Sunset

This is one of the final shots I took at Sepang Gold Coast. The sun at this point had turned into a glowing red ball and I wanted to have an appropriate background for it. I snapped quite a few shots as the sun went down and this one is one of them. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR

Silhouette

Sometimes there's just no time to think and you have to fire off a few quick shots. This was the best in the 3-4 shots I got of this kid playing in the sea. It would have been better if there was a larger spray of water, though. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR

Crabby

This little fellow was taken at Sepang Gold Coast -- a place with a name that sounds more glamorous than it is (it's mostly a muddy shore). What you don't get from the scale in this macro shot is that this soldier crab (Dotilla myctiroides) is maybe only about half an inch in size. As with bugs, taking a macro shot of crabs is an exercise in patience -- you need to approach slowly and crouch long enough that they feel comfortable with you. Here's a closer shot:

I just didn't like this particular shot because the crab was looking directly at me, which I think would have made a better shot. Nikon D200, AF Micro-Nikkor 60mm f/2.8

Natural slide

This was shot at the Bukit Hijau falls in Kedah. Taking action shots is almost always a crap shoot -- the only way to even get one or two usable shots is to take a LOT of photos. Out of these usable shots, perhaps only one will actually be THE one. For me this is the shot -- there's a teensy bit of cropping at the top and bottom but generally the framing is what I wanted and there's a sense of movement in the motion blur yet the boy is rendered sharp against the blur background. There are a couple of things to keep in mind to increase your chances of a good photo however:

1. You need to pan the camera to follow the boy as accurately as possible as he slides down. Anticipation is also key -- you need to watch where the kids slide and you need to know when to press the trigger. I don't normally put the camera on continuous burst mode because most of the time, I will miss the critical moment that happens between shots. So instead, I tend to quickly shoot off a shot or two when I see the boy pass the area I've earmarked as the one which is likely to produce a cool action shot.
2. The other thing to note is that in dim lighting (such as in the canopy of trees in this waterfall area), the shutter speeds tend to be slow and if the speed is TOO slow, more than likely the subject will also have some motion blur even with the best panning technique. Therefore, I increased the ISO to about 320 or so (this is the highest I'm willing to use on my D200) and got shutter speeds that were fast enough to ensure my subject is sharp, yet have a bit of motion blur in the background.

Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR

New design!

Hey sorry for the long periods between posts. What can I say -- life happened. The truth is that I've been as active as ever taking photos, but have not found the time to post them for awhile. However, now I'm back and although I still probably won't post that often, I'll try to put up as many as I can during my periods of inactivity at home. Anyway, as you've probably noticed, the whole website has had a redesign, thanks to some wonderful new templates on Blogspot. I'm not a web designer so I can't really be bothered to customise the site much, but I'd like to think I have a sense of taste and I know what I like. This particular template (see the designer's name at the bottom) seems to really fit my type of blog, and still keep the black border that I find important for photo display. Enjoy.

Hong Kong Beach

As usual. this shot is a very atypical idea of Hong Kong -- it's a very beautiful beach with crystal clear water. Counter to what you think from the Hong Kong Tourism board adverts, Hong Kong is very rich in natural areas to visit and this is one of them. I can't tell you where this is simply because I can't remember hahaha. Shooting landscapes usually benefits from having more foreground interest than sky (although if the sky is interesting, then this rule should be reversed). Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 12-24mm f/4

Blur

This photo is interesting because it illustrates just how much depth of field affects the image. In this photo I really experimented with different apertures to really get the effects I wanted. The question is always -- does one use a small aperture and include as much of the flower and the background as possible or do I selectively focus and choose an aperture that isolates the subject more. There isn't an easy answer for this and it largely depends on the subject matter. I had considered an aperture where each petal was rendered sharp enough, but somehow the background was then too distracting, so I settled on this one. NIkon D200, AF Micro-Nikkor 60mm f/2.8. Below is a shot with a smaller aperture to render more depth of field. You decide.

Tai Mo Shan Panorama

It looks like it's starting to be a yearly thing -- me going to Hong Kong, I mean. As I've said before, the Hong Kong I see is completely different from most people's idea of Hong Kong (big, metropolitan concrete jungle) -- thanks to my environmentalist brother's job, I get to experience what a large part of Hong Kong is actually like. Believe it or not, the city is actually a very small part of the whole of Hong Kong, although the tourism board would have you believe otherwise.

