Itsukushima Shrine of Miyajima

So today, I’m in Bali, Indonesia, and I finally have an internet connection and some downtime. So, I decided to continue working on my photos from Japan while kindly feeding the local mosquito population. I’m in one of those open living room hotels, so there is all sorts of wildlife around me. Mainly mosquitos and geckos. With a couple of frogs. Oh, and some strange dude just walked in saying the front door was cracked open. It probably was, making me wonder if he was just being a nice dude that I think maybe worked here and was just doing a friendly little security check, or if he was Mr. Sneaky Pants and going around checking for unlocked doors so he could steal stuff. I guess I’ll never know. I wonder if my laptop will fit in the safe.

I have taken some awesome photos of Bali today and yesterday but haven’t had time to process and sort them all yet. That might be tomorrow’s post if the internet still works. 😉

Today’s Photo

This is the Itsukushima Shrine of Miyajima, Japan. It’s off the coast of Hiroshima. They built this shrine about 400 years ago, and they built it in the water because they believed the island itself was a god.

I got lots of great photos of this thing, but I will start off with this one. I’ve started applying some textures to my photos as an experiment and wanted to write a little about it. I feel that a shot like this that is otherwise uninteresting really helps add character and mood. I’m still experimenting with this technique and want to share what I’ve learned eventually. I know some photographers like to just throw the texture on there, switch it to overlay, and call it a day, but I really think that doing it right takes a bit more work than that. Multiple layers, multiple duplicated textures, multiple blending modes, etc.

When I get back to the US of A, I plan on doing some really nice free tutorials on this and some other tricks I’ve figured out. If you’ve noticed my blog history, I’ve only really been doing landscape photography for about three months now and have progressed with it pretty quickly. I’ve noticed a lot of the good landscape photographers don’t freely sharing their secrets, most make you pay for absolutely every bit of knowledge with flatbooks or tutorials. Some even make you pay for knowledge on mistakes you might be making that you don’t even know about 🙂 So I’m going to be that guy.