Bad Fence

I noticed this badly painted(I think it was brown over white) fence at my parents' house. I thought that the colors and textures formed by the peeling paint and the dead/dying creeping plant were interesting.

Cute and ugly

I was so excited today, because I was going to my parents' house, which holds a treasure trove of subjects for photography. They have a large garden with lots of flowers, so I was going to practice my macro shooting. Well, it started raining before I got there, and it only stopped when I left. Go figure.


I caught a photo of their adorable little terrier mix, Ben. Since it was dark, and I was kind of reluctant to increase the ISO any further, the shutter speed was low. As a result, the image shows the hallmarks of camera shake and subject motion blur. I think this photo had potential, but now it's too blurry. I guess I could post process it and make it look like I took it through a soft lens.

I managed a rather sharp photo of an ugly fly with my Tamron 90mm macro lens, despite having to stoop over at an awkward angle. I was trying to capture the little red flowers (Ixora) and caught sight of this little fella. Obviously, the photo could have been better if I had used a tripod and external flash, but I'm not sure I want to see this fly in any more detail anyway. Sour grapes?

A flower and me!

I finally managed to take my camera out with me, by sneaking it in my large "new" handbag. I have been using my old and tattered bag for a long, long time, but I finally switched bags just so I could cram in a DSLR with a decent length lens (eg. my 55-250mm). I was still deathly afraid of people staring at me, so I would whip out the camera quickly from my bag, snap, and swiftly return it to its hiding place.


Because of my fear, I didn't manage to shoot any decent photos. Here's a photo I kind of liked, but I didn't have time to compose or to focus properly. I set the aperture way too big, and I missed the focal point as well. Still, I like how the bougainvillea "flower" (the purplish bits) is actually made up of leaves, and the real flowers are nestled inside, ignored but still beautiful in its own right.

I got my new camera strap, it's a Black Rapid Rs-4. I love it! It slings across my body, allowing me to walk around easily, and my camera is accessible with a smooth and quick motion. I took a photo of myself while using that strap. The photo is noisy and the strap can't really be seen. But it's the first photo I've taken of myself with the camera.

Chime

It was raining again today. Everything was dark and dull, so I thought what the hey.... just shoot something dark. This dark blob is a wind chime I got for Christmas.

The chime was moving imperceptibly, so I ended up having to increase the shutter speed in order to avoid a soft-looking photo.

Rain again

It's Christmas and 'tis the season to be rainy over here in Singapore. I tried to capture the raindrops, but they just look like little dashes. This photo is heavily cropped.

Kazu and the Christmas present

It's Christmas day, I'm dead tired from cooking the turkey and gravy and doing the socializing thing. I think I can be forgiven for taking snapshots today. I got a great pillow thingy from my sister and her husband as a gift. I was immediately reminded of the fat one when I saw that ovaly, squishy pillow.

So here she is, held against her will behind the pillow:

And here she is again, putting her foot on the pillow. She doesn't like the pillow too much.

 

Here's the same photo, but with some post-processing to create a "lomo effect". I can see halos around stuff, so it's obviously over processed. It's possible the halos originated from over sharpening. I'll try to work on my technique.

 

A dragonfly

I heard Miki making chattering noises, and I went to check out the object of her attention. Turns out it was a dragonfly. I could have whipped out my macro lens, but this little creature was up on my ceiling light. So I used the 55-250mm lens and zoomed in (the lens, not me).

I balanced myself (albeit shakily) and shot upwards, but it was a giant pain trying to get the camera to hold steady. I basically stopped breathing just to try and stop the extra movement. Luckily, the image stabilization on this lens works like a charm.

Cartoon kitty

I got lazy and snapped a photo of Kazu for today's picture.

To make up for my laziness, I played around with Gaussian blur in photoshop and created a sketch and a cartoon version of the photo.

Here's sketchy Kazu:

Here's Kazu the anime cat:

More flash fun!

I didn't have much time tonight, so I whipped out the flash and a little glass ship in a bottle. Here's the result (pardon the dust):

Bad kitty photo

The title should read "bad (kitty photo)" and not "(bad kitty) photo". Work is really getting to me today. I wasn't in the mood to spend too much time shooting or thinking about shooting today. I took a photo of my little cat, Miki, as she was sniffing around the vicinity of my external flash. The flash fired nicely, at least it's still working.

