Travel Photography: Focusing on “the small” in Malaysia – by Skyler Burt

When traveling and experiencing new cultures it is easy to become overwhelmed at first.  With all the new smells, sounds, and scenery bombarding your senses, the first few days in a new country can make even the most seasoned traveler reach for the pillow.

I remember the first few days in Malaysia, one of my first photography trips after leaving South Korea.   The first time I stepped out of the hotel with my camera was exciting, but ultimately exhausting.  Everything was new to me and I wanted to take

A woman prepares a wick for some homemade lime butter candles, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ©Skyler Burt.

a picture of it all.  I was like a slaphappy, crazed photographer acting like the streets of Kuala Lumpur were the press pool at a high profile case.  My photographic “don’t think, just shoot” approach for those first few days was not a good start to experience a new culture and it did not result in the greatest photos either.  Instead, I recommend sitting back, taking a breath, and focusing in on “the small.” Shooting “the small” means to dive into your surroundings and come away with colorful detailed snaps depicting the less than obvious aspects of a country’s culture.

Every country has their own way of pulling in those valuable tourist dollars and usually they are great places to make photographs.  Although tourist attractiosn are impressive, it might be better to leave them out of your photos.  Go ahead and get that photo out of your system, but then move your lens to “the small.”  Tourist attractions are usually full of detailed slices of the country’s culture.  Zoom in on the people, the patterns, the trinkets, or whatever inhabits your destination’s monuments to make a more personalized photograph.

Next time you photograph your favorite hot spot try photographing “the small.” Simply think of a few categories so as not to get distracted.  I usually try to focus on three categories.  Sometimes a place doesn’t have all three and I don’t necessarily try to make pictures in any order, but I like to keep these ideas in my pocket so I can pull them out whenever I lose my focus.  Detailed below are the categories I use most often when I want to find “the small.”  What categories you choose is up to your personal style or taste and the situation at hand, but it helps to keep “the small” in mind while you’re snapping your next great photo.

Category 1: Color

Detailed photos with the theme of "color," Kuala Lumpur. ©Skyler Burt

Color can be your best friend when shooting “the small.”  For the most part colors are everywhere, just lying around going unnoticed, but if you are keen to them, you will see them on every corner.  Try picking a color to shoot for the day.  It is amazing how certain colors repeatedly show up when you are looking for them. Look for it on walls, flowers, statues, people’s clothes, and everything you see throughout the day.  Each time you see it take a picture of it.  Try to find its opposite color and work with both of them together.  When it presents itself, color will do wonders for those travel photos.

Category 2: People

Detailed photos with the theme of "people," Kuala Lumpur. ©Skyler Burt

People are great reflections of their culture and pictures of people can really give a sense of a country’s identity.  When you take pictures of people, focus on what makes the person special to really make those travel photos come to life.  If you are looking for “the small” when people are your subject, try zeroing in on simple characteristics. If a person has interesting eyes, hands, a mustache, or even jewelry, these features can make quite a nice picture.   Another method is to concentrate on their actions. If the person is playing a musical instrument, look at their hands.  If they are dancing, try capturing the motion of their feet.  There are many possibilities when it comes to taking a detailed picture of a person and sometimes just pieces of them are enough to tell a story.

Category 3: Found Art

Detailed photos under the theme, "found art," Kuala Lumpur. ©Skyler Burt

The Found Art you see always changes depending on your location.  Found Art can be anything from brooms to doorknobs, neatly bound rolls of incense inside a well lit Chinese temple, a brightly colored mailbox hanging off an old wall, traditional teapots for sale or baskets stacked up and tucked away in an alley.  The number of things you will see during your adventure is endless.  Usually these little seemingly insignificant objects will make great travel photos.  More often, these little things can really symbolize the character of a particular culture and show everyone just how interesting the trip was.

