Important Note:
For those beautiful Penang folks, if you are free this weekend, there is the Olympus PEN E-P5 Touch and Try session happening on 26th May 2013. Do register, and have up close and personal experience with the new Olympus PEN E-P5!
More information and registration here: http://home.olympusimage.com.my/eventlist.php
There are limited seats, so hurry up!
I was strolling along the Forest Chase building (first floor) with open view over Murray Street Mall in Perth, and I saw this man and a child feeding the pigeons on the interlocking pavement walkway. Being an engineer I was instinctively drawn to the interlocking patterns of the pavement, and having a high ground means a top view can create something out of the ordinary. The street was getting busier with people passing by, but I thought the shot would look too "normal". I was using my Olympus E-5 and the wide angle lens 11-22mm F2.8-3.5, and I zoomed the lens until I found the right perspective (surprise, surprise, it was zoomed at 17mm which was equivalent to 35mm field of view, a focal length which was not my favourite and I seldom worked with) and then I framed the scene with some empty space to allow passer-bys to enter my frame. I regretted not bringing around my ND8 filter, but I improvised on the spot and set my camera settings to allow the slowest shutter speed possible: setting ISO to lowest 100, and aperture to smallest F/22 which the lens permitted. The aperture priority shooting mode gave me about 1/10 sec shutter speed which was correctly exposed, and then I switched the shooting mode to fully manual to override the shutter speed and deliberately overexposed the shot to get even slower shutter speed. It was the motion blur which I sought after, and I could care less about overblown highlights in this shot at that moment. I did 1/3 sec shutter speed (with all other settings maintained) and I managed to get the movement blurry effect that I wanted. Thank goodness for the built in body Image Stabilization I got away with a usable image (without the whole frame being shaken into blur). I indexed this image in my mind, that I would pay special attention to it when post-processing because I have over-exposed the image intentionally.
For those beautiful Penang folks, if you are free this weekend, there is the Olympus PEN E-P5 Touch and Try session happening on 26th May 2013. Do register, and have up close and personal experience with the new Olympus PEN E-P5!
More information and registration here: http://home.olympusimage.com.my/eventlist.php
There are limited seats, so hurry up!
I was strolling along the Forest Chase building (first floor) with open view over Murray Street Mall in Perth, and I saw this man and a child feeding the pigeons on the interlocking pavement walkway. Being an engineer I was instinctively drawn to the interlocking patterns of the pavement, and having a high ground means a top view can create something out of the ordinary. The street was getting busier with people passing by, but I thought the shot would look too "normal". I was using my Olympus E-5 and the wide angle lens 11-22mm F2.8-3.5, and I zoomed the lens until I found the right perspective (surprise, surprise, it was zoomed at 17mm which was equivalent to 35mm field of view, a focal length which was not my favourite and I seldom worked with) and then I framed the scene with some empty space to allow passer-bys to enter my frame. I regretted not bringing around my ND8 filter, but I improvised on the spot and set my camera settings to allow the slowest shutter speed possible: setting ISO to lowest 100, and aperture to smallest F/22 which the lens permitted. The aperture priority shooting mode gave me about 1/10 sec shutter speed which was correctly exposed, and then I switched the shooting mode to fully manual to override the shutter speed and deliberately overexposed the shot to get even slower shutter speed. It was the motion blur which I sought after, and I could care less about overblown highlights in this shot at that moment. I did 1/3 sec shutter speed (with all other settings maintained) and I managed to get the movement blurry effect that I wanted. Thank goodness for the built in body Image Stabilization I got away with a usable image (without the whole frame being shaken into blur). I indexed this image in my mind, that I would pay special attention to it when post-processing because I have over-exposed the image intentionally.
Interlocking pavement
When I returned from Perth, I had more than a thousand things to do, and in the midst of compiling photographs from my Perth trip to blog here, I accidentally missed out this particular shot.
Not only until a few days ago, I am not sure how or why, the "index" started blinking in my mind and the image popped out, screaming for attention!! I dug out all the RAW files and you have no idea how happy I was to find this image, after having forgotten about it for a few weeks! The image was exactly as I have planned and visualized and it was there, waiting for me to put in some final touches. I converted it into black and white (I wanted this to be a monotone) and cropped it into square, not because of any other reasons but the distracting elements on both left and right of the frame. Thankfully it was shot in RAW, I managed to tone down the over-exposure by a few notches and the image still appeared good.
Of all the images I have taken when I was in Perth (read here if you have not seen the photos) I love this image the most!
