I want to live by the beach. Plain and simple. I want to walk out of my front door and see this every day. I would smile, smile, smile, a huge smile every day.
Canon 7D | Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 | 10mm | f/13 | 1/180th | ISO100
I spent about a month in Singapore on business back in 2005. Coming back 7 years later it seems the whole downtown part of the city is new. Sparkling new buildings, manicured new public spaces, new bridges, but the same old humidity. I haven’t felt humidity like this since I left Texas!! Singapore is beginning to interest me significantly. There are definitely aspects of British colonial history. In some parts like little India, you can see the history of 100 years ago. The downtown core and Santosa Island, for that matter, are new and updated. They are worthy of any world-class city.
You will likely see a bunch of travel blogs focused on finding the cheapest place to stay. They are usually about hostels. However, since the majority of my travel is business travel, I tend to stay at newer, nicer places. Today’s photo is of the new Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore, just at dusk. I had worked a good portion of the day. Then I went back to the hotel to grab my camera. I walked around and grabbed dinner before my midnight flight to London. I had a little time to kill, so I ended up at the Marina. This was the view across the water. My only regret was that I didn’t have my tripod to make this more crisp.
Canon 7D |Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 | 28 mm | f/2.8 | 7/10 seconds | ISO 250
As noted previously, we stayed in Langkawi, Malaysia for a relaxing weekend. We stayed at a pretty nice resort. The resort had a great beach. It was on the edge of a nature preserve. The resort was protecting a natural coral reef. It had a small coral nursery where they were promoting the growth of new coral. There was wildlife all over this place. There were nice butterflies. Slightly annoying mosquitoes were present. I saw a rare colugo (flying lemur of South East Asia) which I had never seen before. Also, there was an interesting dusty leaf monkey that looks like it has white rings around the eyes.
But the most interesting has to be the macaque, an old world monkey. I have shared this story with a handful of people. It seems to be a trait of monkeys across Asia, as I’ve heard similar stories from various people. After a long afternoon on the beach, we enjoyed drinks and got some well-deserved sun. We collected our beverages and a small bowl of peanuts. We were munching on those to take them back to our room to get ready for dinner. On our walk, we came across a macaque about mid-way up a tree acting all innocent. We put down our drinks, including a can of soda. We also set down the bowl of peanuts. This allowed us to get our camera out and take a few photos of this posing macaque. It seemed as though not even 1 second passed before about 6 other macaques jumped out of the bushes. They quickly laid claim to our drinks and our nuts!! I really thought that they might try to make off with my sandals too!! They have perfected the sleight-of-hand trick. One poses for unknowing tourists to put down their food and possessions. Then, a handful of others wait to make off with the goods!!! We ended up watching these guys climb the walls onto various balconies and even break one of the balcony umbrellas. I’d say they outwitted the humans that day.
Canon 7D | Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 | 55 mm | f/2.8 | 1/60th | ISO400
Canon 7D | Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 | 31 mm | f/2.8 | 1/40th | ISO125
A few weekends ago, we had overlapping business trips in Singapore, so we took the weekend in Langkawi, Malaysia. We stayed at the Andaman Resort, on Langkawi Island. The staff claimed it was one of the top 10 beaches of the world. I’m not sure I believe that. However, it was pretty great. We flew out on Friday afternoon/evening and returned to Singapore on Sunday night. It was a great weekend. Here’s a little view of that slice of paradise.
Canon 7D | Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 | 10 mm | f/14 | 1/250 seconds | ISO200
I’m a couple of months late on this one. We were moving and I didn’t have access to my computer. I couldn’t process and get all our shots sorted. No further explanation needed – Sydney New Year’s Eve fireworks, taken from an apartment party in Rose Bay.
Canon 7D | Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 | 55 mm | f/4 | 2 sec | ISO 200
Today we’re back in Iceland for a quick stop. This waterfall was along a path just outside of Thingviller. We stopped at the main Thingviller site and walked around a bit. After visiting the tourist spot, we walked down and around the main rocks. A much smaller waterfall appeared behind a little cliff. We spent so much time here because it is one of the two spots in the entire world. Here, you can see the joining of two continental plates above ground. It really is fascinating. Once you understand, you realize that you are standing on two continents.
Thingviller, in Icelandic, means Parliament Plains. It is where, for two weeks each summer, the would hold Parliament, resolve any disputes and pass laws. Really a remarkable place.
Canon 7D | Canon 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 | 14mm | f/11 | 1/50th | ISO100 | 3 image HDR
Yea, I had never heard of it either. It is in the state of Sabah in Malaysia. It is a small (~600,000k population) city on the island of Borneo. Borneo is also the third largest island in the world. It covers approximately 750k sq/kms. While there is a world renowned orangatan reserve, we didn’t make it over there. We chose a nice relaxing weekend by the pool and enjoyed cocktails at the sunset bar.
Today’s shot is of that Sunset Bar – tomorrow I’ll post one of the sunset that we saw.
Hi all – I’m sending this from our new digs (temporary housing) from our new country (way down under). Couldn’t be more excited to be down here and having new opportunities to travel and take photos. We (the other half of Paul Rin) have been plotting and scheming on new places to travel. We are proposing a new project – Beaches of the South Pacific – and yes, that’s just a great reason to get me to more beaches…
Today’s photo goes back to last spring and to Yakima. We are still unclear on what mountain that is in the distance, but pretty sure it’s Mount Rainier. This photo was taken at about 8:30 PM, as the spring day was winding down. Looking forward to more very different vineyard lands in the near future.
Canon 7D | Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 | 55mm | f/4.0 | 1/160th | ISO100
In Iceland, most people won’t admit, but they believe in fairies. In Iceland, they turn roads so they don’t disturb the fairies. They skip erecting buildings to respect these beliefs. They generally respect things which the rest of the world doesn’t believe actually exist. It’s sort of a fascinating cultural phenomenon.
The more interesting question is ‘where do the fairies actually live’? Here’s an example.
Canon 7D | Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 | 24mm | f/4.0 | 1/250th | ISO400
I’ve heard people say it before. They say Africa gets under your skin. They also say it’s easy to fall in love with. You might find that you get sucked in. That certainly happened to me. I absolutely fell in love with Africa. So much so, I cannot wait to get back.
We spent about 5 days in Tanzania on safari routing through Nairobi on the way in and out. While we didn’t get to climb Kilimanjaro, we drove through Ngorongoro, the Serengeti and the Maasai Mara National Park. We’ll have to go back for Kilimanjaro.
Today’s shot is from our first day on safari. We drove out to a chimp reserve. While we initially got out and walked around, we mostly moved through the park by car. We came across this guy just hanging out about 15 feet off the road. He sat there so easy, I’m sure contemplating the more existential questions of life.
Canon Rebel XSi | Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L | 400mm | f/7.1 | 1/400 | ISO500
Paul Rin Travel Photojournalism 