In this section on the trip I decided to focus (excuse the pun) mainly on some close focus near - macro shots that I took and one or two photos from my walkabout around the town and surrounding area.
The above two Lotus shots were taken at the aptly named Lotus Pond restaurant on Ubud main street. The light here is lovely around mid morning and the lotus flowers deliciously colored. The Lotus Pond is a temple setting and in the evenings they have marvelous traditional Balinese dance and music shows, well worth a visit.
This one didn't quite come off unfortunately. I tried some fill flash from the tiny on camera unit in the X100 and set - 2 compensation to darken the sky a bit. The problem was that I nearly fell into the Lotus pond while trying to get a decent angle below the flower!!!! I gave up after this one effort :) The onboard flash on the X100 is extraordinarily good at close range for providing a little bit of fill or catch light. Use it sparingly on a low setting and the metering balances things out very nicely. See Ken Rockwell's review for more detail on this.
Here is my final shot from the Lotus Pond and its a shoot through of one of the colorful umbrellas that are on either side of the temple entrance. These umbrellas are everywhere in Bali and come in varieties of yellows, black & white and red. They make great subjects on their own or as a backdrop.
We also stopped and chatted to these very nice kids who were cleaning this theatre in preparation for there traditional Balinese dance lessons. I would like to have stuck around to shoot the lessons but didn't have the time to wait around. Maybe next time. It's possible to get very nice reflections on the tile floors of these temples and theaters, usually best in the earlier morning and with a bit of friendliness the kids or locals are usually happy to pose and see the photos in review.
The final few shots are of local people at work. The first above was preparing wood for a temple renovation project and he was nicely backlit with a little bit of flare. It's worth noting that this just needed a simple +1 compensation and its not so easy to get the flare effect with the Fujinon lens, especially with the hood on.
Finally, this very nice guy scurried up a coconut tree and chopped us down some fresh green coconuts so that we could drink the lovely, fresh, sweet milk. What nice people.
All of the images in this post were edited on the fly using the amazing Snapseed App. I am not usually that keen on these kind of things but this one is so simple and effective that I was able to quickly edit on the go without the hassle of a major selection and edit exercise in Lightroom when I got home. The final shot was a bit of fun with the 'vintage' filter and I felt it suited the subject quite nicely.
Hope this was at least a little entertaining and informative. Don't hesitate to drop me a note if you need any more info on the location or techniques used here.
Happy X100 shooting,
Steel
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