Anyway this panorama is shot on Tai Mo Shan in the New Territories, one of the taller (if not tallest) peaks in Hong Kong, and a very nice picnic spot. Adobe Photoshop CS4 is actually an amazing tool for stitching together images -- it makes blending and correctly aligning the various images (in this case 5 images covering a full 180-degrees) extremely simple. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't scale panoramas well and it compresses the shot into a very small ghost of the original so you can't really see how much detail and how large this shot is. Click for a larger (but still lousy) version. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 12-24mmf/4

Bukit Tabur Pano

I haven't updated in awhile, largely because I've been on the daily grind of work for awhile. However I recently did take a hiking trip out to Bukit Tabur in Taman Melawati, Kuala Lumpur and took some photos. Bukit Tabur itself is a hill largely made up of quartz and is pretty interesting -- the moderately difficult and seriously dangerous trail means that the area is largely unspoiled even though it's smack in the middle of a housing area. The hill overlooks a lake which is a also a fresh water reservoir. As usual, when taking shots for panoramas, it's important to keep the exposure the same. As far as framing goes, I always try to frame the image by including some foreground interest, especially in the edges. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 12-24mm f/4

Butterfly up close

Here's a tip-- much as we would all like to think it's possible, it's almost impossible to take a macro shot of a butterfly with available light. If the problem is not with shallow depth-of-field, it's a problem with the butterfly's movement, or the wind, or framing or focus. My solution for field shooting is this -- I turn on the wireless mode on my SB-600 flash, use my camera's built-in flash as the trigger, set my camera to f/16 or f/22, pre-focus, then hold the flash out and above the butterfly, hold the camera in the other hand then shoot away. Yes, this is an actual in-the-field shot. The detail is so good the scales that make up the butterfly's wing is clearly visible when you view the image at 100%. Nikon D200, AF Micro-Nikkor 60mm f/2.8.

Saying a prayer

Brigitte and I revisited this cemetery in Cheras to take some pictures and also to visit some of her relatives buried there. While I had been to shoot here before, I decided to try again and this time bring back photos that are different from what I had taken before. I don't think I have the previous photos on this blog, but I think I succeeded in the challenge I set myself, as the previous shots were more landscape while this series has more detail shots. Anyway a bit of info about taking this photo -- in this shot, what you have to concentrate on is not how the subject looks, but how the background appears.

Let me explain -- it's really important in a shot like this to have the background as UN-distracting as possible and one way to do this is to make sure it's as out of focus as your camera aperture will allow while keeping the subject sharp. Another way is also to look through the viewfinder and try different angles so whatever is left in the background is largely uniform, with little or no distracting objects visible. So here, I applied these two principles, using an aperture that would keep the subject sharp but the background blur, and also making sure that there were no other gravestones in the background to distract your eye from the subject.

Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR

Little Angel too

Another shot of a similar little angel. Sometimes getting in close and removing all other elements from a shot can get you a more interesting shot. Here, I thought the angel was particularly interesting, with its dark eyes. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6VR

Crosses

One way of making a shot interesting is to have repeated detail or repeated patterns. This shot again, is of a pretty mundane subject, but it's interesting only because there's a cross repeated in the background. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6VR

Little corner of heaven

Framing is always critical in shots like this. As I take photos I'm always trying to get interesting angles on pretty common images. Here I placed the angel on the far left, and had a bit of the gravestone showing on the right. This image was slightly cropped to tighten the composition further. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6VR

Serenity

I've been to this cemetary in Cheras before, but with a different camera (the Fujifilm S2 Pro I believe) and as always when I revisit a place, I try to take some different shots from before.

This time, my personal challenge was to take the details rather than the entire landscape, resulting in the series of photos you see here. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6VR

Hint of colour

You know I realise that there are wideangle people and there are telephoto people -- that is, people who tend to prefer wideangle lenses or people who tend to prefer long telephoto lenses. I'm firmly in the wideangle category and I usually have more shots at wideangle and medium telephoto focal lengths than at the full 200mm end of my Nikkor AF-S 18-200mm.

However, occasionally, I actually do find a chance to take a shot at 200mm on my lens, and this is one of them. The two people standing there are actually way up at the roof of a building and I was on the ground. I noticed how striking the image was with the lady in red against an almost completely monochromatic background of metal sheeting. Of the two shots I took, this one seemed to me had the best composition. It would have been better I suppose if the two people were looking towards the camera instead of away, but I couldn't very well shout and ask them to look my way! :)

Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6VR

Dom Panorama

As the few readers of this photoblog must have noticed by now, I'm always enamoured with doing panoramas of the places I've visited. I guess it all dates back to an article I read, when I was a teen, in Practical Photography about a so-called Hockney Joiner. For those not in the know, David Hockney is a famous British artist who also took photographs and created what is called a "Joiner" -- the thing about Hockney's joiners is that they were simply brilliant -- they didn't join properly and in fact were shot from different positions and focal lengths then joined together into a collage. The brilliant part is that even though they were put together in a seemingly haphazard fashion, they actually made sense as a whole. Very interesting!

