Rodney Campbell's Blog

Our second stop on our day trip to Northern Bali was Pura Ulun Danu. I was really looking forward to seeing this temple – I’d originally intended coming here before sunrise on one of my two dedicated days of photography before I’d killed the D600 on the first morning 🙁

The temple complex is located on the shores of Lake Bratan in the mountains near Bedugul. Built in 1663, this temple is used for offerings ceremony to the Balinese water, lake and river goddess Dewi Danu, due to the importance of Lake Bratan as a main source of irrigation in central Bali.

Note: These photographs (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer.

We weren’t here at a particularly good time – it was very late morning, almost midday – it was very bright and the sky was very overcast but we had some low cloud and mist still hanging inside the crater over the lake.

The temple was a lot smaller than I had been expecting (from the pictures I was expecting a much larger and taller structure). It was still very beautiful sitting out on the lake and the best I could manage was to shoot with the camera down almost at water level for this monochrome rendition

Ulun Danu

E-PL1 + OLYMPUS M.14-42mm F3.5-5.6 L @ 18 mm sec at f/8, ISO 200

afterwards my girls and I had a paddle around the lake close to the temple in the water boats you could hire there

E-PL1 + OLYMPUS M.14-42mm F3.5-5.6 L @ 42 mm, 1/200 sec at f/8, ISO 200