The Before and the After

I’m not all that great when it comes to digital imaging and photo editing, but knowing what to do can totally transform a photo.

before

after

Clutter on the right is removed. Texture added. Sides of photo, particularly corners, burned. Contrast upped. Voilà!

For the harvest is ripe

I spent the whole morning downloading free textures from Flickr for use on my photos. What a great day! Though at one point I was frustrated when the laptop hung on me with five downloads in tow.

I notice how my titles make absolutely no sense to anyone else except me.

All I want for Christmas

Canon EF 85mm f/1.8

except that Christmas is tomorrow! After using the $400 LDS claim, I suppose I’ll only have to top up $200 max.

Small. Light. Fast to focus. Great for portraits. And relatively inexpensive. I’ll set my sight on something with a red ring next year.

To get that shot

At past eleven pm yesterday, Andrew asked me if I wanted to get up to the rooftop of the carpark to photograph the full moon. It being only a day past the lunar fifteenth, the moon still appeared totally round, and very bright. So I put a sweater over my jammies and we took the huge 100-400mm almost telescopic lens and the tripod up.

The clouds were very uncooperative and we ended up with less than average shots of the moon with scant a detail. Argh. I’ll try again next month. It was really lovely in the beginning though, with the almost pure warm glow of the moon lighting up the nearby clouds. By the time we were done setting up the huge ass tripod, we knew we couldn’t get the shot we wanted. The clouds had come in way too close.

Oh well.

Anyway, it was interesting to note how we had spoilt the total seclusion of the carpark area for a couple of get-a-hotel-room lovebirds.

Strobist

It really makes a world of a difference to photos when an off-camera flash is used. I’m gonna make time at the end of this year to experiment with the different techniques suggested in Lighting 101, but for now, I’ll settle for familiarising myself with the jargon. Now where is my Kinokuniya privilege card?

I. am. hooked.

I have been following up on Aknacer and Rosie Hardy’s love story on flickr. I log in religiously every day to keep up. It is so touching, surreal, romantic. At times like these, I wish I were a teenager again.

*

Yesterday, so fed up was M at having to deal with the camera in his face again that he tried to foil my photo-taking attempts. Heh. He had inadvertently given me a jewel of a shot.

My first camera lens

I love to read reviews. Book reviews. Children’s DVD reviews. Reviews on makeup. Movie reviews. Photographic equipment reviews. And it is because of a review that I finally landed myself my very own camera lens today! Yay! It’s the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM. The husband made this recommendation when he learnt that I wanted a macro lens and so I read up on it. Took me to the shop to try it out and I really loved how I could get really close up to an object, the lovely bokeh and its overall resultant effect on the photo. And I got the remote control too. Heh. The shop assistant initially handed me one that had to be plugged into the camera.

I was like, “Huh?! How far does this go?”

“About three feet.”

“Three feet?!!” I was thinking – I can’t take full body shots three feet from the camera! “Don’t you have a wireless one?!”

And so he did. Yay.