Featuring the tiny, close up
It has been become customary for my parents to shop for flowers to decorate the house for Chinese New Year… and for me to take pictures of them for posterity 🙂 This time round, we bought hyacinths. I came home from work on the first day of the New Year to find my dad sitting out in the yard taking pictures of these flowers. Joining him for a short while (before I took a much-needed nap), I took the above picture with the aid of a reflector and a piece of black card.
It has been a while since I last took macro-shots of insects at the Botanical Gardens. While the rest of the northern hemisphere is having cold weather for now, we are experiencing the rainy / monsoon season which makes photography almost impossible. In fact, the skies were pouring non-stop for the most part of yesterday!
I took this picture of mating damselflies at the Botanical Gardens in 2004. I had quite soft lighting for the initial few shots I snapped. As luck would have it, the sun decided to make a strong appearance, bathing the two in warm and bright lighting. Lots of post-processing done on the original RAW file in boosting the colours and saturation… Wanted to give a Velvia-feel to the final result 🙂
I finally got my hands on a Canon EOS 20D Digital SLR after resisting the temptation to get one for the last few months. Andy Gray’s take on 20D vs 300D helped, as like Andy, I was previously a user of a Canon EOS 300D although I must say that he owns a lot more great lenses than I do! Initial impressions of the 20D has been very good, although there are some things with my 300D that I miss: Zoom Browser’s auto-renaming when transferring files from the CF card (the 20D comes with its own File Viewer Utility which is less intuitive when it comes to file transfers), CaptureOne’s support for 20D RAW files (the 3.6 update that covers the 20D has been delayed time and again), the 300D’s cheap cable release for slow shutter shots (will have to get the RS-80N3 later), and the battery grip (the BG-E2 for the 20D has had notorious reviews for problems and bad design).
Still, I had fun testing out my new toy this morning while at the Botanical Gardens. The above is just one of the test shots that I did. Taken with the 20D mated to a Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6 APO Super Macro II lens. More new shots to come in time…