Bali Photographer / Thoughts and Portfolio

Promised to the be the most magnificent Balinese ceremony in the history, the event took enormous worldwide attention. Way before a lot of websites have started to write about it whilst travelers and photographers prepared themselves to witness the rare moment. I prepared myself by locking leave log in my office to ensure that nothing came out at the last minutes.

Advance preparation did not help me from making mistake however. With a few Bali photographer friends I went up to Ubud a little too late, resulting in parking our car far away from the event. It took us almost an hour on foot, half of which trapped in thousands of crowd. A friend who brought along a tripod and a portable ladder was forced to leave both of them back in the trunk.

Quite a coincident that the event took place only a few days after arrival of my new Canon 5D replacing my old Nikon D200, so it was my first Canon project. I spent the nights before to familiarize myself with its character, menu structure, and so forth. But a little time with the camera only on my front yard did not give me a lot.

Whilst I do not have a problem with menu structure, familiarizing myself with positioning of buttons and dials were the biggest challenge. Being the second was its exposure characteristic. However, I did aware that the event would be a real challenge for the strength of Canon 5D. I couldn’t wait to see how its full frame sensor results in two extreme situations: (1) Ultra wide shoots to capture everything in one frame, which I thought combination of full frame sensor and 17-40mm L lens should excel. (2). High ISO in low light as the schedule told that the fire would be set after the sun went down.

We got to the event after parade was over, so we lost a few important rituals. All of the ceremony’s elements including bade (carriage), lembu (the bull), and nagabanda (the holly dragon) are all placed on the ground of the royal setra (cemetery). We spent the whole half day to shot different angles of those magical stuffs and human interest shots of the thousands of crown in mix of local and foreigners. My game was wide angle shots with the brilliant 17-40mm L lens, and human interest with the very cheap 75-300mm which proven to work quite well in full frame DSLR. Ken Rockwell was right when saying that among the benefit of full frame is even crappy lens produce good shots.

As the sun went down preparation for cremation started by a series of rituals, including placing the body of the deceased into the bull. The fire actually set after dark burning both bulls with bodies inside. With very limited lighting (only a few lamps available on quite a wide ground), practically the only available light was the fire itself. The actual cremation took very short giving very limited time to fight the crowd to have a chance to fire just a few shots, during which times I replaced my lens a few times. I was disappointed with the performance of my ultra fast 50mm F1.8 which theoretically should excel in low light. In fact shots taken by my 17-40mm L F4 were by far better, even I had to shoot in high ISO to compensate is smaller aperture.