Category: Long exposure

Slow-shutter pictures with motion-blurring effect

Please Q Here

Please Q Here
As the Chinese (Lunar) New Year approaches, Chinatown becomes a bustle of activity with people checking out the festive goodies and bargains, or just soaking in the atmosphere. I made my almost obligatory yearly sojourn to Chinatown yesterday in search of pictures 🙂

Singaporeans are crazy over ba kwa, or barbeque dried pork, which is eaten as one of the festive goodies for the season. Ba kwa prices can go up to more than S$40 per kg at this time of the year, with the queues spilling into the streets and people waiting up to more than an hour for their turn to buy their share. This particular picture was taken outside one of the most popular ba kwa shop in Chinatown. I guess playing with his mobile phone was all the guy could do in the queue to keep himself occupied while waiting for his purchase.

And Then The Stars Came Raining Down 2…

And Then The Stars Came Raining Down 2�
Another fireworks shot from the 2006 Countdown display at the Esplanade…

I wish that I had better a better foreground/background to complement the lightshow. Tree-tops were the best I could find at the Marina Park 😛 It wasn’t easy getting a good exposure since the fireworks kept coming all the time: I was down to using f/22 and ISO 100 on my 20D. Despite that, it was difficult to get an exposure longer than 1.5 to 2 seconds to capture the light-trials. In the cases where I was able to rack-up the shutter speed to more than 2 seconds, the shots were spoilt because a flurry of new fireworks would have already shot into the frame. Fireworks aren’t exactly my favourite photography subjects 😛

And Then The Stars Came Raining Down…

And Then The Stars Came Raining Down...
As promised from my earlier post, some pictures from the 2006-countdown fireworks 🙂

Singaporeans are typically fireworks-mad 😛 You can expect hordes of them to arrive whenever a fireworks display is on. On New Year’s Eve, the roads were typically jammed (including the highway overlooking the Esplanade Waterfront) with cars, most of them illegally parked. It would have been ideal to have gotten some nice cityscape to complement the firework pictures. The closest I could get to the fireworks was from the Marina Park though, with the treetops acting as my only foreground. Much of the picture-taking was just clicking the shutter (with a cable-release, with the camera tripod-mounted) with differing shutter speed/aperture/ISO settings, and hoping for the best 😛