Ranan Samanya Photography
fashion runways, portraits & personal branding, environment, and documentary photography
Tajur Biru Shoreline
We are still in Tajur Biru Island, approximately 2 hours by speedboat south of Bintan Island, where a bunch of good souls from The Humanity Forum is giving education support to both the sea nomads kids and other local children on the island. Here is a quick preview of the living condition over there.
Similar to other small islands in Indonesia, population is concentrated on the shoreline, which is a logical local wisdom of Carbon reduction in terms of transportation. There are two wooden jetties, one for passengers and another one for cargo (which constitutes mostly of seafood catch). All the government offices are also here. Less than 5 minutes walk uphill there is a primary school with what seems (to us who have been living in cities) to be a meager setup.
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Kingfisher
It was a little bit past six thirty in the morning in Temiang Village. Willy from the Humanity Forum and I were discussing a plan to help education of the sea nomads and the village over here on the small jetty. Suddenly he pointed to an object behind my back: “look, a kingfisher!”. I was first hesitating since it was a bit too far. Nonetheless I changed my lens, and walked a little bit closer. Took a few frames, then came back to Willy to continue our conversation. Not for long, as I noticed it flew closer and landed on top of a roof nearby, as if wanted to listen to our chat. So I grabbed back my camera, and shot a few more frames.
If you also want to know more about this program and ways to participate, please go to http://www.thehumanityforum.org/anaklaut/.
The vignette at the bottom of the image was created using OnOne Focal Point plugin for Aperture with three focus bugs.
all about mara
Yes, it is all about my lovely 11 years old daughter. Tonight she was in the big team who performed an operetta for her school’s second lustrum. And I was supposed to test my new knowledge about flash bouncing. Well the test went haywire, apparently my knowledge is still not that good. But the Charitas School stage went incredibly well, and mara was incredibly energetic: from the singing to the jumping and smiling. So (picture) quality aside, here is mara on stage with her friends. Thank you for watching.
Mother of the Sea
Last week we visited the children of the sea in my previous post, and and by now we know that they smoke (cigarettes of pipes) from young age. What surprised me during my short visit with the Humanity Forum was that women also smoke. I spotted an elderly woman returning home from the sea, smoking a pipe as she swiftly manouvered her wooden boat to her docking station in front of her house. Yes, the mothers of the sea are also avid rowers.
Children of the Sea
They don’t know their ages, not even their parents know. For them, it seems, absolute numbers in the age don’t mean a lot. Don’t even ask whether they are registered (in the village) or not. They can’t read, they can’t write. The younger kids don’t even speak Indonesian. They live, and sleep -for most of the year- in their wooden boats. They don’t mingle with the other children in the area. They are very shy. But they are healthy, despite the fact that they may not bathe as much as we do, due to the scarcity of clean water. They are all christian! The small lads smoke, or pipe. They are avid rowers. And definitely good swimmers. Meet the children of one small tribe of Suku Laut (sea nomads), Temiang Island, Riau Archipelago.
sitting in front of the head of the tribe's house, at the background is Tajur Biru island, where the Village of Temiang lies.
Fishermen’s Village – Sunda Kelapa
We’ve visited the harbour, now we take a very brief look to the village where many fishermen live, just a few hundred meters from the harbour.
All the houses were built above the water with bamboo poles as the base support. These are semi-permanent houses, with walls made from wood planks or plywood. Clothes lines could be seen either on the terrace or whenever there is a place to hang and dry laundry.
Trash was spread all one the water surface. These were either trash from the village or items washed in from the mouth of the river. A few houses have greens -makeshift vases and pots with flowering plants- a sign that they too, love some aesthetics, if possible.
Yes, living in Jakarta is a hard living. The people of the village is just one example. And this is one group that we rely on everyday for fresh seafood in the markets, or supermarkets.
Now every time we feel the urge to complain on something on the city life, remember this village. Remember that others are less fortunate and have the right to complain more. But they didn’t. Maybe.
portrait enhancement in 3 easy steps
I have come to respect Aperture more and more as a superb photo management and non-destructive editor application. Not only does it excel with its file management, but the zillions of available plugins enable us to edit images from within Aperture. Here’s an example of a simple portrait enhancement using Aperture, OnOne FocalPoint and Nik’s Color Efex plugins.
The image was taken using available light from an XL lamp, so I first corrected the white balance in Aperture. I also retouched Mara’s face a little bit to get rid of the distracting streak of white line above her right eye.
The background was a mess, so I fired up FocalPoint and defined a blur area. With FocalPoint we can use many predefined settings, choose a lens setup, and even define how many blades the aperture of our virtual lens should have.
I then edited the applied blurred image with Color Efex Pro to give a glamour glow which enhanced Mara’s skin tone and gave her face a little bit of, well…, that glamour look.
And here’s the final result: Mara in her Vietnamese Ao Dai. All done in less than 5 minutes, all without leaving Aperture. I wonder how many minutes will it take should I use the Photoshop approach….
a peek to Sunda Kelapa harbour
Waking up at four thirty in the morning to get to Jakarta’s oldest harbour and watching it starts the day is not going to be my daily dose, but to have experienced it at least once in my lifetime was worth it.
The scene was a mixture of wood and iron, with a very-very strong character on them as if letting us know that they are old, rusty, but not battered yet. Five dominant contrasting colours can be seen: white, blue, green, red, and yellow. And I enjoyed processing multiple frames into HDR.
HDR of 6 frames to grab the sun ray and give the correct exposure of the anchor.
Processing faux HDR on this frame gave me the bright red color of the trucks and more definition of the scattered lime on the road.
Another faux HDR to pop out the colours and more definition of the scattered lime.
At 7 o'clock the sun was already high. Three frames were used to make this HDR.
I wonder whether these filter press is still in use.
Ranan Samanya Photography 
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