AF-S NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8G

Just got this on 290811 for $300, have been pretty pleased with it's performance and bokeh so far, but still finding it hard to master the shallow field of focus when fully opened (f/1.8) or near wide-open, especially when i am using spot-focusing.

Take a look at this:



This diagonally stretched fern leaf (closest to me at the bottom left corner) was taken at f/2.8 with the focal point on the gash in the middle, and already you can see that the field of focus requires you to be rather precise especially when you are taking photos with many subjects or points of interest at different planes (or distances from your lens if you will)



The bokeh is extremely pleasing - with the shot taken against my badly-cluttered table, the medal still stands out sharply. All the objects in the foreground as well as the background fade out of focus nicely, with no jarring shapes and lines protruding, as can also be seen from the shot of the fern leaf where the buildings in the distance just fade off into barely-recognisable patches of colour.

Overall, this is a great lens to have for its price-to-value ratio, and would make an extremely awesome prime lens for beginners like me to play around with fast glass. I would also like to add that the focusing motor is spot on when I use it on auto to check the calibration of the lens, and fortunately, it is my lack of focusing skills that causes the blur when I shoot my friends. Perhaps that's also because I choose to shoot wide open. (my camera will automatically stop down to at least f/3.5 or thereabouts for me the few times I tried to use it on auto)

Will try to test this in low-light conditions in the future, so stay tuned and happy shooting! (:

Rediscovering Panoramas

I have been kind of running dry on inspiration recently, so I just decided to walk around with my camera today. I didn't have much to do, so I went down to the Arts House to catch the "What Lies Between" exhibition. The gallery was quite small to be honest, but I was kind of mistaken in thinking every exhibition would be on the scale of Abbas.

After that I just walked around and went to the Asian Civilisations Museum for the Terracotta Warriors exhibition, where I made the stupid mistake of getting caught up in the other exhibits en route to the Terracotta one. You see, that gallery is buried behind lots of free galleries and I wasn't thinking much when I looked at the exhibits. It was only after a while of "ooh"s and "aah"s that I realised I wasn't looking at Terracotta Warriors. Period. So I rushed over to the exhibit proper, but that is a story for another time.

After that, I walked near the Fullerton Hotel area and it started to drizzle ever so slightly, and the clouds made for a nice view of the sky. And it was then I decided to do a panorama. No tripod, but I just felt like doing it. So I did!

I must first show you guys my first attempts at doing a panorama. For those who don't know how to do it, like me back then, you can find many tutorials on Youtube that are pretty simple to follow.

This was done at Mount Faber some time back in May, and it was done with no prior knowledge of how to actually do a panorama. For one, I wasn't shooting on manual, so you can see the different exposure levels throughout the stitch. Secondly, I was shooting on autofocus, so the focus may be on different zones of the photo (especially since this photo has many layers of "foreground" and "background")

This was a better attempt in that the background is at least more evenly exposed and you can't really tell where the stitches were made, but generally Photoshop does a pretty good job with Photomerge as long as you don't make mistakes that are too obvious like the previous example.

I went to the Marina Bay area with Wei Han in May as well and did two more panoramas. I was really ambitious for this - this was almost a 360degree panorama with the standard kit lens if you notice the Helix Bridge on both ends of the photo. One good technique to note here, besides using full Manual settings and Manual focus, is to take the component shots of the panorama in portrait. This will allow you to take a greater amount of shots for overlapping and also give you a greater depth of view for the panorama. 

The Marina Bay panoramas were shot in portrait compared to when I hadn't learnt that lesson; the Mount Faber ones were shot in landscape. However, all these were taken using a tripod, so it was pretty easy to just pan and take everything in.

The clouds were particularly pretty and the sky was really that blue, I even had to lighten it up a bit. Actually, it was stormy and it happening during sunset made it that much more dramatic. A pity I couldn't bring out the full texture in it during post-processing, so if anybody knows how to and teaches me, I will really appreciate it!

The clouds are much nicer here and it looks like they're creeping across the sky. You can even see the raindrop on my lens at the right side of the image. I still can't believe I did this handheld though! I was using a really high ISO to make up for it, but thankfully the quality still looks not bad (haha I didn't pixel peep)

I'm not saying that these panoramas are all fantastic and that awesome, just that I have noticed a significant improvement from when I first started out playing with panoramas using the tips I collected from different websites, so I thought I'd share it with you guys as well!

There's always room for improvement, and putting together what I shot quite some time back with what I am shooting now is always very encouraging =D

Three Trysts with the Terminated Tracks

There have been many posts and photologs detailing the KTM ever since it closed down in July, but I wanted to add my personal narrative of the tracks to the collection since I saw that most of the photos of these tracks were taken almost right before they were closed, resulting in cluttered and similar-looking photos. Since I have had the opportunity to enjoy the tracks in their full splendour without too many people about, I would like to share photos of how it looked like in the past, when nobody cared too much about them. ):

I first discovered the tracks quite some time ago, when I first moved into my current abode. But I never bothered to go down and discover what it was all about, and that was when I made up my mind to pay this enigmatic site a visit after I had gotten my camera. That was way back in January, and the very first encounter with these sullen metal structures.


The sign that was vandalised after the KTM section closed, and subsequently removed.


The very empty bridge with nobody but me for almost the entire afternoon.


A girl who was texting her friend, but it totally reminded me of Inception. "You're waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don't know for sure. But it doesn't matter. How can it not matter to you where this train takes you?"


The controls for the tracks - I couldn't even begin to imagine how many sections of tracks these levers controlled


A closer look at all the bright lights that I still cannot comprehend, but the ignorance just adds to the anachronism and mystery of the railway for me


Ancient relics by the house where the station master stays, just one of the many signs of decay slowly devouring the track


I was also really lucky that day; Besides getting many segments of the track to myself, I even came across a band (presumably local) having a photoshoot for their album cover here. It'll probably go vintage because you will never find the railway there again ;_;


That was the setting up, this was getting the real shot. I think the perspective will look really nice with the layered foreground and background from the angle of the cameraman!

