The moon was as round and white as Soniko’s ass last night. Thinking that it would make some interesting shots, I decided to head back out after coming from tutoring to take some pictures around my neighbourhood.
I rarely do night shots so this little trip around the neighbourhood was a great learning experience, and a great reminder of how dirty my D40 is!
Occasionally there are Chinese Temple event thingys that occur at the open field near by. To show that they are here, they spam flags all over the place leading up to the place where it is held. Much like laying bread crumbs for the children to follow in Hansel and Gretel. This particular flag formation is located at a road junction.
This is a road junction near my place too. Behind be is the Chinese Temple event thingy. My trusty bicycle is seen in the first picture; obligatory with every outdoor photoshoot to feature my bicycle because it’s awesome. I tried getting the moon to be centralised but the picture with it centralised were all pretty messed up.
The same junction, just from a different angle.
After a pretty long cycle, I decided to go some place else where I figured I could get good shots of the moon. Cycled down the bicycle track to get there. In Singapore, sometimes there are bicycle tracks for bicycles to be on, separated from the normal walking paths. But unfortunately you see people walking on bicycle tracks sometimes, waiting to be banged down by me.
The grey thing on top are MRT tracks. MRT is the term used for train in our part of the woods.
I passed by an overhead bridge on the way to my destination, climbed on top of it and took some pictures.
I like how this picture turned out
Suprise! It’s Shana who gets to go out today! I decided that she would look great at night!
Unfortunately the top of the overhead bridge had terrible lighting, there was a street lamp right at the top to illuminate the place, causing all pictures taken to be extremely saturated with yellow light, thus obliterating 90% of the picture I took.
In the original pictures, Shana looked like cheese. I had to change the hue and saturation of all the pictures. Pretty disappointing considering I spent a good half hour on top of the bridge trying different settings. Made me feel that I need a proper tripod. I had a few shots of the MRT train whizzing by Shana in the background, but the pictures did not turn up good so I omitted it. A real waste!
I gave up after sometime, and continued heading to my destination at the edge of my neighbourhood, called the Lower Seletar Reservoir Park, it is located right beside a water catchment area.
I guess this is the best picture of the night!
This is what you see when you look across the body of water. I don’t know what that place was called, but a map reference search says it’s the “IDA Singapore C&E Testing Centre”
Love the reflection on the water!
I probably took lots and lots AND LOTS of picture of dear Shana in this angle, the first half was rejected because I found out my lens fogged up causing blurry pictures. The angle was disgusting and horrible to take too. The moon was really high so I mounted my camera in portrait view on the bench. Next I let Shana stand on Rin’s Nendo Carrier to elevate her. The problem was that it was almost impossible to look through my D40’s viewfinder.
I managed to do so after find a sweet spot by sitting down on the wooden platform where I took these pictures and doing some high level yoga neck turning. Probably words can’t describe how much trouble it was.[1] Just know that I was on a wooden platform; wood = cockroaches crawling out of the gaps in between the wood.[2] The wood was wet because it rained and I sat on it.[3] Lighting was horrible – HORRIBLE!
Love her side profile. After taking those high angled shots, I placed Shana on the barrier that prevents people from falling into the water and took a few pictures. This one turned out the only decent picture!
And the last picture of the day, her against the water body.
Overall, I think that the pictures were not well-taken a lot of them don’t look good scaled down either (‘~’), but I learnt a lot taking at night. Next time I’ll be well prepared with my own lights and reflectors ^^. Interestingly after many outdoor shoots that I have done, this one was the first one where someone came up to me to ask what I was doing. Though after replying him, I realised that perhaps no one asked me before because it was a pretty obvious I was taking pictures. Don’t think you can mis-interpret what a person does with a DSLR!
< ![CDATA[those are nice photos, which camera are u using btw?]]>
< ![CDATA[I like the photos! The one under the bridge was excellent.
Do you have the "tungsten" setting on your camera? Both of my cameras are Canon, so idk if Nikon has it. But if it does, it really helps with yellow bulbs!]]>
< ![CDATA[lol thanks!]]>
< ![CDATA[the shana photo is not bad. maybe u can learn some photo editing technique? i believe if u increase the colour saturation it will turn out well]]>
< ![CDATA[I really liked http://www.flickr.com/photos/kodomut/3695886604/ and the last one..
