:: Walldrobe Photography ::

Happy 2009 to everyone. 2008 has ended with quite a number of unpleasant incidents, ranging from earthquakes to terrorists attack to the crush of the financial markets which affected almost every economy in the world. Having said that, let’s not forget there are moments which touched our lifes and events which lifted our spirits too. For the first time, Singapore hosted the first F1 night race which brought us into the limelight all over the world. For the first time over 48 years, Singapore won a Silver medal in the Beijing Olympics, not forgetting the opening ceremony at the Beijing Bird Nest Stadium was one of the best show ever.

On a personal basis, I finally did my proposal to her and bought our wedding bands 2 days ago. 2008 is also the year where I seriously considered venturing further into Wedding Photography. I’ve always love photography and this thing has been at the back of my mind for so long. It was a tough decision to make and definitely a total switch from the current job I’m working as. With the passion and the support from all of you, I’ll continue to shoot and bring you better pictures.

What’s New Year without the fantasic firework display. I’m a great fan of fireworks and every year during the Singapore Firewroks Festival, I’ll be there queueing without fail. Though I wasn’t there this year at the Marina area witnessing the countdown, I’d still like to post some pictures of fireworks which I took over the years. I’d also like to specially thank my friend cum mentor Say Chong, who taught me a great deal about how to shoot fireworks. It was through him I learnt a whole new thing about photography, especially fireworks.

Before the announcement of the Marina IR, the Merlion has provided a very good foreground for shooting fireworks, to capture the fireworks with a taste of Singapore within the picture. Ever since the marina area was block off for the massive IR project, I’ve to change my location to the other side of the river, with the Singapore skyline as the backdrop. This doesn’t bring out the best in the fireworks as with the Merlion anymore. The backdrop is too far, the lightings in the buildings too dim etc. I’ve yet to shoot it from the floating platform though. That area might provide a better angle.

I’m not sure about other people’s journey into photography but mine grew and started the typical way a person would normally go when picking up this craft. I bought my first SLR, took my first picture, was amazed by it, wanted to learn more about it and eventually joined some clubs and societies to go further into it.

A particular technique that I always love is dragging the shutter to go for a really long exposure and I’m always very amazed by the results. That was the first technique I learnt actually. Though I must say I didn’t really learn much from joining those photography courses back then, it still did taught me a thing or two on the basic like the aperture and the shutter speed. Thanks to the technology in today’s world, there is the internet and forums where we can find and read up just about anything we want to know about photography and of cos to study and learn how the professional shoot by looking at their pictures and reading people’s critiques.

The first place that those clubs and societies brought us to are usually the Bird Park or the Botanical Garden and mine was the Bird Park. It was there that I made my first attempt on long exposure to capture the man made waterfall inside. From there, I learn, study, improve, read up, practice again and again and the following pictures are what I’ve taken over the years. I shoot anything from streams, rivers, beaches, mountains, waterfalls, buildings, fountains etc whenever the situation allows me to go for a long exposure.

One thing about shooting scenary in the last light is you can keep going back to the same place but you’ll never get back the same picture because the colour is different, the cloud formation is different, the weather, the sunset and everything is different. The following pictures are posted in my earlier Scenic Singapore post but the pictures are totally different. One was taken just minutes apart and the other was taken on a different day.

Another thing I learnt about shooting evening scenes of buildings is you cannot do it during weekends because most of the office lights will be off. The picture looses so much colour and vibrancy due to the lack of light, just like the picture above. That is the reason why I went back to re-take the picture again.

Today I was trying to backup some of my stuff into my backup drive so as to make space for more pictures that I’m copying into my pc everyday. As technology for camera advances, we see more and more pixels being packed into the camera. I still remember the days when my 300D is only a 6.1mp camera. Now, the 5DmkII has a stunning 21.1mp sensor. Every shoot now is going to take up gigs and gigs of space. Storage is going to be a problem but thank goodness, harddisk is getting cheaper and cheaper nowadays. This reminds me of the 1st harddisk I owned, a 21mb harddisk during the DOS era and I was so proud I actually owned a harddisk then. Ha..it can’t even hold 1 picture now.

I always like taking scenery and Singapore does have lots of things to shoot. It’s only limited to our imagination. While I was browsing through my folders, I realised there’s lots of folders of pictures that I took and I haven’t have the time to look at it yet. Following are some pictures taken in Singapore which I like personally. You can make a guess where are all these pictures taken.