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.