Anyway, it was because of Hockney Joiners that I started taking photos in school and joining them up like this, although unfortunately, none of that work still survives today since it was all on film and prints and is now lost somewhere. As a result of this, I've had an interest in making joiners ever since.

While my shot of the Kohln Dom in Germany is far from being a Hockney Joiner, I really like the weird perspective this particular one gives me. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6VR

Having a nap

I thought this picture was pretty cute -- the baby seems to be extremely well rested! Anyway this shot was taken at the Dom in Cologne -- the father obligingly allowed me to take this photo. D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR

Cologne Bierhaus

On the day of our arrival in Cologne, we stopped by at various pubs for food and beer. Now I don't normally drink, but the beer in Germany is so good I really had to make an exception. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 12-24mm f/4

Ledge of lenses

I'm pretty happy with this shot I took at Photokina in Cologne, Germany -- it's perfectly framed and exposure was good and the focus was very sharp. This isn't such a big deal normally, until you consider that the photo was a grab shot in dim lighting conditions and I only had a split second to shoot off two frames of this lady before she walked away. The only thing I don't like about it is that it's practically an ad for Canon lenses. :) Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR

Leafy Symmetry

Sorry for the lack of updates -- I recently switched my main monitor from a regular LCD monitor to a HDTV and am still colour calibrating it and tweaking it properly for Photoshop and critical work.

Anyway, here's a shot I took only a few days ago -- this photo is almost a straight conversion from an NEF of my Neem tree sapling which I'm trying to grow. The reason for this shot is that I was struck by how symmetrical the leaves of this sapling were. The standard set up here for shots of this type -- I had a wireless SB600 flash behind a translucent Ikea breakfast-in-bed table and used my favourite 60mm Micro-Nikkor for the shot. The thing about macro is that you really have to control framing, focus and depth-of-field carefully --this shot is actually as framed in the camera, without any cropping at all. As for focussing and aperture, I shot a number of images at different apertures till I could get all the leaves at least mostly in focus. Nikon D200, AF Micro-Nikkor 60mm f/2.8.

Hong Kong!

I recently went on a working trip to Hong Kong to test a new range of Panasonic Lumix cameras, one of which is the latest version of the high-end panorama style compact digital, the LX series. The latest model, the LX3, is a really nice camera that has been vastly improved in many ways from its predecessor. Panasonic Lumix LX3

Keeping it together

One of the things that's been improved is apparently the dynamic range of the LX3 -- in this situation the camera still hasn't blown out the highlights even though there's quite a range of bright and dark here. Panasonic Lumix LX3

Down by the sea

This shot was taken with the B+W mode of the LX3. As usual, a bit of foreground interest to lead you in to the photo is important in a shot like this. Panasonic Lumix LX3

They Live!

It's pretty amazing the amount of live seafood you can find in Hong Kong --- from Abalone, to geoducks, mussels and all kinds of weird things besides, you can find it here. Panasonic Lumix LX3

Hong Kong abstract

This shot was achieved by rotating the camera as the exposure was taken. I tried a number of different methods in an effort to take as many different shots of a common view at Hong Kong's Victoria Peak. Panasonic Lumix LX3

Train and city

I managed to capture this shot mostly on automatic for the LX3. The only adjustment here is to crop off a stray arm on the right that was encroaching into the frame. Panasonic Lumix LX3

Shopping Mall

This shot was taken with the wideangle adapter for the LX3. Strangely enough even though it was past midnight at Victoria's Peak in Hong Kong, the place was still bustling with open shops and people. Panasonic Lumix LX3

Coils

Incense coils at one of the temples I visited in Hong Kong. Panasonic Lumix LX3

Boat lady

This boat lady taking me to the restaurant has a lot of souveniers to peddle! Panasonic Lumix LX3

Casino Lisboa

Not to be confused with the Grand Lisboa below, the Casino Lisboa is yet another one of the many casinos in Macau. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR

Grand Lisboa entrance

The entrance of the Grand Lisboa casino and hotel in Macau. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR

Grand Lisboa 1

This is what the Grand Lisboa, one of the largest casinos in Macau, looks like from the front. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR

Grand Lisboa 2

This is a side view of one of the biggest casinos in Macau, the Grand Lisboa. The light was just perfect at this time of day -- at dusk with just a bit of light left in the sky. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200m f/3.5-5.6 VR

Poser

I just thought this group of people shooting photos of this cute scruffy dog was quite funny. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR

Checking out the display

No fancy title for this shot. Just a little girl checking out the display cabinet in the musuem near the St Paul's Cathedral facade. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR