Taking photos in Bali

Bali offers a visitor a wonderful opportunity to practice photography. For someone like me who is from a northerly latitude, the things that stand out are the intense light, bright colors, amazing sunsets and shades that are created around dawn, interesting dress, unusual situations, tropical landscape and attractive people. You don’t have to be a genius to take decent photos here. Balinese people are often photogenic and like to smile.

Check out our new Bali photos page for some examples to go along with these tips.

Here are some of my tips and things I have found to be a barrier:

I use a small compact digital camera (2mg pixel) with a 512 mb chip. That means I can take a ton of photos, about 900 in fact. The limiting factor for me is battery power, so if you are planning on taking many photos, bring spare batteries.

People say that ‘magic hour’ is right around dawn & dusk. This is because the softest lighting is at that time. At midday it is the brightest. In Bali this is amplified as we are close to the equator and the midday sun is a cooker, casting deep shadows on people’s faces. In the tropics the sun rises and falls quickly, so ‘magic hour’ changes fast.

The atmosphere in Bali is humid and dusty, which is a tough environment for hardware. Keep your camera covered or in your bag, rather than loose and uncovered. On the flip side, I see great photo situations in front of me like something right out of a travel magazine. Those situations come and go before I can get my camera out usually. Using a compact camera, it takes a while for the thing to turn on and focus. By the time the shutter goes off the subject has walked 10ft , so its hit and miss when photographing people in motion. If portraits of Balinese people is your goal, get a camera that can shoot more than 1 frame a second and use a decent zoom lens.

Some of the best photo situations in Bali are mothers with kids, sarong vendors, temple ceremonies and food stalls. If you are shooting people use the tall format and try to get the eyes in focus with the background not distracting the view. Most people in Bali that I have come across don’t mind being photographed and many say thank you. One of the techniques I use if I want to get a somewhat natural shot of a local walking down the street, is to find a spot that might have good light, or an interesting background, focus on that very casually without raising the camera to my face and squeeze off the shot as the person walks into it. A lot of the time I just stop my motorbike and bang bang, no time for set up, just shoot and hope I get something. If someone is sitting or standing stationary, I might gesture that I’d like to take their photo. They will soon tell me if its not possible. I don’t push the issue if that is the case and never pay for photos.

People stepping in front of me happens all the time, and I don’t get mad about it. Its just going to happen in a very populated place like Bali. If someone has the bright sunlight behind them during the day, I use the flash to brighten their face. For inside shots of large areas, such as hotel lobbys I will use a small tripod with a 2 second delay.

I’ve got a friend who is a photographer in Bali and he told me ‘the golden rule for photography is you never show a bad photo’. My God I’ve done that plenty of times, but hopefully there are a few decent ones in there too.