A Glimpse From Down Under

A Glimpse From Down Under
It’s been work, work and more work since going back to my daily job (after passing my professional exams earlier this month :)). I will have to try squeezing in some time for photography this weekend if possible!

Still another shot from the Botanical Gardens from my last visit! After getting bored with the ducks, the lotus flowers, the lotus leaves and dragonflies, I turned my attention to the koi in the pond. This particular one busied itself peeking out of the pond repeatedly (hoping for someone to feed it perhaps?). I fitted a polarizer on and tried to anticipate where it would go… Frankly, it wasn’t easy to compose the shot since its motions were difficult for me to predict! Think this was the best of the lot I got in the end.

A Rippling Good Time

A Rippling Good Time
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.