Looking ahead

The next stage of my major project is not yet due, however I had the fortune to be invited by my wife to join her and her friends on their annual temple tour. Each year several of her university friends hire a van and visit nine Buddhist temples to pay their respect and give merit.

Fortuitously the subject of my next Major Project stage is 'temples'.

I also had the great luck of meeting someone who was willing to lend me their Nikon D3s. This is the best camera around for low light photography, and knowing that I would be photographing in low light even during the day, I was lucky to have it for the temple tour.

The colours and dynamic range of the finished images is far superior to my Nikon D300, but the ability to shoot in near dark was something I just couldn't get over. Normally I would have taken all the indoor shots below with a tripod. On this day every shot was hand held, even where I was bracketing the exposures.

Unfortunately, the colours are not very bright in these low res copies, but the concentrated day out really helped me put together some great shots and ideas for future images.

At each temple visited I consciously decided to try a different approach. Some temples I went down low, some I went for symmetry, alternative views, HDR, the sky, interaction, close ups, etc, etc. This is just a small sample of the images I captured yesterday.