It’s been a while since I had posted something here. Sorry about that, but work was literally keeping me at the office for longer hours for the past
weeks. I did manage to take some Instagram shots during the quick visit to the mall on Friday. Here they are.
I was fooling around in my garden with my Tamron 90mm SP macro lens (one bloody sharp lens it is!) when I noticed some pretty flowers that caught my attention.
I can tell you that the biggest challenge in macro photography is keeping the camera still, and all these were taken without a tripod! It goes without saying that these shots were a few good ones taken from a pile of many many bad ones.
Here’s a little something taken with Instagram. Shown below is an old burger stall just behind my office. Gosh, I really love these Instagram filters. A seemingly mundane shot transformed into a work of art.
Every once in a while, a mushroom or two (maybe more) would sprout up somewhere in my backyard, and my mum would yell at me to whip out my camera for a few snaps at these tiny organic parasols. Just this morning, I noticed these two pretty mushrooms near the veggie patch. For one thing, they look suspiciously suggestive. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
The iPhone proved to be a very capable photographic tool, and when Instagram came along, it redefined the smartphone as not only a tool for recording visual information, but one for sharing them as well. Here are some pictures taken with Instagram.
Concert photography is not something everyone will enjoy, but for those who wish to take a first step in this direction, having the right preparation is necessary. My first attempt at concert photography was a little while ago, when I was shooting under Wedding Celebrations Studio for Sungha Jung’s concert at the Kuching International Airport. Sungha Jung was brought in to perform by Borneo To The World, a soap maker and newly-opened retailer at the airport. I would personally think their marketing strategy proved extremely successful, at least judging by the size of the crowd and the attention they were getting.
I only had two hours to prepare. A quick poking-around the web returned some interesting results on what gear to bring and what to expect during the event.
Listed below were the items I brought along. Because I anticipated I might be moving around quite a bit, I decided to pack light.
I presume that the above setup would be largely dependent upon the type of concert photography you decide to get into, but having a fast prime would be mostly adequate as most concerts are set in venues with low ambient lighting. Having a camera body which can shoot at ‘stupid high’ ISOs (as Ken Rockwell put it) would certainly be an advantage. You may have also noticed that I did not include a flash. This is because flash photography is often not allowed, or even if allowed, it may be restricted to certain settings and under specific circumstances.
The truth is, you don’t really need to have cutting-edge gear. Having a eye for good composition and some luck should suffice for most people. Below are some photos taken during the event. Click on the pictures to view the EXIF data.
If there was something important I learned about concert photography, it is about photographing minute and often-overlooked details. It is these things that help convey and express the persona of the subjects being photographed.
Shown below is another version of the above photo, but in full color. At this point, you may notice that when the photo is rendered in black and white, we tend to focus on the texture and outlines of the subject.
Having your gaze fixated solely on to the performer(s) will tell little about the surrounding. I decided to include a bit of the audience in the above frame to give the picture a bit more impact. Shown below are a few more examples. This is a good way to ‘throw’ the viewer right into the heat of the action.
Hi everyone! I’ve included in the how-to section above my latest article on metering basics. In this article, I will explain the three fundamental metering modes available in most digital cameras out there in the market. Please leave any feedback in the comments below. Happy reading!
Lionel
It’s been a while since I updated my blog, due to my hectic schedule. It is not easy juggling many tasks at a time, especially when you have to work 14 to 18 hours a day. It’s not easy being an entrepreneur. Sometimes I wonder what keeps me going.
Anyway, I digress. I’ve recently managed to squeeze in a bit of time doing some write up on my iPad (Pages for iOS is AWESOME), especially since the ‘right idea’ inevitably pops out when I least expect it. Having a pen and paper at this time would certainly be great, as my sometimes quirky nature to multitask often means what I have in ‘active memory’ gets blown out of the window, but having an iPad to lug around is certainly the ‘in’ thing, but…
LIONEL! Stop writing nonsense!
Ok ok..so back to the topic.
I have decided to spend some spare time sharing my knowledge in photography with the rest of the world and what better way than to have them downloadable as PDF files right? I have added a ‘How-to’ section which you can access from the menu bar just above. If you have any suggestions on how to improve the articles, please do leave a comment below.
It had been quite a while since the last time I set foot in Fairy Cave. The last visit there proved somewhat fruitless due to the fact that I relied solely on my camera’s high ISO capabilities to shoot in near pitch dark conditions, for forgetting to bring my tripod. The ensuing result were photos that were a little on the soft edge due to extensive in-camera noise removal.
Photographing the interior of the cave proved more difficult than the last time. Not only was the light intensity lower, but it has only just stopped raining and it was so extremely humid inside! Imagine the viewfinder fogging up each time I looked thought it! And the stench inside the cave was oh so unbearable too.
But I digress; complains aside. The stuff I brought along with me were:
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of photographing the cave was that there was not enough light to judge my composition, thus making the right judgement very difficult if not impossible. The low light also made it difficult to autofocus. Thank goodness the Nikon had all 39 autofocus points doing their magic.
Another thing about the lighting in the cave was the heightened contrast between the dark and light areas. It was virtually impossible to have a single exposure capture the entire range of light so I took several exposures, ranging from 30 to 2 seconds, and made a HDR image out of them. Shown above is an HDR composite image.
Keeping the camera still during the long exposures was one thing considering that my tripod was a flimsy and cheap one. The last time I took it out for some night shoot it literally swayed in the wind! In the cave, it was not so much of a problem with the wind, but I was hoping to have a tripod that could hold kilograms of gear without worrying that it will tip over, especially when you can’t see that we’ll in the dark.
Here are the individual Jpeg images before I combined them to form a HDR image.
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| Exposure: 25 seconds. Aperture: f/5 |
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| Exposure: 10 seconds. Aperture: f/5 |
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| Exposure: 5 seconds. Aperture: f/5 |
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| Exposure: 1 second. Aperture: f/5 |
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| Exposure: 30 seconds. Aperture: f/5. Deciding I needed a bit more texture and detail for the cave’s floor, I decided to lengthen the shutter duration. |
And here are the HDR images.
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| The cave interior |
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| The outer ‘chamber’ of the cave, overlooking a sky-roof. |