As freelance rice planters, their job is to transplant the rice shoots, spaced out, into the flooded paddies by hand. These ladies were happy to tell him all about what they do. So Tommy hops off his motorbike and strikes up a conversation with the ladies planting in the field. Which in turn is how you form great memories, that you then cement with beautiful photos. Which is how you meet interesting people and learn cool things. Having a camera with you is a great excuse to go up and talk to someone.
But about 20 miles into his trip, he spots some freelance rice planters working the paddies. He loads his photo gear onto his Honda Vario scooter and heads out into the pre-dawn darkness from Surakarta, traveling east en route to Tawangmangu which is 25 miles away. In the west, lots of successful photographers have started out this way, taking advantage of the cloak of early morning. Seriously, at 5:00am, the world is your oyster. You can pretty much shoot anywhere without a permit. But there is a time-worn secret: get your butt out of bed really early and be in all set and in place before the other blue hour starts to happen. People would take them to get access to great locations and to finally learn the magic f/stop to get beautiful landscape photos.Īs we all know, there is no magic f/stop. But for this particular morning we get to sleep in a bit, as he is not leaving until 4:00am.įun little aside: I have a friend, Chris Hurtt, who used to lead landscape photography workshops in the San Fransisco area. He says he often leaves his house as early as 2:00am to get to a good site in time to photograph the sunrise. Tommy is a sculptor by trade and a photographer by avocation. After I reached out to him via Instagram's messaging function, he wrote back and graciously shared some of the details of this particular outing and the resulting photo. Which, through their Instagram account that I follow, is how I came across the photo above by Tommy. They are a super active bunch, with social get-togethers, classes, and a general vibe of people of different experience levels helping each other in all sorts of ways. I mean, how could I not want to visit there? Cool and industrious people, amazing scenery, fantastic food, and a killer Vespa modding community:Īnd then to top it all off, there's the ID-Strobist community. And the latter definitely includes Indonesia. The former list includes places like Hanoi, Vietnam and Lisbon, Portugal. I follow hashtags of places I know and love, and places I can't wait to visit when all of this COVID-19 mess is over. Trapped at home these days, I currently do a lot of my travel vicariously through Instagram. That's Tommy, above, whom I first met via Instagram. Java is the economic center of the Southeast Asian nation, and features the city of Jakarta on its west end and a lot of volcanoes scattered all over the island.
He divides his time between the cities of Bekasi and Surakarta on Java, one of the main islands among the over 17,000 islands that comprise Indonesia. Our local guide and guest photographer for this trip is Mr. Up for a little Lighting Cookbook field trip to Indonesia? Yeah? Then let's go. Seeing as no one is doing much traveling these days, I thought it'd be fun to pay a visit with a Strobist reader photographing somewhere far away.