I must have walked 10 miles in Jogjakarta that day. There were so many things to see… interesting people, clothes, etc etc. I saw this guy a few times, and I decided to take a shot on the third time. He regarded me with a cool one-eyed stare and didn’t give much reaction one way or the other. I’m pretty good at getting the vibe if someone does not want their photo taken… I got no vibe from him. Actually, I got no vibe at all.

The little streets of Malacca had all sorts of interesting temples and stores full of antiques and curios. I don’t normally talk about curios in such high regard. Curios in other countries always seem better than curios in your own country. And thus, we end this diatribe on curios.

I’m sorry to hear about all the financial woes there…  Maybe things will get better.  I think they should get that economist from CCP (the ones that make Eve-Online… not the Chinese Communist Party, which might have questionable economists), to run the banking system for a while.

Here are a few of my lesser-known Icelandic pictures to remind them of all the pretty things there…that don’t cost any money to see.

Each of these “bells” is really a stone cage that houses a seated Buddha statue, facing outwards. At this time in the morning, you can take little flashlights and peer inside the cages. It’s all very eerie and fun…

In the distance, you can see a few volcanoes poking through the mist.

I checked the sweet internet earlier in the day to see exactly what time sunset was in Yellowstone. I have the sunrise/sunset website bookmarked, which is kinda strange, maybe… Anyway, It said 7:03 or something like that. I knew full well that it means the exact moment when the sun dips below the horizon, so the sun really “sets” about 30 minutes before that… but that didn’t help me get into the right position to see the sun right before it dipped below the mountains.

Luckily, there was a fine band of yellow sky lit up above the mountains, reflecting across the Madison River.

I could hardly figure out where to look first! I was happy to have a second pair of eyes there with my camera, so I could look at one thing while the lens and attached remote looked at something else! Every 10 minutes the clouds moved and the light changed, creating a different scene as I snapped away in bliss.

You can feel the morning humidity hanging on the air over the lagoon. It was a little after 5 in the morning at Angkor Wat, and a small Cambodian girl had brought me a little chair to sit down in by the water. She also brought coffee and condensed milk, refilling me every 20 minutes or so. I think the chair and the coffee was the the best $2 I ever spent!

This red-stoned temple had hundreds of tiny rooms scattered all over the grounds. The light streamed in from many angles to light up the walls and carved details. I only wish I was around 1000 years ago with my anachronistic digital camera… that would have been good, except for the no flickr part.

They aren’t really cubes, and they are not really that mysterious, but the words taken together, especially in reference to something that is not cubic or mysterious, are tantalizingly mysterious.

The night I first arrived into Reykjavik, I only had a few minutes of light before the darkness. I soon discovered that the final deep blue before dark lasts about an hour in Iceland. I am quite sure they take it for granted, because I saw it every night and everyone was going on about their business, not taking notice… Over by the docks, I found these four guys securing the blades on this helicopter for the evening.

This was one scary place in a storm. I can’t overstate that. The whole place felt alien and ancient… there was hardly anyone at this remote temple, and then pretty much everyone left when the storm hit. Between squalls, I took some quick shots as the sun went down, using a rainsleeve over my camera to try to keep it as dry as possible.

There is a little story over at “Innovative Digital Photographers” about the stuff you see here on Stuck In Customs. You can get to the article here. It features a shot from Yellowstone, where I happen to be near today for some meetings in Montana. I have pasted a few of my favorite Yellowstone shots below for your wide-screen viewing pleasure!

The second shot there is of a nearly-impossible-to-photograph Steam-Tornado taken at the Grand Prismatic in central Yellowstone.

This is one of the largest pieces I have ever made; the giant TIFF is about 21,000 pixels across (this one I uploaded is only 15,000 pixels across and has been downgraded to JPEG to fit inside the draconian upload requirements). I shot it one cool and crisp morning at Glacier National Park in this crystal clear lake that is fed by glacial runoff. It is comprised of 90 different photos that took a small eternity to mix together into an epic HDR. I’ve been thinking about having a 10-foot mural printed at walk-up resolution… but I am not quite sure where I would put it!

If you click on the shot, you can go to the Flickr site. From there, you can click on ALL SIZES to get to the largest size to see the detail, should you be so inclined!

Also, for those of you that are interested in learning more about HDR and this kind of photography, I have a tutorial up in this area of my blog, which you might enjoy.

I’m working on my biggest photo ever over the weekend and putting on the finishing touches. In the meantime, a commenter reminded me of a fun shot I did of some children in Indonesia, so I thought I would put up some of my favorite kids’ shots from around the world (that are not my own kids!)

The children below are from, in the following order, Indonesia, Cambodia, India, Bangkok, Malaysia, Thailand, and Iceland.

I have been working on a new batch of shots from Indonesia which will be coming up soon, but in the meantime I was looking at how dramatically the light changed on one day I was there in particular. These two shots below are from different parts of the country… One was taken around 3 PM and the second was taken around 7 PM.

After an accident on an ATV, I was stuck on this road for a long time while waiting to for rescue.  Luckily, the camera and tripod were uninjured and the time I was waiting for happened to be sunset.  There are worse things in life than this!

The morning in Indonesia seemed to change every 5 minutes from blue to pink to purple then back to blue again. I could hardly figure out where to point… Framing these Buddhas in the bells at Borobudur was a fun exercise in composition and patterns.