Palawan beach outing

My kids love to play with the sand. And any parents with young children will know how to hate these fine grains. Among so many venues to play with sand, my favorite is still Palawan beach at Sentosa because it is the easiest for dirt containment and control. The washing point is nearby, the beach is not crowded, the 7-11 convenient store is around the corner and there is plenty of shade (provided we reach early). Hence armed with the Sentosa Islander card, Palawan beach has been one of our frequent family outing destination.

I’ll always bring some imaging device with me, be it Smartphone, compact cam or my DSLR, depending on the weather. Today, the weather was very good for photography (but definitely too hot to be enjoyable) and thus I brought my DSLR with me.

Sunny day make pictures nice but also tends to blow the highlights. I’ll prefer to compress the dynamic range using some tone-mapping but do take care not to make it too fake. Nonetheless, if I had never been to sentosa, I’ll have thought it really is a tropical paradise. Never believe in postcards.

Tokyo Auto Salon 2013 – second pass

Ever since I had two lovely attention seeking children (gotta spend more time with them now until they disappear with their friends), I no longer has all the time in the world to pursue my hobby of photography and polish the pixels after each session, even if I had the chance.

After the photoshoot at Tokyo Auto Salon 2013 at MBS, i spent about about two hours to select and post process the pictures. The haste resulted in some pictures being dropped in the first pass, which would otherwise had made the cut if I had look through them more carefully. Anyway, the following are additional pictures after doing a second pass of the raw files. For these, I could took some effort to fine tune the exposure, cropping out distracting background artefacts etc.

I posted the above picture before in the previous blog on the Tokyo Auto Salon 2013. But I find a tighter crop nicer.

Fisheye fun at the Marina Bay

Last friday, just before I headed for the Tokyo Auto Salon 2013 at the Marina Bay Sands, I purposely alighted one stop earlier at the Promenade MRT station to take some pictures at the Marina Bay. As my fisheye lens had by this time became my favorite lens to add some twist to otherwise ‘stale’ scenery, I only brought it for this wide angle lens (other than those portrait lens for the models).

The above semi panoramic shot of the helix bridge and the financial centre at the background is actually a crop from a simple, levelled fisheye shot. Before I had my fisheye lens, I’ll usually attempt to take several pictures of such scene and stitched them together using Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE). With fisheye lens, I merely need to crop out the centre.

Louis Vuitton parvillion

This is one of the ‘shot to death’ scenery shot around the Marina Bay ever since MBS came to existence. The fisheye effect merely spruce up the other wise boring image.

Wonder Full- the light and water show @ Marina Bay Sands

There are quite a number of free, light and water shows in Singapore. One at the Resort World Sentosa, one at the Gardens by the Bay and another at the Marina Bay Sands. I finally found time to bring my family down to Marina Bay Sands, MBS to take a look. Ever since the Bayfront MRT Station was opened, getting to MBS was so much more convenient.

More on the light show, titled Wonder Full, can be found at MBS’s website.

Beginning of the Wonder Full- light and water show

Big baby

The main highlight of the show was the mass release of bubbles  towards the end that drove the children crazy.

S.E.A. Aquarium Overview Video

Went down to S.E.A Aquarium again. This time my primary aim was to do a overview video to introduce the Aquarium. Hence I only took with me my compact camera, Sony HX9V.

The following video is a compilation of a series of short clips I took with HX9V, put together with Windows Movie Maker and free background music from http://www.jewelbeat.com.

 

More HDR @ Sentosa, Imbiah Lookout

Look my family to Sentosa again, 2nd time in 2 weeks. Originally intended to go Marina Barrage to fly kite but the surprising hot weather in the morning (good for photography though) made us changed our mind. Thanks to the Sentosa Islander pass, Sentosa is a good backup plan anytime 🙂

Sentosa has been around for so long that (other than new attractions like RWS) almost every angle has been taken. Hence I decided to play around with some HDR post processing again. I still prefer more ‘natural’ but vibrant HDR as compared to other-worldly-surreal HDR.

If only the Merlion can rotate constantly… will prefer it to look to the right

On the way back to the Central Beach Station from Imbiah Lookout. Again, if the Merlion can turn to face me, it’ll look much better 🙂

I wonder how to get on board this truck… it is a very different form of ‘transport’ option available.