Black & white pictures
Just a short little update while I am away in the UK…
No new pictures this time on my trip to the UK (I did not bring a camera apart from the small little 2-megapixel one in my mobile phone) since this is strictly a not-for-pleasure study trip. The above was taken 3 years ago on Read Bridge located at Clarke Quay in Singapore. Just a short reminder to myself that I am soon to cross the one big major bridge in my career…
Updates to this photoblog will be a little slow as I will be away to the UK for some revision courses before I attempt the final portion of my career-related exam in early May…
The above picture was taken during the same trip I made to the Botanical Gardens almost 2 weeks ago. This particular duck was having a good time making ripples in the water. I made a quick switch to shutter priority / continuous drive mode and clicked a quick series of shots. This was one of the better ones with just the right composition, action and ripple patterns. I wasn’t able to dial in some compensation for the brightness of the water: the duck ended up looking a bit underexposed because of the lighting situation. Thankfully, I was able to recover the details with some RAW processing in CaptureONE. I have also done some vignette-masking/levels adjustments to darken and increase the contrast of the ripple patterns while leaving the duck highlighted as the main subject in the picture.
Despite the recent worries about bird flu, lots of people were seen feeding the ducks at the Botanical Gardens. Whereas it was duck (feeding) season for them, it was duck (photography) season for us! 😛 But getting them in nice and interesting compositions wasn’t that easy. You need a super-zoom / telephoto lens to get real close, and the closer you get, the more difficult it gets to frame and squeeze off the shot at the correct moment. Given the 200mm reach of my 70-200mm f/4L, I couldn’t get that close too. In the end, I decided to spot for interesting arrangements within the brood of ducks. By the time I took this, the sun was almost overhead. I decided on a silhouette approach for a change instead. I was lucky to capture this particular picture where the ducks (and their reflections) were just nicely seperated and arranged. I have added a sepia / b&w tone effect to the original shot (which was almost monochromatic to start with anyway!).