When the sun goes down.. - Trigora Beach, Indonesia

The Story:

This installment comes to you from Trigora Beach, a lovely shoreline on the eastern shore of the Island of Bintan in the Rhiu Province of Indonesia. The Islands of Batam and Bintan are favorite weekend getaways for many Singaporeans both because of the close proximity and the fact that things are much cheaper here than the Island nation. Commercialism has kicked-in over the past few years and it is now easier than ever to get to these islands with a lot of ferries plying to different "jettys" across the two islands at very frequent intervals.

While we are on the topic of Indonesia being relatively inexpensive, did you know that I actually spent about 2 million bucks for that trip? The high point of the trip was, aside from the snorkeling and the watersports that we did, handing out a tip of about 70,000 bucks to our taxi driver (a tout who hung onto us from the moment we left the ferry terminal actually) after about half-a-day of sight seeing. In case you didn't get it it, you will have to head over to this Wikipedia article.

As usual, this trip was put together at the last minute - in about 24 hours actually. I wanted to take the not so beaten path into the country and so instead of heading over to the Singapore-centric Bintan Resorts area (which according to internet sources seem to be a colony of Singapore for all practical purposes), we headed over to Batham and take the road less traveled.

After a day of navigating blindfolded through what looked like a hegde maze albeit with a lot of resources, we reached our resort - Yasin Bungalows, a beach front property at the Trigora Beach, about 40 KM from the main port of Tanjung Pinang in Bintan. After a few minutes of resting, we headed over to check out the backwaters of the South China Sea.

The Scene:

As I said on the opening line of this blog post, Trigora beach is at the eastern shore of Bintan and here I have a sunset shot from there. Ironical, ain't it?

This is one of the biggest take-aways that I got from this trip. When the sun goes down, don't forget to look away. When we arrived at this beach, I wasn't planning to shoot landscapes. In fact, the idea was to shoot a few portraits for my friends who I had traveled with. However as the sun was quickly setting behind us, the sky towards the North threw up some amazing oranges. I scrambled to put together my typical WideAngle setup and got a few shots to register that moment. Some wise man once said "Always have a backup plan when you go out to shoot something". I think that we should add that we should be prepared to shoot that unexpected moment that mother nature can throw at us anytime, especially if you are a landscape photographer.

The Shot:

ISO 100 | f/16 | 1 sec | Canon 10-22 @ 10mm | Canon Rebel XSi