Lower Seletar Reservoir Park part II- digital Winter

This is the first time I experimented with Infrared (IR) cum black and white (B&W) photography. Comparing the two sets, I personally preferred the ‘normal’ coloured set but nonetheless, IR still provided more fun 🙂

 

Lower Seletar Reservoir Park

I was early for my appointment at Yishun, so I made a small detour to snap a few pictures at the lower seletar reservoir park. I made 2 set of pictures, one straight forward set with my sony nex5r and other infra red set with my Olympus E-620 and R72 IR filter. The jpeg from the former was uploaded via WIFI to my tablet, Samsung Tab 3 8.0 and quickly processed using the free app, Snapseed. I was very very pleased with the results. Photography had never been so easy.

Stay tuned for the IR set, when I find the time to process them.

Navy@Vivo

I got to know this event from Facebook and decided take a look on a weekday, when there it is not so crowded. The ship anchored is RSS Endurance, a really big ship by our Navy’s standard.

 

Unlike typical events which I’ll cover with my olympus DSLR, E620, this time I had with me just a Sony NEX5R with a kit lens. And instead of painstaking post processing the selected raw with Dxo Optics Pro, I merely uploaded the out-of-cam-pics to my android via WIFI and did some touch up using the free app, Snapseed. I purposely exaggerate the colours and effects (much towards HDR than realistic photography) to spice up the otherwise ‘boring’ scenes due to the overcast skies and dull coloured objects (military colours).

Anchoring a military ship in a civilian environment does produce some contrasting photographic event. I overlooked the corner when I push the tones for this shot.

Waiting to board the ship.

The sky threatened to unleash a heavy downpour but wasn’t this dark (dramatise via Dramatic tones)

Super puma on the deck. The deck is big enough for 2.

View from other parts of the various decks.

While I thought the deck was huge, the interior was even bigger.

It was then that the downpour started… and trapped many on board from leaving. But created an opportunity to take pictures without people around.

Overall, even though the results was far from perfect and a far cry in terms of output quality compared to raw processing using Dxo optics pro, then tone-mapped with Photomatix, the speed at which I can upload, select, process the pictures provided me a great compromise in terms of time and effort if the shoot is not that critical to me.

 

Titans of the Past @ Science Centre

Came across the advertisement in the papers and decided to bring my family down to take a look at the dinosaurs- Titans of the Past, Dinosaurs and the Ice Age Mammals at the Science centre. Compared to the Megabugs return, I personally prefer this because there were more exhibits to see. Other than skeletons, there were also animatronics, basically ‘moving’ dinosaurs.

The skulls were the first to greet the visitors.

Then there were more of the skeletons, mostly replicas.

Even though the exhibition area was not that huge, there were more to see at each turn.

This 36m Argentinosaurus was just too huge for me to effectively capture it in one frame.

And just as I thought this was it, another turn took me to the Ice age.

I was originally very keen to correct the white balance of the pictures but after several shots, I decided to leave them alone as I found the artifiical colours retained the original mood of the exhibits better.

And to end it well, there was a sand pit to allow the children a chance to ‘uncover’ some dinosaur fossils.

Keep up the good work, science centre!