Adam Monk Photo Tours

Relying on your light meter…

…Continuing on from this Previous Post

One of the main difficulties you will encounter when shooting into the light is that your light meter will almost certainly produce a dud result.  Your camera’s light meter assumes a subject of mid tone grey, so to balance the tones with the intense bright light coming straight into the lens it will show your subjects as black silhouettes, usually with no detail information in the shadows.

Your image will usually turn out very dark…

I still remember reading the exposure guide pictograms on the Kodachrome 64 box when I was young.  It showed in wonderfully simple graphics how you should always shoot portraits with the sun over your left or right shoulder so that the bright sunlight shines directly onto your subject, and never with the sun in front of you shining into your camera lens…  This gave us many generations of family photos of people with screwed up faces as they squinted directly into the bright sun.

Into the Light for Drama

Regardless of what the old Kodak film box says, shooting into the light can produce some stunning results if you are careful with your exposure and practise a little.  

It’s not going to be right for every subject, but there are many situations when an image shot into the light can add enormous drama to a scene, especially if you can create strong shapes and take advantage of the shadows produced.

The image to the right was taken at the Mongar Tshechu, a cultural festival in the far East of Bhutan, shooting into the light, deliberately.

Look at the shadow stretching out in front of the dancer, see how it’s adding so much to the narrative and the dynamic nature of the image?

You could even say that the subject of this image is the dancers shadow rather than the dancer himself.

This shadow also gives a real 3D depth to the image, something that can be difficult to achieve with a 2D medium like photography.

As you may have heard, the Bhutanese government has put the price of their daily tariff up, starting from next year. Way up… They are doing this in an effort to control their rampant tourism industry and mitigate the damage that tourism can do to delicate cultures and fragile ecosystems.

After nearly 3 years of (covid imposed) no photo tours to Bhutan I am headed back there in 2023, for my 11th trip.

I completed the details on the website a few days back and sent a short notification email to 8 people who had expressed a specific interest in Bhutan for 2023. As of today there are 4 places taken already, which leaves just 2 left…

I will be sending out a general newsletter later this week, and with only 2 places remaining I don’t imagine they will last long. If you think you might be interested in my Bhutan photo tour for 2023 you can read all the details HERE>> If you have any questions regarding this tour please send me an email to tours@adammonk.com

That’s it folks, the last spot for my Bhutan Photo Tour for November 2018 is gone, the tour is now fully booked.  If you were considering coming it’s now too late for this year, but I’m already planning the 2019 tour, I’m just waiting for festival dates to be announced.  So if you would like early warning for my 2019 Bhutan Photo Tour send me an email tours@adammonk.com

It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster ride for the booking of my Bhutan photo Tour for 2018.  A week ago there were 2 spots left, then it was fully booked, then I suddenly had 2 cancellations (health reasons) so I was back to 2 available places, and now I have just one…  If it sounds interesting to you, click HERE to read all the details.

This year, for the first time since 2012 I am not taking a photo tour to Bhutan.  It’s not that I am sick of Bhutan,  quite the contrary, I enjoy Bhutan more each time I go.  It was the roads…  The extensive road works from one end of the country to the other were making the driving somewhat unpleasant.  The good news is that the road project is well underway and is due to be completed by the end of this year.

The other good news is that I am running another 15 day photo tour to Bhutan for 2018.  As if that were not enough, I am also taking along special guest photographer Paul Hoelen as an additional Photo Guide.  Paul is a highly acclaimed and very talented professional photographer residing in Tasmania.  He has many years of experience guiding tours and teaching photography skills, and he is a lot of fun to hang out with.  If you would like to read more about Paul and the plan for the 2018 Bhutan Photo Tour click HERE>>

Dates are out for my Bhutan Photo Tour for 2018.  I’m still building the web page with all the details and the full itinerary, but all the planning is done the itinerary is written and the hotels are reserved.

15 days in Bhutan.

This tour will follow my tried and tested plan of 15 days in Bhutan, a small group travelling in cars (not a bus) with only two participants, a local driver and a guide per car.

2 Cultural Festivals.

I base the itinerary of the tour around the local cultural festivals, which are a major highlight of the tours.  This year the timing is finally right for me to include two festivals I have been wanting to attend for years, but I’ll tell you more about that later.

Dates for my next Bhutan Photo Tour are…  4 – 19 November 2018.

Full details and itinerary will be out soon, if you would like to be kept up to date you can email me tours@adammonk.com or you can just keep an eye on the blog.

Something a little different here, shot from a high pass in the Himalayan mountains of Bhutan during a brief pause to change a flat tyre and admire the view… I think in the opposite order though, the tyre went flat after we stopped to admire the view.  Still, it gave us more time to watch the changing light and the clouds floating past below, bumping into the trees and high ridges.

I used a 200mm tele to really isolate this small scene from the mountainous background.  The light was streaming down the valley and the cloud was strongly side lit giving it this magical luminous quality.  The mountains behind the cloud are just visible as the slanting diagonal lines in the background.

Bhutan Photo Tour 2016 almost full.

I’ve got just 4 places left on this years 15 day Bhutan Photo Tour, leaving October 3rd from Bangkok, we have managed to coincide with three cultural festival this year, something I have never managed before.

The above image was shot with the Nikon D810 and the Nikon 70-200 f4 lens, it’s had a little cropped off the top and bottom, but very little post processing.

Contrasting with the previous entry of the Himalayan landscape without any visible sign of humans, I also love the Bhutanese traditional rice terracing found all over the mountainous countryside, like this image from the far East of Bhutan in the region of Mongar.

Bhutan is a land of small holding subsistence farming, and the vast majority of the land is still under thick native forest, in fact the forest cover is increasing yearly and it’s basically forbidden to clear new land for farming.  The Bhutanese landscape is very mountainous, the valleys are steep and with only a few exceptions, narrow, so every bit of flat space is utilised carefully for cropping.  When the land is not flat, they make it flat with terracing.  Very clever use of space and it makes for beautiful scenery.

If you would like to come with me to Bhutan I run a fabulous small group (just 10 people) photo tour there every year, you can see all the details on my Bhutan Photo tour page.