Nine Gods Festival

 The Nine Gods Festival, a celebration of nine days starting with the welcoming of the deities from rivers – with triangular flags lining the streets and people becoming vegetarians… (only temporarily) – and ends, with the deities sent back to the rivers with long procession march down the streets to rivers.

I was in Alor Star when the sending back march occurred on Monday, so that’s where I shot this. As if part of the festival, it would almost always rain during the march of the deities back to the rivers. Luckily it was only drizzling and with the trees above, I was sheltered.

Rain? Just take out the umbrellas.

Treat or tricks?

Even the Indians would come for performance.

Flag – see him trying to balance it on his palm, on his head, or use his mouth…

The ambitious ones would try more daring moves.

A family of three fixated on the marching performances.

The “possessed” mediums for the deities.

The “goddess” sprinkling blessing water onto the crowd – and she also “blessed” my camera…

Well, the whole marching procession took more than an hour just to move pass a point, that’s also the duration I stayed for it.

[Landscape] Flowing water…

…and rocks.

There are only these two elements in the photos here, nice and simple. Of course the water was shot in long exposure to create that blurry look. As the river is rather shallow at that area, I was basically standing in the water with my tripod set up on stones… thank goodness my camera did not get splashed or take a bath in the river, no matter how dusty it may look.

When the day became dark, so does the light available on the river.

In case you were wondering, this is just somewhere near Sungai Petani.

[Landscape] Paddy fields

At this time of the year the paddies are harvested and the fields cleared for the next season of paddy plantation. Without the usual green patch covering the wide field the exposed water surfaces bring forth another kind of scenery before our eyes: the water providing excellent reflection to the sky; people fishing for keli by the pools of water; children playing; birds flying about the fields…; and of course the farmers work on the land with their ploughs, ensuring another good harvest for the next season, and to provide us with more rice to eat.

A paddy field with Gunung Jerai overlooking it in the background.

For such a scene sunsets make good photos…

A lone tree stands in the middle of the field.

A woman fishing for keli – for such a time when one does not wish to buy fish, the easy and patient way would be to go down the field and catch some yourself. Cooked properly the keli fish is delicious.

The farmers working on the land.

 

Birds would come to the fields for hearty breakfasts by feasting on the abundant insects. I had wanted to capture photos of the long legged white birds in the fields, but they would soon fly away as I approached them… and at 200mm my lens is simply not long enough to catch them. As compensation there are swallows instead. Even then I still need to crop the photos to get what you see here.

[Landscape] Lightning

Lightning is rather hard to shoot, not least because it’s quite unpredictable in appearance, you also need patience in waiting for it to flash and get that good shot out of who knows how many hundreds of exposure.

Moving on, these few shots here were one of my early experiments and trials on shooting lightning, as seen from my condo overlooking KL. The distant lightning made good photos if you could get them.

 

Next time when I could hunt more lightning I’ll try some different composition and framing.