万家灯火

This was taken from Mount Faber in Singapore yesterday evening — I wanted very much to repeat some night scene photography that I took with my G3 more than a year ago (this time, with my 300D and better lenses). Alas, the growth of shrubs and trees has been so rapid that they now obstruct the view I managed to get last year. However, I did manage to capture something new this time around.

As usual, the concrete jungle of buildings provided the setting for the shot. Taking this right at dusk, the buildings provided nice lit patterns for the shot. I like the layered effect created by the varying distances of the buildings in the shot, with the bottom left block of flats providing a strong visual anchor for the overall scene. The title of the shot is in Chinese and means literally “Lamplights of ten thousand families”.

Surfing Knights Of The Round Table

More pictures from the series I took at the Changi Airport…

This is actually a Internet cafe/surfing station at McDonald’s in Terminal 2. The escalator landing from the floor above provided a good vantage point for me to capture the actions of net surfers (mostly children on that lazy Sunday morning!). I like the arrangement of the people around the high-tech looking table and setting. Taken with a slow shutter speed with the camera mounted on a tripod.

Trolley Service


The Steven Spielberg-directed movie, “The Terminal”, inspired me to try my hand at taking some candid shots at the Singapore Changi Airport last weekend. Indoor shooting was however much more challenging due to the dimmer lighting conditions which necessitated using higher ISO settings, slower shutter speeds and wider apertures. These all led to a compromise on noise-levels, sharpness and the ability to freeze decisive moments.

For this shot, the interesting patterns of the floor tiles together with the unusual lighting first caught my eye. Setting up my tripod to await passers-by to add a human-element to the pictures I would take, this maintenence man who was collecting used baggage trolleys pushed his load right into the camera frame. Seizing the moment, I snapped a shot only to find that sharpness was lacking due to motion blurring as a result of the slow shutter speed I was forced to use. Worse still, the picture appeared very grainy since I was forced to push the ISO setting up to 800!

All this was a pity since I liked especially the composition and setting of the shot. Not wanting to waste the shot, I decided to do some Photoshop-work on it. The result you see here is a combination a usage of the smudge-tool (to give a brushed art feel to the shot), solarisation, and application of a canvas-texture to the final picture.