Another Point-of-View

I enjoy travelling as much as my son enjoys annoying me late at night for a glass of water. Don't get me wrong but I do enjoy travelling, whenever time and my bank account permits. As my other half puts it, "going somewhere nice for the school holidays is a must and it is our God given right to have you along with us". After 18 years, I know that she means business and should not be taken lightly when she uses the word 'God' in any part of her sentence. Alhamdulillah and thanks to her, I think I'm a well travelled person now. I've been to parts of the world that I can only dream of when I was young. Over the years, I've breath the cold air on top of the majestic Eiffel Tower, drank coffee on the streets of Amsterdam, watched the sunrise at the eastern shores of the UK, swam with the abundance of fishes that healthily thrive in the waters of Pangkor Island and enjoyed dinner at Penang's famous seafood outlets.

I took this beautiful scenery of Kea Farm valley during my recent visit to Cameron Highlands. It was taken at noon during the time when light from the sun was just about to blanket the rows of farm houses and vegetable gardens in the valley below. It has been a foggy morning to start off with and I knew I won't be able to capture the finer details of the scenery without sufficient ambient lighting. I took my time composing this shot. With a cup of hot tea next to me, I began to look for the right composition and time to capture what I had in mind. I snapped a few test shots to judge the correct exposure with my Canon 50D set on exposure bracketing mode. In this mode, I'm able to record three images in one single shutter release with each image having different exposures. It's truly a handy tool as I can roughly judge the correct setting for the final image. As I'm so used to take pictures in RAW format, I knew it wouldn't matter much as adjustments can be done later during the editing process in Lightroom. However, for this particular image, I wanted to see how well my 50D can cope with minimal editing in Lightroom for the final result.

The greyish skies were beginning to break at around half-past eleven. Sunlight began to pierce the sky and it only took a few minutes after that before I saw the first wave of thick cottony white clouds emerging from the hillside to the right of this image. I wanted to show the movement of the clouds as it slowly moved to envelop the horizontal plane on this image. The sunlight, during this point of time, wasn’t too harsh and was adequate enough in capture the fine minutiae of the valley below. The rows of wooden farm houses were clearly lit up as the first ray of sunlight hits them after a sunless morning. I would have preferred some human activities down at the vegetable farms but as I was pushed for time, and the composition had all fell into place to clearly capture what I wanted to show, I started pressing away the shutter button.

The end result came out exactly as what I wanted to show. Minimal editing was done to correct the curves and level of the colour tones. I used Photoshop CS5 to convert the image into black and white. A high contrast red filter in the black and white adjustments was used to add more punch to the clouds above the valley. The greenery tone of the farms below converted well in shades of gray to show the contradicting contrast of the skies and the land underneath it. I’m very pleased with this image and the final output was then sent to the printers. A simple black frame around the final print puts the final touch that this image needed before I finally hung it on the wall in my study room. Cameron Highlands is beyond doubt a glorious and stunning place to visit.