When trying to make good travel photos, look for “the small,”it is important to capture slices of life which are symbolic to the particular culture.  When exploring with your camera try to look for different colors, unique characteristics of the people, found art lying around or whatever is strange or new to you.  Search high and low for these cultural cues so that your photos reflect what makes the destination so interesting.  Every country has uniqueness like no other and if you are able to capture it, people will love the photos from your travel adventures.

Detailed photos under the theme, "mail box," Malaysia. ©Skyler Burt.

The Portrait by Skyler Burt

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ©2009 Skyler Burt

As a travel photographer you must perfect your “travel portraits.”  This is something that I’ve been trying to do for a while, but I admit I just haven’t got to the sublime art of making people comfortable around me.  Or maybe it’s making myself comfortable around people, or both, I’m not sure.  Whatever it is, I know I must get over it and produce some stellar portraits or I ought to hang up my camera now.  Or at least shut myself inside a well lit room with a stove and focus on food photography, which for me would be the same.  Although, I wouldn’t pass up a good meal, especially after taking a nice picture of it.

For the last few days Heather and I have been trying to take pictures, and I’m going to stress the word “trying.”  I told Heather that “I’m going to make portraits of people no matter what, I don’t care if I have to ask a hundred people and ninety-nine of them say no, as long as I get one!”  After her eyes stopped rolling we cracked open our trusty guide book and after careful analysis we set out to find the Thean Hou Temple.  A temple, which the guide book describes as a three storey

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ©2009 Skyler Burt

beautiful Buddhist temple, one of the largest in Kuala Lumpur.  As travel photographers, fireworks shot from our eyes in a cartoon fashion and we immediately went to look for it on the map.  Maps by the way can never be trusted in guide books, unless they’ve been printed yesterday, especially of countries growing as fast as Malaysia.  It seems that in the six years since our guide book was printed Malaysia has not only changed all the street names but the directions of them as well.  The three maps that we have been using to try and navigate around the city all had a convenient little arrow pointing off the map with the words Thean Hou Temple.  Not too surprising.  Well, we weren’t going to let some small, useless arrow stop us.  At the bottom of the stairs in the lobby Heather remembers a stack of maps of the city that were different than ours.  I quickly ran down to grab one, but again the dreadful arrow was pointing straight off the map into the void that was our lack of direction.  “No worries” we say to each other,”we’ll just hop on the train and….”  So that was our plan.

It was not that bad of a plan, it had certainly worked well for us in the past, and the trains here are very convenient.  Among the plethora of trains that take you around the city we hopped on the MRT, or Monorail Transit.  This is my favorite form of transportation around the city, mainly because you get really nice views and the train has no operator.  That’s right, it’s completely automated with no driver,

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ©2009 Skyler Burt

fantastic!  Now, I don’t know if this is a regular thing, but it’s a first for me.  No one else on the train seemed to be too surprised and I didn’t want to look foolish and start wildly gawking at this newfangled marvel of modern technology, shouting that no one is controlling the train, so I kept my cool.  Once we exited the station in the area, which we suspected that little arrow on the map pointed, we were greeted by a short young man asking us “where ya from?”  This is a regular occurrence for us if we stand in one place for more than thirty seconds.  Usually the person asking, wants to sell us something or give us a overcharged taxi ride and out of sheer abundance of hearing this simple yet effective conversation starter, our most likely response is a shrug like we don’t speak English.  This man didn’t look to be peddling anything, so we answered as we always do, “Los Angeles, and you?”  This man, who’s name I can’t remember, seemed to be nice and informed us, in a whispering voice, that most tourists don’t usually venture into the area that we were in and that if we like taking pictures, we should go to, (insert name of district I can’t remember).  We asked him if he knew of Thean Hou Temple, but he didn’t.  So we walked for a while and he said he had nothing to do so he would guide us to the district of which he spoke of earlier.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ©2009 Skyler Burt

Right now in Malaysia, the people and government are really taking precautions over H1N1.  Everyone gets handed a little white mask just about everywhere you go.  Most people wear them, and our newly found man, the random protector of lost tourists, was following suit.  It lead to a pretty funny walk.  Every time we asked him a question, he would give us these really long responses, all I’m sure were quite informative, but nevertheless muffled by the mask like a Malaysian Darth Vader.  At the end of each response he would pull down the mask and let out a great laugh and smile.  We would nod and smile, blurting out a “Oh” and “Ah,” then our guide would pull up the mask and go on talking.

