Photo: BackHome Hostel, Malaysia - The Travelling Editor

Post image for Photogenic You: BackHome Hostel, Malaysia

I’d barely left the confines of the hostel. That was the point.

The sheer amount of literary and editorial chores mounting up into the metaphoric pressure hold crushing down on me, sending me on verbose frenzies of internal cerebral gibberish-churning. Basically, I needed to let off some steam – I needed to find a place, office away from home, where I can regroup after days of constant travelling, work through the tasks list.

I suppose I managed to find just the one. And more.

Even before I could find my way to BackHome – cutely named, is it not? – did I found my stimulant in writing from a chance encounter with a homeless man. Arising the next day – today – in the double dorm bed, at a tactfully late hour, I felt rejuvenated enough and ready to live my scribally hermitic existence in Kuala Lumpur.

Before I could raise a thought about the slipping of time, the blue transition of hue cast over the hostel’s backyard – a concrete-chic affair washed with whitened walls, sprouting in vines and enshrouded in cigarette smoke – ruptured in yellow saturation, as the night lamps flicked themselves on.

I’d lost track of the hour.

A cause for review: how pleased I was to revise on just how voluminous the literary conceptions I’d brought to life in a day.

Behind the lens

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Not only was it a sense of time I lost track of – I’d let luminosity in the scene diminish too.

Whereupon I decided to take a shot at capturing the decor of the hostel backyard, I may have left it a little too late. By the time I did remember to do that, there was but only a vague hint of shimmer available to my camera.

Compromises would have to be made. Like sacrificing the intensity of colours by opting for a shallower depth of field, or in this case the widest aperture my ultra-wide angle lens was capable of stretch to. F-stop of 2.8, to be precise.

Then there’s the ISO, or image sensor sensitivity, whacked up to some 2000 just to make room for the low light setting. Except at measurements as such, the image is guaranteed to be pixelated, and speckled in appearance.

Luckily I have Lightroom – the Adobe photo-editing software – to patch up the image. Vibrance and colour settings should compensate the dullness, while toddling between sharpness and noise reduction reduced the graininess and refined structures of objects in the photo.