Indonesia - Bali
We took the ferry across to Bali and to an ocean front hotel in Pemaron on the north coast. Doubtless originally a fishing village, today it's focused on tourism. Our focus here was the fishing boats and dolphins.
The boats are modern outrigger canoes with motors.
So, of course, we were out on the water before dawn, but this time we didn't have a long drive and walk to get there.
After sunrise, the focus shifted to dolphins. There were pods of dolphins about, and they would surface momentarily around the boats, but never really long enough to spot them and get the camera focused on them to get a photo. I've been whale watching and such often enough to know that I wasn't going to get a good shot, so I just watched. The guide chastised me for not taking photos of the dolphins, but later admitted that in more than ten years, he'd never gotten a good photo.
Then other boats started coming out looking for dolphins, and kept coming. Soon we were surrounded by more then 50 boats in a swarm. Someone would spot some dolphins and all the boats would go shooting off in that direction. Of course the dolphins were submerged by the time they got there. It was kind of sad and funny. Then i notiecd off to the west another huge swarm of boats doing the same thing. The dolphins surfaced so briefly that I doubt they were much bothered.
After breakfast, we walked through the local market, a good chance to see local produce and get some people shots.
The stalls in the market mainly had produce and candy.
The locals put small trays of flowers and such out on the sidewalk in the mornings as offerings. The market also sold the materials for those.
Of course, there were bananas, lots of bananas, and a good variety.
Then we were off, up into the mountains, to the Batur volcanic caldera.
The size of these ancient volcanoes is astounding. They can be miles across. In this photo, we are on the rim of the caldera, and everything in the photo is the caldera.
The dark areas on the ground are from a recent eruption from the "small" cone on the left.
On the rim is the Pura Tuluk Biyu Hindu temple. While most of Indonesia is now Muslim, Bali is mainly Hindu, with unique style temples. The first thing you notice is the split gates.
One unique thing about Bali is that everyone visiting a temple needs to wear a sarong. They usually have loaners if you don't own one. That allows us to learn how to wear one.
A few years ago, some tourists figured out they could create the image of a pool of water at the gate with a mirror below the camera and it became a popular image to post. Now the local guides carry a small mirror to take a photo of the tourists.
The temples are courtyards with a variets of shrines in them. Tall pagoda type shrines are the most common. There are two varieties; stone towers,
and ones with multiple thatched roofs.
They typically contain just enough space inside for an image of the god that shrine is dedicated to.
There may be a pavilion with a roof, but otherwise it's open space with the shrines. People come to pray, worship, and leave offerings at the shrine to the god of their choice.
Our hotel was also on the rim of the caldera overlooking rice terraces below. Of course we all lined up to take photos, but they had finished harvesting and were burning the rice straw in the fields. As the day went on the smoke kept getting worse.
Of course, we were up before dawn. The smoke had cleared, and we had a good shot.
Actually, that is two shots. The light in the sky was before dawn, but the rice fields were still dark. I took another shot after the light hit the fields and combined them. It was another good learning opportunity. It had been years since I had used image stacking to get a higher dynamic range, and I remembered it as being fiddly and annoying. Now, if I have taken the two shots on a tripod without moving the phone, I can just load them into Luminar and into the Merge function, and the software just does it. No tweaking the levels of the images, etc.
