Halloween @ ACM

These photos were taken on Halloween, at the Asian Civilisations Museum. Took me a while to post, but here they are.



I never had the guts to ask people in public to pose for my pictures, but such was the atmosphere of Halloween, with people in their costumes, that the moment I lifted up my camera, people actually started posing for the camera without me asking. First time I felt like a photographer. :)



For this shot, I asked "can I take your picture?", and totally in character, she paused in her tracks and dead-panned her zombie look to me.



A bunch of Japanese kids were running around and they were camera whores, posing for me. I got down low and caught this pretty purple witch.



As part of the festivities, a talk was conducted by Singapore Paranormal Investigators. This shot is of the crowd and it seems to capture a certain tension and atmosphere in the air.



There were many great costumes around that night, some spooky, but all-together fun.

Postscript: I shot all these shots with the 50mm, set to 1/50 at 1.8, the supposed slowest one should set for handheld shots. While some shots were blur (mostly the fast moving children), most turned out well.

Man on Pulau Ubin

There is some ambiguity at first as to where this shot is taken, but look carefully and you'll soon realise exactly where this is.

Processed to give it a 'grungy' look, and to bring out the interesting freckles on the man's face.

Paradise Tree Snake Chrysopelea paradisi

This cute snake was spotted by my brother at the beach after cycling. I used full zoom to get in as close as possible with lots of DOF, while my focus and aperture to ensure that its eyes were is sharp focus. Processed in lightroom to give it 'pop'

Interesting Facts: Also known as flying snakes. Of course, they cannot fly but they can flatten their bodies and glide from tree to tree. This species is very common in Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve. More information at http://www.flyingsnake.org/

Size: 120cm
Diet: Lizards, frogs, geckos, bats
Activity: Diurnal and arboreal
Habitat: Mangrove forest, lowland forest.

Red Sunbird

This was shot in Pulau Ubin, as I was resting and having a drink at a roadside stall. This little sunbird landed on the bushes nearby and flited about, jumping from flower to flower.

My experiences with birding so far have not yielded anything nice. The only birds that I could capture were domesticated pigeons. The reach of the 250mm lens means that I have to approach within 10m to get a shot, and by then they would have flown away.

For this, I knew I had only a few seconds to shoot, so I grabbed the camera, extended the reach to maximum, and shot away. Approaching bit by bit, I tied to hide behind chairs and ignored the fact that there was a big red chair visible in the frame (which I would crop away later). The emphasis was on trying to get as good an angle and pose as possible; I knew the bird would fly away in seconds, and any shot would do. (Later, when my father happened to see the picture, he saw that there was a red chair in the corner, and chided me saying "this shows that you are a lousy photography". I wanted to argue but decided not to bother. Haha.)

Out of the maybe 8 frames I shot, this was one of the last, when the bird noticed me and made eye contact. Focus and exposure was good, but I had to crop some and the auto-ISO was at 800, which meant noise and loss of fine detail in the feathers.

I did quite a bit of post-processing to this final shot, but each played an important purpose: cropping; selective 100% NR to the background and 50% NR to the foreground, leaving the feathers untouched; slight desaturation to the hibiscus flower to avoid overpowering the bird; USM to sharpen the catchlight in the eyes; vignetting to give depth;find edges to sharpen.

original

Recently...

I've not posted in a while, but that doesn't mean that I haven't been shooting. I'll be processing and posting some of my photos from previous months bit-by-bit, so do check back occasionally and share your comments! (better still, use RSS)

Recently, I managed to get my hands on Lightroom 2 and although I'm still figuring it out, it offers me the convenience and confidence to process my RAW files fully the way I want.

I also attended a really short photography course and I learnt something really important, and that is to set my ISO to it's lowest setting (100), and adjust accordingly if needed. How I have been shooting all this while is to use the AP mode - and my ISO was on auto. This created problems when for example I was taking a landscape shot in Cameron Highlands and the camera auto-set to ISO 800. When I came back it was full of noise and I felt it ruined the shot, especially since I brought a tripod, caught the sunrise, and bracketed my exposures and compositions. Hope you like the new blog layout!