Soon we arrived at the district that he told us about, and we said our goodbyes.  He turned around and headed in the direction from which we had just come and was gone.  We never found the temple that day, but we saw it from the train heading back to our hotel.  After lots of walking in the wrong direction we found the temple the following day.  Like the guide book said Thean Hou is three stories and beautiful, but much newer than we had expected, and without the charm of some of it’s more ancient brothers.

About Us…. By Heather Marie Burt

This is a blog telling the stories and travels of me, Heather Marie Burt and my husband, Skyler Burt, two American travel photographers who love each other, and shooting travel. We have never had enough money, fancy gear or amazing careers, but our dreams have taken us around the world. We love to shoot and we push each other to shoot better and try harder. We are happy to be signed with Lonely Planet Images and have begged, borrowed and taught English to make our way through the countries that we have visited. We strive to learn about the people, cultures and the places we visit, just as much as we try to make good images. Understanding the heart of the culture and country is a rare gift, to be an outsider looking in. I hope we always remember where we came from, and that it is a privilege to enter someones life, even if it be just for a moment to capture a millisecond of their soul.

We were happy to be married on August 20th, 2009 in Sabah, Malaysia, and look forward to a life of traveling, exploring and loving life and each other.

The Rungus People…and the rum. By Heather Marie Burt

Our new blog!….Hi everyone, we are starting a blog, and I have started it appropriately with a letter that I recently sent home to my family. I cut out some of the family mumbo jumbo, but you can see that it was quickly written and without much thought, I’ll try to do better next time. These are the adventures of two Lonely Planet Photographers trying to push each other to shoot better and see the moments. Our blog is called Postcards and I think it is an appropriate name. My husband Sky and I love to travel and we have begged, borrowed and taught English to be able to afford our adventures through Nepal, Korea, Japan, Malaysia and mini adventures through Mexico and Thailand. We have a list of countries that we want to go to longer than Santa’s naughty list. Hopefully in the next couple of years we are able to go to all of the countries that we want to. We are currently sluming in Kuala Lumpur, awaiting a job and a visa in Oman, our supposed next destination. I hope to make lots of stellar pictures and stories both with our time left in Malaysia and in our new home. Postcards is a good name cause we’ll try to give you a sense of where we are in each blog entry with some pics and a bit of a story; the same concept as a postcard, but free.

Our adventure started with us reluctantly renting a car. I say reluctantly
because 2 days earlier we had returned to Kota Kinabalu having driven straight
back from the east coast 6 hours in a 600cc car, after offering a ride to a
German couple….and ALL their bags. Two Americans, Two Germans and an obscene amount of bagage should not be able to fit in this car, but it did, and we drove over Mt. Kinabalu in 1st and 2nd gear all the way back. The German couple were seriously nice, so it was worth it. So, back again to rent the cheapest car on
the lot, and they gave us the same one. Then off to the store for provisions. I
stood at the store for 30 minutes choosing a pb&j…should I go with Goober,
the only American brand, or should I go with something Malaysian which is most
likely going to be nasty? The goober says “America’s Favourite!” right on the
jar.  I thought to myself, “If that was an American opinion, favorite would be
spelled right.” So goober it was, and raisin bread, plus a bottle of rum per
Skyler’s request. Then we were off.

