MNS: Infamous Shwedagon Pagoda

Exposure: Aperture F16|Shutter Speed 25s|ISO100

Shwedagon Pagoda is one of the most sacred Pagoda in Myanmar. More information can be found in the wikipedia regarding it. Most of the time I avoid tourist attraction when taking photos at night unless I can find new perspective to present it.

Thought process: Staying in Yangon City, you will certainly see the Shwedagon Pagoda, and I have been seeing many images of the Pagoda, be it in real life, in post cards or drawings. I keep looking for new perspective to create fresh image for Shwedagon Pagoda until I found the location shown in the image above.

The big red triangle gate is not the entrance to Shwedagon Pagoda, in fact it is the gate of decommissioned army base, Shwedagon Pagoda however is located at the other end, what attracted my eyes to create image like this is the shape of the gate and Shwedagon Pagoda(they both have triangle shape), when the gate and Pagoda aligned properly in the image, it does bring our eyes directly into the Shwedagon Pagoda even though it is very small in the image, then I control the exposure properly so that the golden glow on Shwedagon Pagoda doesn't overexpose until detail is gone.

About the light steak, it requires timing and luck, there are traffic lights nearby so basically I just made rough calculation on timing to get where I want the light steak to show in the image, it requires couple of tries because you may get caught into something in 25 seconds time.