Batu Caves
I travelled to Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur just for one day and decided to visit Batu Caves just one more time cause last time the weather was dull and cloudy and I was hoping that I got sun this time (spoiler: I did).
Early got up, around 6am, shower, hotel breakfast, taxi and I’m at Batu Caves. There is a quit long and high stairs to get to the main cave. But this time it was quit easy for me, maybe because I didn’t focus on it and mostly focused on taking pictures.
Anyway during my climbing to the top I didn’t shot anything useful, just couple of warm up shots.
I used Leica MP with 35mm Summilux and boy I love internal light meter. Previously I used only cameras without light meter so I need to meter fist and then adjust everything on the camera but now I did not need to do it and it was such a relief. I explain why. Conditions outside the cave and inside the cave are obviously different but also the weather was cloudy and different shadows so I needed to adjust camera settings quit a lot and this little indicator in the viewfinder helped a lot to not fucked up.
So I finally was inside the cave and man it’s huge, I was there before, but now with this light and shadows it looked so epic.
Monkeys were everywhere but they were not aggressive, did’t try to steel anything from anyone, they just bagged for food. But anyway I hided all the stuff I had so they could not steel something they somehow like.
Firstly I did far away shots, I mean far away from monkeys but quickly understood that they are not interested at all in my photography and besides they let me come very close while I was looking in the viewfinder, hiding besides the camera. Shutter is also very silent so it did not frighten them.
I’ve spent two hours in the cave tried to make some monkey portraits, sometimes got lucky. And time to time observed the continuous conflict between monks and monkeys who tried to steel some bananas and other fruits that belonged to monks and laid on the altar.
Afterwards I went down the stairs and this time I was more lucky and brave to take pictures of the monkeys in close distance.
At the foot is a large square and lots of people feed pigeons and also monkeys. I drank some water and found myself in the middle of the square, shooting all this mess.
Finally the time was up and I need to went back to the hotel and move to the airport.
Need to mention that I almost missed my flight that day, luckily it was delayed and also my camera couldn’t resist all this sweat from my hands and got rust on the lens release button but I would know about it later after returning back to Vietnam.
