Shutter Speed: Freezing the Moments!

Freeze!

The shutter speed of the DSLR plays a major role to freeze fast motions. Sometimes things happened so quickly that our human brain failed to perceive its beauty.

For fast motions such as water splashes(outdoor), any shutter speed above 1/1000 should be able to freeze the water. Shutter speed of 1/8000 was used in Aperture Priority mode for the picture above because I wanted to get a good focus of the girl with big aperture.

It is always interesting to photograph water splash because it can create some interesting patterns:)

The choice of shutter speed varies according to the speed of the motion too. For the photo above, I used only 1/400 and yet there isn't much motion blur except for their legs:p

Well, it doesn't mean that you must freeze fast motions all the time. Sometimes some motion blur will increase the impact visually as well. 

And of course, don't forget to do jump shots at the beach:)

Night Photography in Singapore

Night photography! We meet again! After I learned some lessons from the night photography in Malacca, I'm giving myself another chance to try it out again:)

 Alright, this time with lower ISO, which is around 400, I was able to avoid getting noise at the darker region of the photo. The original photo was way too colorful and none of the color stood out, so I've decided to made it black and white:)

 For the above picture, I attempted to use the tilt shift effect so that the trees will look miniaturized.

Yes, I've made it black and white again for the same reason:)

How about some vintage effect instead of black and white? Let me know what you think about it:)

Garden's by the Bay! It's very different from the usual night photography here because the super tree itself is bright. Without proper exposure control, the top region of the super tree would appear to be over exposed. Since its reflection on the water were weaker compared to its actual brightness, a filter was used to lower  down the brightness of the actual super tree. 

Alright, I know what you're thinking, the super tree was overexposed right? Yes you are right, and that's just how difficult to find the right balance between all the settings. Furthermore, I did not bring a timer to perform bulb mode again(sigh). So all the shots taken were below 30 seconds of shutter speed:( 

Voila! a closer shot of the super tree! Thanks to the 16-35mm wide angle lens that I brought along, I was able to capture it when I was directly under the super tree!

The lesson: Please bring along a timer to try out bulb mode next time:p

Finding the Right Light!

The position and the intensity of light can affect the mood of the picture easily. Although having enough amount of light to shine on your subject from the front directly will give you its best detail, but the reverse creates can create interesting result as well.

 As you can see above, the spot light was positioned close to the couple in the picture. In fact, the actual light source from the back was so much taller than both of them. I had to squad down and take a low angle shot to bring the light closer to them. Since it's a spot light and there isn't much light shining on their face, I had to use another artificial light, which is the flash to properly light up their faces. Right now I'm still figuring out how to make the light to be "star-shaped". I was unable to do it because smaller aperture will lead to longer shutter time that will blur moving subjects easily. Any idea?

 Alright, how about bringing the light even closer to the subject? This time I position in such a way that the light was directly behind the subject (the girl's head). You would notice the the strong light from the back creates a high contrast on her hair and separates it nicely from the dark sky. The flash was used again because there isn't much light shining on the subject and it was rather a fast moving subject.

Finally, I've managed to capture this one without using a flash! At this angle, the spot light from the top of the stage was strong enough to separate the two from the background and also to light up their faces partially. A bit of lens flare sets the mood well too.

Night Photography in Malacca

Finally I've got a chance to do night photography! Dad picked me up by using his motorcycle and we started to look for nice scenery in the Malacca town. When we were at the bridge that leads to the Jonker Street, I mounted the DSLR on a tripod to take some shots. I've made a mistake though.

 I realized that I've pumped too much ISO (1000!) because I thought the sensor would not be able to see much of the details at night. I've forgotten that all these can be compensated by using low shutter speed since I brought a tripod along. I realized that there were lots of noise in the sky when I reviewed the photos in my computer, and that's because of the high ISO I've used. Speaking of high ISO, I think that would be the reason why I was able to shoot in the manual mode instead of the bulb mode. The manual mode could only take maximum 30 seconds of shutter, which is relatively short compare to bulb mode with manual shutter speed set by the photographer by using a timer(which I don't have). 

Interestingly, diffraction of light occurs as the aperture becomes smaller. When it happens, bright lights such as the street light becomes star shaped. Sadly, another mistake I made was the use of the smallest aperture, F22! I learned that photo quality degrades as the aperture size decreases. Initially I thought F22 would give be the "best star shape" from the street lamps. 

However, soon I discovered that F11 onward would be able to give the result, without making the photo quality worse. Everything was shot in RAW, so that all the details were preserved for editing purposes. Well, I couldn't stay in Malacca longer due to my CCA commitments in Singapore. I would definitely try night photography again in Singapore!

More photos:)

Light Trails

Another light trails:)

First Shout Out!

Hello world! Thanks for visiting this blog! I hope that you will enjoy the photographs shared on this blog! Feel free to leave a comment as well:)