

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Two young people attending a birthday party at Sunshine’s Beach Bar on Nevis
©2006-2013 Wendy G. Gunderson

It helps to have done your homework.  Before we travel, I like to read not only about the sites to see in a particular place, but also about the history of the region. Find out how the country developed, the people who inhabited it, the dominant religions, the political system, etc.  Read the area’s newspaper online to understand what is timely, and what is of concern to the local citizens.  It gives you a perspective on how the area developed the way it did, and an insight into what makes people who they are.  It also helps you engage in conversation.

Ask questions.  Having done your homework and having some background information on the country will make it easier to ask intelligent questions.  In addition, people are likely to be more responsive if you ask questions reflective of the fact that you took the time to get to know something about the people and want to know more.

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Two young people attending a birthday party at Sunshine’s Beach Bar on Nevis
©2006-2013 Wendy G. Gunderson

What I have found is that through these conversations, I gain not only a much better appreciation of the country and its people, but I realize how much alike we all are.  Many of my conversations while traveling start with questions about the country, and eventually become conversations about family, politics, and religion, where I find we hold many of the same beliefs and concerns.  That is what makes a wonderful photograph, understanding the person behind it, not just capturing the superficial image.

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Wendy G. Gunderson is an attorney from Pewaukee, Wisconsin and founder of My Irie Time, http://myirietime.com/, a website devoted to travel in the Caribbean.  As she plans a November to trip to Eleuthera in the Bahamas, she is reading the book “Eleuthera, The Island Called Freedom,” about the history of the island, the local newspaper, “The Eleutheran,” http://www.eleutheranews.com/, and as much other information as she can gather regarding the island.

Filed Under: Photography, Women Writers Tagged With: encounters, One Question, travel photography, Wendy Gunderson, women

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