Category: Travel

One of the intimidating things about candid photography is summoning one’s courage to unabashedly point the camera at the subject of interest. Depending on the culture of the local society, you might be rewarded by unwelcome stares, or worse still, swears and curses from the subjects involved. One thing about the Balinese is that they are often quite happy to have their pictures taken, to the extent that the mother in the above scene was even able to breastfeed comfortably in public, and despite knowing that our cameras were trained on her and her child. Taken at a traditional market in the Bedugul area (click the geotag icon on the top left of the picture to see the location).

We arrived a little late for the Kecak Dance performance at Uluwatu during our recent trip to Bali. The ushers were kind enough to let us sit right next to the performance area knowing that we wanted to take pictures. This area turned up to be perfect in the end as we could see the activity happening backstage even during the performance. The above candid moment made it worthwhile even if it meant that I did not get a good angle to take pictures of the actual dance performance.