bsb at night

About the photo:
Bandar Seri Begawan at night. This would've looked more impressive if the waters were calmer and we had a skyscraper or ten. :)

Photo aside, I've got an announcement to make. I'll be away on vacation to Indonesia (specifically Jakarta) for about two weeks. I doubt I'll have internet access there and even if I do, there's no Photoshop for me to work on my photos. So yeah, I'll be absent for two weeks starting tonight.

Hopefully I'll be able to catch some interesting shots while I'm there. It all depends on how willing the other members of my family are to go visit interesting places rather than just shop 'till they drop.

down to earth

Seeing a butterfly settling down on the ground sparked a thought in me. These little creatures spend most of their lives in the air, flitting from bush to bush, flower to flower doing their daily routine. So when I came across this particular one resting on the ground, it evoked a sense of humbleness in me. Its modest coloring only served to drive that fact home even further.

About the photo:
Taken at Tasek Lama in Bandar, I've altered the colors using the urban acid action taken yet again from Action Central. Great place to get very useful photoshop actions made by great people.

mosque

The Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin Mosque is a well known landmark in Brunei, and as is the case with all famous landmarks, in Brunei or otherwise, they have all been photographed to death; thus leaving little room for originality.

Being someone who likes to take photos of sceneries, however, I couldn't resist the temptation to at least try and tackle this particular subject matter at least once. So here you have it, my take on the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin Mosque. I hope it's at least halfway original.

About the photo:
I took two shots and combined them into an HDR image via Photoshop. Then I applied Thomas Niemann's Tones (taken from Action Central) and played around with the colors a bit until I got something I liked.

As far as colors go, I suppose this is my first heavily processed image that I'm publishing (although I do have some more on my hard disk). Sometimes out-of-camera pics do get boring and mucking around in Photoshop can yield interesting pictures once in a while.