Botanic Gardens Photoshoot

Happy New Year!

I went to Singapore Botanic Gardens for a New Year's eve photoshoot yesterday.
I haven't been putting my Pentax dslr to use as much as I'd like to, and when I do, it's mostly shooting my kids and paintings.

So, since I'm only required to work half-day on Dec 31st, I thought I'd visit the Botanic Gardens to shoot some nice landscapes and flowers there... who knows, I might get some good reference photos for my painting class too.

All pics taken with either the kit lens 18-55mm or FA50mm F1.4

Bintan Lagoon Resort - a Pictorial

I went to Bintan Lagoon Resort with the missus over the weekend to have a quick getaway from the busy work life we had in Singapore. It's only a short 2D1N stay but we thoroughly enjoyed it.

Here's some pics taken with my Pentax K10D dslr camrea...

Quite different from my usual watercolour posts... but nonetheless I tried to incorporate some knowledge of arts in terms of composition and colours into my photography as both painting and photography definitely compliments one another especially in these two aspects.

Enjoy!

I'm Back... with pictures of Tokyo, Japan

Well, I'm back! it's been one hell of a long time since I last updated this blog. As I've mentioned earlier, I was attending a work related evening course and I'm glad to announce that I've finished the course and barely passed it... but a pass is still a pass... so I'm done with all the reading and revising... haha

I've also picked up photography during this absence although I have been toying with the idea for sometime. Photography has always been a secondary hobby which supplements my watercolour art, but I decided to own a digital slr so that I can shoot better quality photos. So, I bought myself a brand new Pentax K10D, after much research and found that it is exactly what I wanted at a reasonable price.

I went to Tokyo, Japan for a week in August for work and I took the opportunity to go there 3 days earlier to tour around the city, and took lots of photos. Here are some of my favourites.

The Imperial Palace and residence of the Emperor of Japan, aka Kōkyo

Colourful fans and souvenirs at Asakusa

Beautiful Sunset at Sensoji Temple, Asakusa

Night scene at Ginza - I just love the contrast between the trailing
lights from the moving cars and the idling traditional bicycles

Have bikes will travel - more and more tokyo residents are
going green by riding bikes around the city centre

Traditional Japanese parade at Harajuku

KAWAII!! This little guy is so full of energy!

Hope you like my photos, comments are welcome.
Of course, this doesn't mean I'll stop painting and become a photographer instead.
Watercolour is still my first love, but obviously with this new toy, you'll see more photography stuff from now on too... :-)

More pictures of my trip to Tokyo in my Facebook: Album 1 and Album 2

National Day Fireworks

It was Singapore's 42nd National Day yesterday. Usually, I'd just stay at home and watch the parade 'live' on TV. Sometimes, I took the opportunity to take a break and went back to Kuching like last year. But this year, a couple of my colleagues have just started photography and asked me to go with them to take photos of the fireworks. Now, I don't even have a decent digital slr camera and my knowledge of photography is also limited to basics like what are F-stop, shutter speed and simple composition rules which I apply from my painting.

So, I went along with my humble Panasonic Lumix FZ20... we had dinner at Lau Pa Sat and by the time we reached the big field behind One Raffles Quay at 6:00pm, the place was already packed with families in picnic mats, photographers with bulky gears and tripods, and happy people waiting to watch the fireworks.

We couldn't get a good view at all as there were too many people in front of us, so we decided to shoot our photos a few metres behind, resulting in many heads on the foreground spoiling our photo composition. Nevertheless, it was fun and I enjoyed the nightout with my good friends and colleagues.

The crowd

Giant jelly-fish??

Here are two of my beginner's effort in shooting fireworks... one lesson learnt, i should have upped the shutter speed to at least 5 seconds or more to catch the tail-lights of the fireworks.

Although my effort pales in comparison with the pros with big-shot dslr camera, I hope you enjoy the pics... Happy Birthday, Singapore!