It was a 3 hour drive, but we managed to find it alright…and boy was it
secluded. The Rungus people are one of the something like 34 tribes in Sabah.
They have their own language, food and clothes, and that is what we expected to
see. Unfortunately they no longer walk around in their tribal clothes, and
instead they just wear dirty old clothes which is not very interesting or
photographic. They showed us to our room and told us that there was another
couple visiting them too, from New Zealand. The house that they live in is the
most interesting thing about these people. Their house is called a “longhouse”
and it is called that because it is literally a really long house. It is made
of logs and bamboo, no windows, no screens, just sticks. It is pretty much just a really long porch with a series of about 10 rooms in a row. When a father and mother had a house long ago, and a son got married, they would simply build 1 room on to the house. Each family lives in 1 room, and every time a son or grandson got married, they built on another room and soon enough, well you get the picture. So the longer your house was, the bigger your family. To this day many Rugnus families still live in these really long, wooden houses and they can be seen
all over the country side.

After we took a look at our room, we were called over by the owner
(grandfather) of the house who was sitting with 5 men of the house. He wanted us to have a beer with them in celebration of their newly built, outdoor eating area. We were obliged and quickly started conversation with them. 2 of the men spoke
English and they translated for the others. They told us that later in the
evening we could try their rice wine, and so Sky offered to give them a taste
of our Rum…..what a mistake! When we pulled it from the car they all passed
the bottle around staring at it like a kid on Christmas morning, they had never
heard of rum. They laughed at the character on the bottle, a pirate with a
parrot. Fast forward to 4 shots later and they were all asking for more,
smacking their lips with the finish of every shot repeating loudly “RUM, it’s
RUM.”  The worst part is that they kept forcing us to drink and we kept saying
as politely as possible, “We usually don’t drink it like this,” to which they
replied “Don’t you want to be my friend? We are being friendly!” We were some
of their favorite visitors, I’m sure of this. They taught us how to say cheers
in Rungus, and after Sky mistakenly asked about a nearby fruit tree, they told
one of the grandchildren to get us a fruit from it. It was a giant, stinky type
of durian. He jumped to the grandfathers request, climbing the tree like a
monkey and then all of the family stood at the bottom shouting which fruit he
should pick. The taste was horrible, but after the kid climbed the tree and
picked just the right one, we had no choice but to eat it. Plus they kept
saying, “Our traditional fruit, don’t you like our traditional fruit?” I could
still have night mares about that food, which is banned in almost all hotels in
Malaysia due to it’s repulsive smell that sinks into the fibers of the room.
And FYI, it does not go well with shots of rum.

By dinner time, the rum was gone and the men of one Rungus longhouse were very
happy. As for the dinner, another interesting and barely edible affair, we ate
our small portion  with a grin on our face and excused ourselves to our rental
car; Goobers never tasted so good, and it’s now this American’s favourite. haha
With second dinner finished, we headed back to the  longhouse, and boy was it
dark. Creeping back in, (hard to do with a house made of bamboo), we were
invited to another circle with the men now sitting on one side of the porch and
the women on the other. The women were talking and sleeping and the men were
busy, you guessed it, drinking rice wine. “We told you there would be rice wine
and my friend went to the other village to get it.” Oh no! The faulty
electricity in the longhouse went out just then, further suckering us in to
their now lantern lit circle, and we could only stand 3 or so rounds of rice
wine….oh gosh, that was a long night in the longhouse. We finally snuck away
and went back to our room, 2 foam mattresses covered with mosquito nets, but we
slept on one. It was a long and uncomfortable night

.

The next day the New Zealand couple said that they needed a ride to the tip of
Borneo, and although we planned 2 nights with the Rungus people, we took the
out and gave them a ride. A long 50 minute ride to the tip of Borneo that made
us wish we were back with the pirates of the longhouse! In that very 50 minutes
we decided that we were never going to get old and grumpy, cause this older
couple complained about just about everything in Malaysia in 50 minutes. We
didn’t plan to see that area, but it was a pretty drive and we made it back to
KK in the same day. Overall, it was not the trip that we planned and we did not
really get any useable pics, but it was quiet an adventure that we will
remember for a long time.