Standing a Quarter Mile Above the Ground in Malaysia’s Petronas Towers

Gazing out across the sprawling city of Kuala Lumpur from atop the Petronas Towers has been high on my to-do list since first seeing the buildings in the movie Entrapment, staring Catherine Zeta Jones and former 007, Sean Connery. It was finally checked off during a backpacking adventure across Malaysia and SouthEast Asia, all of which is chronicled under the site’s STORYTELLING MENU.

A whale statue sits beneath the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Me in a broken fountain taking photos of a whale sculpture beneath the Petronas Towers

The whale photo above led to one of my favorite memories from the entire trip when I kicked off my flip flops and waded into a broken fountain to get right under this whale. The image was captured using a 10.5mm fisheye lens on a Nikon D80.

I later post processed it in Photoshop using lots of levels, curves, exposure and other adjustments.

Check out more of my photography from Malaysia including Melaka, Perhentian Islands, Cameron Highlands, Kuala Lumpur.

The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia reflect in the windows of a nearby office building

When built, the Petronas towers were the tallest buildings in the world at 1,558 feet each. Today, a Dubai holiday is needed to stand atop Burj Khalifa: a 163 floor tall building that shatter’s the record with a nearly-double 2,717 feet.

This view of the Petronas Towers comes from the skybridge on the 41st floor and was taken with my fisheye. As I wrote in my blog entry titled Chinatown, The Entrapment Towers and the Harlem Globetrotters in Kuala Lumpur:

We woke up at the crack of dawn the next day and headed back to the Petronas Towers to queue up for two of the 1,400 free tickets issued daily to go to the skybridge on the 41st floor. Our book advised us to arrive early or be disappointed so we got there an hour before go time and found ourselves pretty much at the front of the line and people still coming in and going up hours later. Oh well, we still got to go up on the second elevator ride of the day. The view from the top was spectacular and the light perfect.