Tendrils

Are you a landscape, people, fashion, nature or macro photographer? If you think about it, there are a variety of subjects open to the photographer if he/she just keeps their eyes open. For me personally, I'm interested in nature and macro photography.

This shot is a macro of a tendrils that my passionfruit plant puts out to help it creep up the fence. I spent a good hour shooting this with a single wireless flash positioned from the top. Lighting was simple but the trick is to angle the two tendrils in a pleasing composition. Nikon D7000, AF Micro-Nikkor 60mm f/2.8.

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