That concluded my first trip there in January. Coincidentally, my dad proposed a few weeks later that we take the KTM to experience it before it closed down. So in March, my whole family took the KTM for the first (and unfortunately, last time) from the Tanjong Pagar station.

We booked the earliest train to get the cheaper tickets (0645 if I remember correctly), and my whole family bundled into the taxi without really waking up to see the station lit by street lights and not much else.


A view of the station from the outside, at the point where we got off the cab.


The gates were all shuttered up because we got there even before the ticket office opened, so I just tried to look around when the station was still sound asleep.


The train I thought we would be taking resting in the station before it began it's long journey, but it turned out that that was the 0800 Express train that had slightly pricier tickets.


This adorable cat was up and running way before many Singaporeans awoke from their daily slumber, I'm not too sure whether it was a stray though. I definitely need to take a few lessons from him (or was it a her =s) on how to chillax.


Food glorious food! Unfortunately most of the stalls weren't open at this hour, so my parents and I just got teh from one of the two stalls that were open.


The stall my parents got the teh from, as well as this friendly backpacking lady who is 70 and still travelling the world! It so happened that she was the only passenger other than my family in the station for quite some time, so we happened to have quite a good chat while waiting for the ticket office to open. Haha I wish I will still have this kind of energy when I'm at that age.


Finally boarding the train! As you can see the pace of boarding is quite slow, there's no rush and there's no crowd at all. It was more of a daily mode of transportation for people rather than a tourist attraction back then in March 2011, which you can easily contrast with photos of the last train departing the station and the fully-booked trains before that.


The train stopped for almost 2 hours at the Bukit Timah station, not for anyone to board in particular. I didn't particularly mind - it gave me the chance to shoot many things I wouldn't have the chance to. It was like a perfect photoshoot all set up for me - the morning sun, a life-sized train, not too many people walking around and into your shots (note I mention too many because having people is fine and adds life to most photos)


I found out the answer 2 hours later. It was to allow the Express train you saw earlier to pass since the track subsequently only had room for one train to travel at any one time, and this was the only place where you could so-called "overtake". So yes you do get what you pay for =p

In July, I paid one last tribute to the vestiges of the tracks still left in the heartlands of Singapore by going back to the same place I had been six months ago, and hopefully record the legacy of these tracks with my slightly-improved photography skills.

I wanted to capture the small details, the wear and tear after many years of use and being exposed to the elements, and a sense of grandeur and finality that I would not see all these structures again.

I got down low and shot quite a bit in black-and-white, but I always shoot in colour first and convert to black-and-white subsequently so that I still have a lot of room for post-processing.


One of the many rivets that the trains pass over everyday, reminds us of how insignificant we are within these huge systems that hum everyday


Bolts and nuts...


And more rivets!


The corroded metal girders add really pretty texture, and I was really lucky to get a nice lens flare to go along with this


The same bridge, 6 months later. But this time there are many people in the distance all marvelling at this wonder before they are about to lose it.


I really like the geometric patterns on this simple bridge. I decided to silhouette it against the clear blue sky just for fun!


And my last and favourite shot of the series! Observant readers may notice that they have seen this somewhere before...

Till then! I hope to bring you more interesting photostories, but this was just because I so happened to visit the railway three times at different periods of the same year. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did writing this!

Photo-hosting Sites

Under the recommendation of my friend Renjie, I have decided to set up shop at Flickr! But - there is a total filesize limit of 300mb, which I foresee to be quite a problem since most of my later shots are shot in RAW and converted to JPEG, which means the filesize could easily hit 10MB.

Going to have to do some major compressing or find other solutions that can be sustained for a longer period of time...

[Edit on 050911:

I just realised that the 300MB applies per month so the limit resets at the start of every month. Still just to play safe I convert all my photos to the lowest quality possible so that my site loads faster and I take up less space in case I go on a photo-uploading spree during any month. Good to backup photos at the end of the month though, if you have not used up your monthly quota yet!]

How This All Began

Coming across photography was really an accident, but it was really a blessing for me. I had always marvelled at wonderful pictures but never thought about doing it myself, and I had no idea that technique played a part in creating visually appealing pictures that I subconsciously liked but never realised.

Coming to think about it more carefully, actually it wasn't that accidental. After I enlisted, my maternal grandmother passed away, and coupled with the loss of my paternal grandmother a few years back, I gradually realised that I wanted to keep my memories with me, alive. I saw photos as a good way of helping me to remember whatever had happened in my past, both when I am now healthy and young, and probably when I get old and forgetful.

Delving into this world has been an extremely rewarding experience. I spent a lot of time alone, just my camera and I, walking around Singapore and talking in the sights and sounds. I learnt to notice many things and appreciate them for what they are, things I had never paid attention to because I did not have the chance to scrutinise them through the eyepiece.

I started off posting all my pictures on Facebook but I decided I wanted something more than that - I wanted to explain and describe the process of taking some shots and share my journey as an amateur photogropher with other enthusiasts. I believe that as long as I work hard at it I will gradually get better, and I hope this shows in my pictures.

For those that are still sitting on the fence as to whether to pick up photography as a hobby - do it. You don't have to invest in a fancy DSLR, even iPhone cameras or your compacts can allow you to practice the basics of composition and recognising the "moments". So many people have a camera nowadays nobody's going to judge you. The best thing is everything is open to your own interpretation and how you decide to approach each and every shot, and the sky's not even the limit!

In December 2010, I made the decision and I have not looked since. Take a look!