Xmas light up - Singapore

Last week, the streets of Singapore were lighted up for Xmas. It seems thought that some savings were made as I thought that the decorations were less impressive that the previous years. It might be because Marina Bay was lighted up for the first time and budget had to be streched a little.

Scarecrow at Kranji farm- a quick snap

After a morning at Sungei Buloh, we stopped at the farm opposite to get some fresh salad. I saw this scarecrow and took a snap at it.

Milky Stork - Sungei Buloh

A group of milky storks at Sungei Buloh Nature Park, Singapore.

The rest of the puppeteer

Interestingly, the puppets representing ladies are played by ladies and male puppets are played by men. So during a long interaction between ladies, the man puppeteer takes a rest.

Chinese string puppets - Looking behind the curtain

Feeling like a kid, I peeped under the curtain to have a look at the puppeteers. I was the only interested spectator as the play was for the souls or ghosts, so it felt like no one was being disturbed apart from, maybe, the artists.

View from the tree top bridge

The view over the forest canopy from the tree top bridge in the McRitchie Reservoir Park is quite impressive. However, even late afternoon (the bridge is locked after 5pm), the contrast between the shadows and the still bright sky is too wide to be captured properly by the sensor of a camera.

All conditions were then met to experiment with HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. For the resulting image above, 5 pictures were taken of the same scene at different shutter speeds (correct exposure, -1 stop, -2 stops, +1 stop and +2 stops). They were then merged in Photoshop using the HDR function, which mixes the exposures to achieve a more neutral tonality across the image.

When the exposures are taken, best is to have the camera on a tripod with trigger by cable release. For this particular image, the camera was hand held and the hanging bridge shaking slightly... By far not the most favourable conditions. Then focus should be manual, camera on aperture priority (to avoid change in depth of field between the shots), white balance fixed (not on auto) and, preferably, ISO should be kept low (as HDR photography tends to create background noise). For Nikon camera, when auto bracketing is used with release on continuous, the number of shots selected in the auto bracketing series will be taken automatically. It is then not necessary to change the shutter setting between each shots.

Taoist ceremony

The most impressive part of the ceremony was the burning of the large statue of a soldier on a horse both made out entirely of paper.