I like the mood of the photo, and how it captures Miki's natural curiosity. However, there are hugely overexposed areas and massively underexposed areas in that photo. I tried to salvage the photo by changing it to black and white, using the channel mixer. Can't say it worked. Oh, and excuse that plastic bag.

Nighttime in my neighborhood

I sneakily ventured outside, but I was still too timid to get out of my condo compound. So I only managed a somewhat pathetic night landscape shot of the area outside, occluded by the tennis courts. I used my 18-55 kit lens, and I stitched 2 photos together to get a wide enough view.




I got a few funny looks because I had set my tripod up in the car park. I can't wait till I'm brave enough to venture out to other parts of the city to take night shots.

Snails and sky

Well, I didn't have an ounce of time yesterday, due to the BBQ. I was going to go outside to take a night shot today, but then I spotted my zebra nerite snails doing something interesting. One of them crawled onto the top of the other's shell and was crawling around on top.

I was wondering if they were about to... ahem... breed. But then this happened instead:

Forgive the shakiness, I was in a hurry and just took the video while in an awkward position, propped up on my elbow.

I thought the sky at dusk looked rather nice, so I tried to take a photo of it

Continuation of the Christmas theme

I didn't have much time tonight, so I just took a photo in my dark apartment -- without a tripod and without flash. Had to use my fastest lens for this, the 50mm 1.8. I pretty much had the aperture wide open, so the depth of focus is insufficient. Also, there is some camera shake, as the shutter speed was 1/6.

I wanted to photoshop the hinge away, but I really have to do some work as we're hosting a BBQ tomorrow.

Blending in

So I decided to try my hand at blending the various exposures, by using layers and masks. It turned out a lot worse than what HDR Pro did, but I presume that I'll improve if I keep trying. I think that it is better for a person to decide which bits of each differently exposed photo to bring out in the final merged product. I have to learn this technique somehow!

It's Christmas season

And it's humid and rainy here in Singapore. Oh well, at least my neighbor's front door looks really Christmassy.

The photo was taken in darkness, from across the street. I felt like I was spying, when all I wanted to do was to capture the little lights in the trees and the general warm feel of the front area. I couldn't see to focus, but it turned out ok. I used HDR Pro again to stitch together photos with exposure lengths ranging from 2s to 10s. I wish the car wasn't in the photo, but it didn't look right when I tried cropping it out.

Argh, I've tried to remove the default borders around some of my photos but all the stuff I've read on the net doesn't work. It's annoying when I make my own border and the extra border shows up.

Performing bear

I tried to make it look like the little toy bear was performing under a spotlight. Due to the fact that I had to hold the flashlight in one hand while focusing and taking the photo in another, the photo turned out a bit slanted and the bear is out of focus. But it's pretty close to the effect I was shooting (haha) for.

Fish panning

Not. I guess it's really well-nigh impossible to get a panned shot of a small and active fish in a small aquarium. I'm sure a lot of it is my lack of technique, but it really was difficult to judge where the fish was about to swim to. All of a sudden, my laid-back fish decided to become a swimming maniac. I swear she knew what I was trying to do.





This was the best I could manage. The little dots are bubbles. The background isn't even really blurred from movement. I think I give up, I need to find larger objects to practice panning on.

Moon again!

I took a quick photo of the moon with my 55-250mm lens.

My flash and wireless receiver both work! I'm so relieved. I don't know if they will start to fail later on, though.

No photos today

I'm still in mourning. I bought some silica gel and placed the flash inside. I also managed to crack it open a bit, to (hopefully) shorten the drying time. I wish I had a hairdryer, I could have dried it so much faster that way.

Disaster

I dropped my external flash and the wireless receiver in the fish tank today. Luckily, the denizens of the tank are perfectly ok. The flash and receiver.... I doubt so. I'm really upset, but it serves me right for propping the flash on the top of the tank.

I tried to turn the flash and receiver off as quickly as I cold, dropped the batteries out and shook the water out. I put them in a bag of rice and placed the whole thing in my dry cabinet and turned down the humidity setting. I'm not really hopeful, but maybe they'll kind of work after they dry out.

I only managed one usable photo before the mishap. This is a little 6 week old platy.

