Last month I had the privilege to travel to Yogyakarta, Indonesia with AirAsia and Nikon Philippines for the Search for 1st AirAsia Travel Photographer.

I was teamed with their official contender Velvet Lagman and AirAsia‘s Official photographer Mr. Adam Lee as our mentor!

Velvet is one of the 4 contenders for this competition who will be sent out to 4 different cities in Asia accompanied by professional coaches.

The challenge is to take photographs around the city and come up with a photo set composed of one photo for each of the 5 categories, namely; portrait, food, landscape, architecture and a 9-photo collage that will tell a story about the city’s culture.

No post-editing will be allowed, except for in-camera editing features. The Coach’s intervention will also be limited to dedicated coaching sessions during the trip and sharing of additional tips and tricks during photo walks. They will not be allowed to manipulate the Contender’s camera or take photographs on their behalf during photo sessions. Their entire journey will be shown to everyone together with the selected photographs.

A voting portal will be opened at the end of all four travels, wherein you will help us decide on who will be the first AirAsia Travel Photographer Powered by Nikon.

Velvet received a lot of coaching from Adam. He was super hands-on and was so generous in giving tips! I bet Velvet had a hard time with all the information overload since she only had a few days to learn the basic settings! I did’t really bothered them much for I know Adam needed to coach Velvet for I already know how to use my camera. From time to time of course, I did ask tips from Adam on how I can improve my travel shots.

And so for this journey, we went to exotic Borobudur Temple in Yogyakarta as one of our shoot locations.