BIGGER not BETTER

You just came home with your super duper DSLR that you deprived yourself months of fish n chips to get, put on your super duper thousand dollar zoom lens; snapping away... expecting super sharp results than your humble point & shoot and was promptly disappointed ;) What gives?

Not far off from the above scenario, I took some shots of our neighbor; Gully's son Jerico a while back when I got my Canon 30D camera; the lens was a rather pricey EF80-200 f2.8L. The camera and lens combined cost a whopping NZ$4,200.00!!

Let there be Rules!

Last week I talk about the Rules of Thirds, an imaginary two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines that assists your composition.

You also learned that finally even Adobe recognise the importance of The Rule of Third in photography. The crop tool in their latest Photoshop CS5 Extended will superimpose a "Third Rules" over your to be crop image, hopefully guiding you to a better composed crop.

The only problem I find about those very fine overlay lines, they are a bit hard to see; wouldn't it be nice if we can have easy to see white lines and we are able to overlay them to our image anytime we want?

Rule of Thirds

Every photographers serious about their composition would understand the importance of "The Rule Of Thirds".

If you don't, listen up ;)

So what is this "Rule"?

Wikipedia described this powerful technique to make your photos more interesting as:

"The rule of thirds is a compositional rule of thumb in visual arts such as painting, photography and design.

[1] The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.

[2] Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would."

Confused? Take a look at the diagram below...

Put it simply, the rule of thirds says that your picture is most interesting when its subject is composed along imaginary lines that divide the photo into thirds, vertically and horizontally.

Homesick Blues

It is winter like this that you miss your old hometown, it is the bitterly cold wind; the never ending drizzles; the gloomy 5 pm dark... it is time like this that you miss Penang :(

You missed the beach, the warmth of the setting sun; even the hot humid breeze!

SD Card Disaster!

After weeks of rain, freezing Southerlies; we were given a sunny Saturday! Le general and I decided to soak in the late afternoon sun along our Overseas Terminal.

After a nice cup of Flat White and banana-white-chocolate muffin, we took a stroll along the marina... I was attracted by the hundreds of sea gulls along the shore. I had my Olympus E-P2 with me, I took some shots.

Back home I plug the 8 gig SDHC card into the card reader and open this shot in Photoshop.

Shot with E-P2 and a Leica Elmarit 28mm f2.8 lens.

And before I can say "gull", the SDHC card crash! I was "told" the card has not been ejected properly and all that rubbish and it promptly disappear from the desktop! Arrrrrrr!

Remembering Tun Omar Ong

This news hit me in my face when I launch The Star Online a few minutes ago! My memory open like a floodgate...

I remember on that Saturday, April 20, 1974; The Star Managing Editor, K.S.Choong asked me (rookie Photo Editor) and rookie reporter Alex Choong (no relation) to go up Penang Hill and find Tan Sri Omar Yoke Lin who is enjoying a quite honeymoon with his pretty bride, Dr.Aisyah S.P.Chan.

Choong told us it is an EXCLUSIVE story and we got all excited!

Noise Control

In the good old days of film, we worried about "grain"; film grain! We demand "fine grain" film, we processed our black and white film in fine grain developer to achieve finer grain!

Came digital and instead of grain, we are face with "noise"; digital noise or image noise.

Unlike film grain which can usually make your picture look sharper and create more impact in black and white photos, digital noise make picture look awful!

When I was working with the papers, Kodak Tri-X was my "standard" all round B&W film. I shot all type of subjects with just one film type and often exposed at ISO 400 to 1,600 without worrying about graininess of my images!