Stairs and sepia

I tried to venture out with the 50mm f1.8 lens, but I chickened out halfway down the stairs as I could hear a lot of people coming in and out of their apartments. So I took a photo of the stairs.

I decided to try out a sepia tone by using channel mixer and hue & saturation. This was the result, after adding a vignette to it.

 

Strangely, there isn't much difference. Hey, my stairs are sepia colored!

Green eggs and shrimp

Well, well. One of my cherry shrimp has greenish eggs. My shrimp usually have bright yellow eggs, but once in a while I see one with greenish eggs. I got a pretty clear shot of the eggs with my 90mm Tamron macro lens. For the lighting, I used a wirelessly triggered Nissin 622 Mark II external flash off to the side.

 

Here's a cropped view to show the eggs a bit more clearly

HDR mani-ar take II

I tried the night scene from my balcony again for HDR. The results from HDR pro in photoshop are so-so, I still need more practice. I also plan to redo this scene "by hand" by using layers and masking. I need time for that, though!

This time, I used 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s and 20s exposure times. Here's the result, straight "out of the box". I didn't change anything; I just used the default settings.

Then I went crazy with the sliders, trying to create a "cartoony" kind of look. I've always wanted to live in a cartoon. So up all the way with saturation, down with the gamma, lower the radius and increase the strength.... and this is what I got.

Ummm.... still waiting. HDR pro runs seriously slow on my computer. So slow, in fact, that I hesitate to change stuff on it. Oh here it is, a day later.

Cherry Red Shrimp

I tried to get a nice photo of the smaller Nerite snail today, but they all turned out blurry. Such is the challenge of taking photos through aquarium glass. So instead, here are a few photos of my cherry red shrimp. I must have over 100 in there now. I started out with about 10. They're industrious little critters, always cleaning up something or other. And they're really small, about 1 cm long.

Yes, I know that I overdid the contrast here. It was a failed attempt to visually separate the shrimp from the overly busy background.

This is my favorite. It looks the shrimp is climbing a tree somewhere outdoors.

 

Singapore is a good place for an aquarium hobbyist. One of the stores I go to is actually open all year round, 24 hours a day! I have yet to go at an odd hour like say, 3 am. I wonder if people go there after a drunken night out and purchase fish.

Carbon dioxide and snails

The zebra nerite snails are happily munching the algae from the walls of my planted tank. I love them! But the sad thing is that the larger one has tons of chips and pits in his shell. We didn't notice them when we fished him out of the container in the store. The trouble with this very popular store is that there is absolutely ZERO space, it is overcrowded, AND you have to fish out your own fish or other water critters. So I was butt-to-butt with several people and trying desperately to dislodge a stubborn snail from the side of the container. People were also waiting for the net, so I rushed and got myself a snail with a bad shell. I hope that he'll be ok; I have to get some calcium for his poor shell.

This is a badly taken photo; I wanted to show how the shrimp seem to like to clean the snail's shell.

They're going to be well fed indeed. The walls get completely covered with a furry carpet of algae in the space of a week, the algae is so out of control. The problem is that I have such high lighting (3.5 W/gallon) and not enough fast growing plants. Also, I didn't have CO2 injection until recently. DIY CO2 just didn't cut it, and the algae grew strong and free.

I've set up the inline reactor which mixes the CO2 with water in order to efficiently dissolve it. I got a cheap powerhead, and it's working a charm! Only thing, the inlet has holes big enough for shrimp and guppy/platy fry to get sucked in. So I'm looking for pantyhose. No, I don't have any. I covered the inlet with a thing I bought today from a local market-type area. The picture suggested that it was stockings, showing a pair of sexy and womanly legs. But the label suggested that it was something else with a more geriatric purpose: "100% support velvet socks". It turned out to be more towards the geriatric side. It will work for the interim, but it is butt ugly!

The powerhead pumps the water from the reactor into the tank. I got some stuff to attach the tube to the wall so the outlet doesn't look so ugly. I'll cover it with tall plants sometime.

Here's the drop checker, which changes color based on how much CO2 is present in the water. Right now, it's almost blue because I put new solution in not long ago.

So now, the tank looks like this:

Birds, at last!

I've been hoping to either get photos of the moon, or of birds just outside my balcony, but so far I haven't been able to. Well, I got a quick couple of photos of birds in the trees outside the balcony today. The photos are not good (lighting, focus), but I'm hoping that I'll get some nicer ones as I improve.

