Lightening, Overcast & Humid, No Glimpses of the Moon

 

I did get up especially and spent nearly an hour with my camera pointed skyward, hoping for just a glimpse of the lunar eclipse, but the skies here in Jakarta remained heavilyovercast. In fact the clouds where so low they where well lit my the city lights. The constant thunder and lightening did backlight the clouds and give hints of a few gaps, but the slightest trace of the moon, or the shadow of the earth on it, never materialized. Adding to the challenge was the extreme humidity, so everything on the camera fogged up. Even after half an hour to acclimatize, I found I still need to have my cleaning cloth wrapped around the camera.

I did manage an available light photograph of the fountain, beside which I had set up my tripod.

Cross Town Traffic

The traffic in Jakarta is a really intense, albeit very slow experience, but it is a challenge to show in still photos. Such disorganised chaos that actually still moves is pretty amazing, but oh so tedious if you are in a hurry. To help those stressed out many street corners now host massive flat screens continually showing commercials!

Watching the Sky Cloud Over

This morning I had high hope because the sky was so clear (very unusual in Jakarta at this time of year) but as the day progress the storm clouds began to form and my nightfall it was totally overcast. Not so hopeful about photgraphing the lunar eclipse tonight.

Vertical stitching

The grey polluted and rain soaked Jakarta afternoon appears to be growing new sky scrapers each hour. It is a very vertical story like the tallest trees in a forest and not something that the normal landscape mode photo with a wide angle lens does any justice to. Even tilting the camera to the portrait mode (long axis running vertical) may not help a lot. Using a stitching program vertically (autostitch does this automatically, but other software may require rotation of the images to be stitched first) can produce a convincing tall image.

Jakarata Dawn

HDR Jakarta Sunset

HDRi Jakarta Sunset, originally uploaded by imageo.

The bracketted set of photos, used to create this HDRi image, were taken without a tripod and with long exposures. So without dynamic photo's pinwarping this would have just been a triple exposure blur-out.