Brought about the atmosphere of the anime as she was always on tall buildings looking around the city.]]>
< ![CDATA[Nice bokeh for the last picture.
At last, Shana gets an outing with you. =D]]>
< ![CDATA[i think you got the hue problem due to the white balance. did you calibrate it before starting the shoot? i always have a white swatch in my pack when i'm shooting something.
also, did you use any form of stand? - well, i presume you did because i saw some ISO 200 and it would be pretty much impossible freehand at those lighting conditions.
also, do you take pictures in the RAW format of your camera? just curious, because you tend to get better results when developing the raws afterwards (depending on what you use). i like silkypix but catch myself using lightroom or direrctly photoshop more often these days.]]>
< ![CDATA[Cool shots!
I like those Shana pictures you took.
The water body looks great too.
I think, a DSL is better than a normal Digi-Cam.
Oh curse you money!]]>
< ![CDATA[hope you don't mind, i really liked a picture from your shoot and felt like doing some photoshopping - took about 5 minutes and an 8bit image is not the best starting point, but i'm having it as a background image for my eeepc:)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/candlej/3697099857/>
< ![CDATA[Those are some great shots of the moon! I tried taking pictures of the moon last night, but they were pretty bad, which disappointed me greatly.]]>
< ![CDATA[Lovely photos as always~!
I love the photos where you get to see the full moon...
I was wondering, weren't you a bit afraid your daughters might fall off from those bridges by some circumstance? I tried taking photos of my Yuna figure in a high place just once and I was pretty nervous she might fall ><;]]>
< ![CDATA[Nikon D40 with the standard 18-55mm ESII lens kit
haha, you must be the 12837129371289 person to have asked!!
No one reads the FAQ section of http://kodomut.wordpress.com/about/ >_<]]>
< ![CDATA[Unfortunately no, my D40 is a very old model ^^ ]]>
< ![CDATA[I already edited it >_<
the Shana's red hair was practically yellow at the start !]]>
< ![CDATA[Maybe you can show the before and after edit version. :)]]>
< ![CDATA[the nikon D40 IS a DSLR... nice big sensor, low noise but not the newest kid on the block - i'm sure it has calibration tools built in though.]]>
< ![CDATA[Started shooting in RAW since my 3rd acquired figure.The problem was that the Yellow lights around were really really intense >_<! ]]>
< ![CDATA[oh yeah it does, but because I always take in RAW, I never bother lol]]>
< ![CDATA[But I it's a kina a waste of money.
I don't take a lot of pictures.]]>
< ![CDATA[Actually I wanted her to do another pose but I was afraid that I would cause her/some of her parts to fall into the water because it was quite windy and vry dark >_<!
Another pose would have been better for that pic!]]>
< ![CDATA[I liked the one you linked better, but it's a little blurry ('~')
The last picture should have had a more dynamic pose!]]>
< ![CDATA[The last is awesome. Very nighty ^^]]>
< ![CDATA[i always calibrate - even when taking raw pictures it's a matter of the image sensor you're using - my camera having a CMOS it does affect the result afterwards.]]>
< ![CDATA[Ah ok, I will take that into consideration next timeThanks for the tip ^^ ]]>
< ![CDATA[That is some awesome work from an 8bit!Kinda surprised that you choose that picture though XD ]]>
< ![CDATA[Hey I like the contrast!]]>
< ![CDATA[i think it fits the shana atmosphere best :)- also it was a little bit "challenging" to begin with - and i like challenges.
i use CS3, but read that you just installed CS4 - what were you using up until now?]]>
< ![CDATA[Had always been using CS3 on the G5, CS4 on the Macbook and iMac.But I decided to cut down the use of the G5 since it's not in a good position to sit for long periods of time ^_^ ]]>
< ![CDATA[Haha, yeah I was.It was extremely dark a I refrained from lots of posing. Was afraid either my camera or my dear Shana would be taking a dive. ^^ ]]>