I think this bird is called a Bulbul:

This is just a Mynah, but I thought it was funny when he was puffing his feathers up.

Unfortunately, I didn't focus well, plus there is some motion blur. Birds are tricky, I keep feeling afraid that they'll fly away. At least my fish can't leave the tank. Well, not by swimming, anyway.

I got two zebra nerite snails today, to help clean the algae walls of my planted tank. You bet there are going to be photos of them pretty soon!

Peephole

I started out shooting in manual mode, and two months later, I still haven't really ventured away from that. I can see the allure of Aperture priority mode, and I've played with it a couple of times, but I get nervous about letting the camera decide the shutter speed for me. I tend to be a bit careless sometimes, and I may not notice if the camera has selected a ridiculous shutter speed for me. Like maybe 1/5 due to low light. What if I take a photo without noticing? Disaster! Silly, I guess, but I'm still very much a beginner.

I have a plan. From now on I will try not to "cheat" and will force myself to use at least one photo taken on the actual day. If they are all terrible, I will have to find a way to post process or change at least one artistically to make the best out of a bad situation. I hope that this will hone my "artistic eye" and improve my post processing skillz (see how clever that was, using that "z" to imply that I have no skills).

On to today's attempt. I tried once again to get that photo of the peephole from the inside, and the photo of what the camera could see outside. I took two photos: one focusing on the peephole on the door, and the other focusing on the view through the peephole. I combined the two in photoshop, and masked out the unwanted areas. Here's the result:

 

Yeah, it's really in need of a clean. But I like the way it looks like you're going back in time when looking through that peephole. The photo through the peephole was taken at high ISO (1600) ,  combined with the dimness and the uncleaned peephole lens, and it adds an old grainy effect. The vignetting due to the lens was unintentional, but I feel that it fits in with the old-timey feel.

Here it is again, this time in black and white. I used the channel mixer and desaturation.

HDR mani-ar

I adore/worship/sleep with (ok, not the last one) my Canon DSLR and the 4 lenses I have (the 18-55, the 50mm 1.8, the Tamron 90mm macro, and the 55-250 IS). Yes, even the kit lens! But I really miss my Sony Ericsson for its portability and the wonderful photos I managed to get, just because I always had it with me. Take this photo of this beautiful and humongous (at least 2m long) reticulated python for example. It was late at night and we spotted the snake as we were walking along an extremely dark path (the lights were off).

My iphone 3gs can't take decent photos even in slightly dim light. I need a flash or light on that thing! I've missed another snake opportunity, one that slithered thoughtfully across my path as I was jogging. I stopped and tried to take a photo and it came out dark, pitch, black.

So it's the size of the DSLR and the light-lackingness of the iphone that prevents me from taking interesting photos outside. Ok, those are pathetic excuses. I'm also too shy to be seen out taking photos. I hope to overcome that soon.

Anyway, here's a photo that I took from the inside (balcony), of the outside (car park). I took photos with my 50mm lens for durations of 4s,8s,13s and 25s, then I used the HDR merger in photoshop. The lights look kind of odd, and they are too bright. And the photo looks nothing like how it appeared in the merger program, it looks very odd instead of having a high dynamic range.

But if I choose the "surreal" preset, I kind of like the weirdness I see!

Massive failure!

None of the photos I attempted today turned out presentably. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was trying out something different. Namely, trying to take a nice photo of the inside of the door with the peephole (oooh, sounds naughty!) complete with the image that I could see outside. While interesting, it was a complete failure.

So I tried a few tutorials on masking effects in Photoshop instead, and had a lot of fun doing that. There's tons of stuff out there on the web, and it appeals to the techy and artsy sides of me. Tonight, I had fun trying out some artistic effects, using this tutorial: http://www.computerarts.co.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/475879/art120_tut1.pdf

For wonderful writeups on digital photography and post processing techniques, I like reading http://www.ronbigelow.com/articles/articles.htm I'm also trying to finish reading Bryan Peterson's book, "Understanding exposure". I wish I had more time, but right now I'm overwhelmed by my PhD and work commitments. Progress is going to be slow.... but let's hope there's some.

Oh, I'll just cheat and stick a photo that I took yesterday over here. Here's Miki. The lighting is terrible but she looks kind of cute.