Capturing Bali beyond postcards and influencers
- May 18
- 5 min read
In Bali, not quite home but getting there
I’ve never lived in Bali, but I’ve been more than once and also for relatively long periods, so sometimes I feel I can almost call it my 3rd home (second is Hong Kong...).
The first time I went there was in 2017 and I was traveling with a couple of friends, so the plan was simple, sightseeing, relax, have fun, basically all the things people usually do on a first trip like that.
It was great, of course, but at the time there was not much time for my photo experiments, apart from the ones I took as memory of that experience.
Things changed years later: in 2024 I went back, this time for a series of circumstances that I'm not gonna explain here and made me reconsider my plans, staying this time for a longer period. Bali felt different immediately. It was already a busy place when I first visited, but coming back years late it changed even more: certain areas, especially Canggu, which back in 2017 was (luckily) totally ignored by the Instagram "gurus" and not more than a small village with rice fields, had turned into something else entirely: few locals, influencers everywhere, guys walking around like they just stepped out of a fitness advertisement, girls equally focused on being seen...nothing wrong with that of course, but it was not exactly my environment (I cannot compete with those muscles for sure...).
So I moved to Seminyak, which felt like a better compromise. Still busy, still part of the same ecosystem, but slightly more relaxed, slightly more grounded.
Then I went back again in 2025 for another longer stay, another attempt at understanding what it means to live and work somewhere that is not really home.
These times I had the change to take some time for myself and for my photography experiments. As you can imagine, Bali is totally the opposite of places like Hong Kong: here you don't have extreme verticality, no urban jungle or dense architecture forcing your eye into specific direction, but lot of landscape, green and open spaces.
Landscape is not exactly where I feel most comfortable with photography: I have always been more drawn to cities, structure and chaos that can be framed and controlled, so in some way shooting in Bali was a challenge and using multiple exposure felt even more challenging.
Reflections and various failures
In the beginning it was quite frustrating, since most of the attempts did not work. The images felt empty, or forced, or simply uninteresting. There is a moment when you realize that your usual way of seeing things does not translate well into a different context and you either adapt or stop and go back to the environment you feel more comfortable.
However, I kept going and day after day I found myself walking along the beaches of Seminyak, often at sunset. Not because I had a clear idea of what I wanted to shoot, but because it was the only moment of the day when the light started to do something interesting.
The colors in those minutes were amazing, painting the sky, the ocean and the reflection on the shore, tones of orange, yellow, blue that changes minute by minute...
As I said, what really caught my attention was not the sky itself, but what was happening on the ground: the wet sand, the small pools of water left by the tide...everything was acting like mirrors, so I decided to strart from here.
That was the moment when things started to make sense again: I began experimenting with multiple exposure using those surfaces as a base layer, combining silhouettes of people walking along the shore with inverted or rotated frames. Some of the most interesting results came from shooting a second frame at 180°, creating compositions where reality and reflection blended into something that felt almost abstract but still recognizable.
People became part of the process almost naturally and you don't really need to look for them since they are everywhere, especially at sunset, walking, stopping, taking pictures of each other, building their own small narratives in front of the ocean.
Some of my favorite images came from these simple interactions. Silhouettes crossing the frame, reflections stretching and breaking under their feet, the horizon dissolving into layers of light and shadow. Nothing complicated, but somehow still satisfying, even though in a different way than many of the more complex shots I normally took in places like Hong Kong or Japan.
When it started to work
One moment was particularly rewarding: there were hundreds of people on the beach, most of them doing exactly what you would expect, so selfies, ready to pose against the sun, etc...
At some point I noticed a girl wearing a very nice white dress, standing against the sun while a friend was taking photos of her. A very standard scene, almost predictable.
Instead of shooting her directly, I crouched down and pointed the camera towards the ground to her reflection. The reflection of this girl in the shallow water was a great subject for an abstract photo, slightly distorted, moving with every small wave, but still clear enough to define her shape.
I started shooting there, focusing only on the reflection (...and btw, I think she didn't even realize how much I was attracted by her reflection in the water, since she was super focused to get the perfect pose). The result was something completely different from the original scene. The dress became a fluid shape, the body almost dissolving into light, with the entire image shifting from something ordinary to something a more abstract and ambiguous.
Another day I went to explore a relatively new area called Nuanu Creative City, a sort of cultural space where art, architecture and nature blend together. It's a very cool space, one of those kind of hubs where you feel inspired while walking. One of the highlights there is a striking sculpture of two heads by the artist Daniel Popper: this became another unexpected playground for my multiple exposure experiments. I started combining the sculpture with the surrounding greenery, giving me interesting results and I like the way the leaves and tree branches interact with the shape of the head.
Looking back, Bali was never going to be an easy place for me from a photographic point of view, artistically speaking is outside what they call my "comfort zone" (oh, God, how much I hate this term!), but it made me understand that sometimes you need to push your boundaries and "cross the borders" of what you feel is your territory and you still can get interesting images.
Most of the time the percentage of failures is pretty high and that's totally normal, but sometimes, if you stay long enough and start "breathing" the place, the results can be very rewarding.
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