A Rippling Good Time

A Rippling Good Time
Updates to this photoblog will be a little slow as I will be away to the UK for some revision courses before I attempt the final portion of my career-related exam in early May…

The above picture was taken during the same trip I made to the Botanical Gardens almost 2 weeks ago. This particular duck was having a good time making ripples in the water. I made a quick switch to shutter priority / continuous drive mode and clicked a quick series of shots. This was one of the better ones with just the right composition, action and ripple patterns. I wasn’t able to dial in some compensation for the brightness of the water: the duck ended up looking a bit underexposed because of the lighting situation. Thankfully, I was able to recover the details with some RAW processing in CaptureONE. I have also done some vignette-masking/levels adjustments to darken and increase the contrast of the ripple patterns while leaving the duck highlighted as the main subject in the picture.

永浴爱河

永浴爱河
When we first arrived at the Botanical Gardens for our last outing, I spotted these two ducks right in the middle of Symphony Lake, just nicely lit by a spot of warm sunlight. They were unfortunately out of the full reach of my 70-200mm f/4 L for me to take any close-up shots. I decided to adopt a wider perspective approach instead, composing the ducks against the surounding water and the background of lotus flowers. I did partial metering on the ducks, which helped to throw the surrounding background into a nice, deep colour. I have done further post-processing in Photoshop to darken and slightly desaturate the background of lotus flowers. I think this picture will look good as a super-large print hung on a wall — there are lots of details here missing in this version resized for the web 🙂

The title for this one was contributed by CY’s mum 🙂 To those who can’t read Chinese, it means literally “forever bathed in the river of love“.