Our Lady of Guadalupe Church

I took this photo on my last trip to the Philippines. It was very dark and no tripod was allowed so shot this handheld at ISO 800. My canon 50D did a good job at controlling the noise in the photo. Would have been nice if the light wasn't shining on the painting but not much I could do about that. I forget the exact details of this church but it is the Our Lady of Guadalupe Chapel inside Intramuros. I had been to the Philippines many times but never here so decided to wander around for the day exploring. It is worth the trip but beware, when you exit it is a nightmare trying to find a taxi.

I spent the evening tonight getting ready to fish as it is Senior Citizens Day tomorrow in Palau, which is a holiday. Got a new fishing pole I want to try out but it is kind of windy so will have to play it by ear.

Religion

Well, it's Sunday again in American Samoa. As you can imagine, church is a huge event in American Samoa, which is a great thing. But it also means that a lot of the beaches are closed for swimming and/or fishing. So you options become much more limited. But it could be worse, in Tonga, it was actually against the law to work on Sunday and to do a lot of the leisure activities. Now these folks take their religion to the extreme. I shot this photo in Leone, with the sun starting to go down. It is a beautiful statue, but sits behind a locked gate, which is a shame. I had to raise my camera above my head to shoot over the fence to get this shot. But I think it came out kind of good and is an appropriate post for a Sunday. In this case I just set my camera to aperture mode and used matrix metering. Some people were giving me funky looks so I wasn't sure it they were okay with me taking photos so didn't stay long. Normally I like to ask first but no one was around until I was ready to take the photo. Then it became a case of better to get the photo and ask for forgiveness later. Ironically, I have never had a problem with people letting me take photos except for one case. I had stopped to photograph a beautiful little church and actually asked and received permission from some teenagers that were there. I got the tripod set up and they left. While I was taking photos (from the outside of the church) two men walked up and wanted money for taking the photo of "their" church. They thought I would sell the photos and make a lot of money and wanted a share. You could smell alcohol on their breath so I just told them I was an amateur photographer trying to capture their beautiful church for myself. But I also told them I would delete the photos as I had no money to pay them. Pressed a couple of buttons on my camera (no, I didn't delete the photos) and told them the photos were deleted and made my way to the car with them following and made my getaway. It is hard to reason with drunk people.

Church

American Samoa must have more churches on a per capital basis than anywhere else. Everywhere you look, there is a church. While driving home after a rather uneventful day looking for photographs, we decided to stop at a little store to get some food. I looked up and found this beautiful cloud formation. Knowing I had to photograph it, I knew there was a church a couple of hundred yards down the road. I got in my car and drove to the church, which luckily had no cars parked in front. Knowing that the dynamic range (the difference between the brights/darks) would be too much, I set my camera on a tripod and shot a series of photos at different exposures. Back at the house I combined all the exposures into a HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo, using Photomatix (a program you can buy to help with HDR photos). I liked the way this photo came out. The moral of the story is you never know when a photo opportunity will present itself so be on the lookout.