Tag: phoneography Page 4 of 6
Got my hands on the new $1 coin.
Phoneography Monday Weekly Challenge: Macro
Apps used: Camera+
The one on the left is the new third series $1 coin that is replacing the old second series coin on the right. Series 2 has been in circulation for over 25 years. The new $1 coin which is bigger can no longer fit into the pay-per-use supermarket carts, so it initially did cause us some confusion, until we realised that we should use the new 50-cents coin from the third series.
The interesting feature about our $1 coins is the octagonal frame within the round shape, which according to urban legend, is there for fengshui reasons. It ensures that every citizen will carry an evil-warding bakua on their persons and bring prosperity to the nation.
I do prefer the second series coins, which Sydney describes as carrying a garden city in our pockets. The $1 coin sports the periwinkle flower. You can see the full set of coins with the corresponding photograph of the plants/flowers featured on Sydney’s post – Garden City on the coins. It is a pretty concept, I think. :P I also find the execution of the embossed design on the second series more refined compared to the third. Or it could be that the dirt trapped on the old coin shows up the design better. :P Haha!
The third series coins feature the national icons or landmarks of Singapore. Pictures comparing coin design to actual here – Singapore’s Third Series Coins.
Anyway, out of the set of coin denominations, I do actively collect 5-cent coins. It seemed the aluminium-bronze plating helps to turn my hydrangea flowers from pink to blue (which I prefer), so I have been throwing these garden themed coins into the plant pot to aid the flowering. :P Muahahahahaha!
None of the third series coins are aluminium-bronze plated though. :( Gah!
Anyway, here’s another round object belonging to a creature that had Mr P and I running in circles for the last few nights every time it rains or the wind howls. @_@ I am a very tired human.
Completely disappear has done a macro post on Japanese coins before that I liked.
Reference
– http://www.mas.gov.sg/newcoins
– http://www.mas.gov.sg/NewCoins/Third-Series/Features.aspx
– http://www.mas.gov.sg/NewCoins/Third-Series/FAQs.aspx
When I was a child, my dream was to go to university. If you think about it, it would make sense, wouldn’t it? After a few years of working, I longed for a job closer to nature (out of the office) and wondered how one could become a landscape architect. My friend laughed and said it must be the hay fever speaking. It was too late. As adults, we have too many other worries. A few years ago, I met a lady travelling in Canada. She must have been a number of years older than me and she was a landscape architect; it was a mid-career change. I have often wondered, if mid-career changes are just easier to engineer in another country other than Singapore.
Flowers in the Sky
I found a mirror in my iPhone,
an app that worked magic.
It made a scrap of nature symmetrical,
look unnatural, less organic.
Weekly Phoneography: Nature [challenge details here]
Apps used: Gorillacam, Camera360, Snapseed, Camera+
App effects: There is a mix of filtered and unfiltered photos here.
I played with this,
creating arrangements that decorate.
A virtual landscaping tool;
it does not propagate.
Foreshadow
For every bloom that unfurls in the sky,
every leaf that uncurls unseen by man,
every cell resounding the cry of nature:
every beginning foreshadows every end.
Every blossom drying out,
every petal a recital
of every falling back to the earth,
an unending cycle.
Close up
And so in the best way they know how
each photographer’s eye will capture,
the essence of life, no different from
the tiniest purveyor of nectar.
Nature
And if the weed goes unseen
It will not matter,
Nature’s serendipity gets discovered,
sooner or later.
Though often overshadowed
by sculptural bits of plant matter
nurtured by human design
to impress and to flatter.
P/S: I thought it was time for a bit of bad poetry to pop out :P
Picture 1
“Hold on a minute,” I said, “I want to take a picture of the flower-shaped lights cast by the roof on the floor.”
But there were people walking by. I snapped the roof with its flower-shaped cut-outs that let escaped similarly shaped light shadows on the ground as I waited for the passerby to clear the frame. When he had passed, the flowers were gone too, as the clouds obscured the light.
Picture 2
I was waiting for the family to arrive for a buffet dinner at a hotel. I was in the lounge and spied a many thousand (I exaggerate!) baubles of a chandelier. I sidled to the couch somewhat directly underneath and pretended to be playing with my phone… and then non-nonchalantly snapped a few pictures. I just didn’t want to look like I had never seen a chandelier before :P Muahahahahaha!
Picture 3
Night loo break and short walk with Donna. Leaves lighted up by streetlight. They looked numerous, and yet still lonely in the dark.
Picture 4 and 5
At the petrol station while Mr P was filling up petrol. The light was bright so I couldn’t see the flowers of this blooming tree clearly. No problemo, let’s take a picture and look at it on the screen at a later date. I love blooming trees.
Picture 6
I stepped onto our tiny bedroom balcony, took one look at the sky and went back in for my iPhone.
Picture 7 and 8
Mr P and I were standing on our tiny bedroom balcony waiting for the National Day rehearsal military planes to fly past. We got bored and looked down, studying the construction site below instead. When we looked up again, the blue sky had already been crossed with these streaks of white, marking the passage of those planes that we were waiting for.
“They went past? I thought we would hear them. They usually are very loud, aren’t they?”
“Dear, they are military planes. They have a stealth mode. You can hear them on National Day because they made them loud deliberately.”
Ooops.
Anyway, if you look real carefully in one of the corners, you can see a tiny sliver of the moon.
Phoneography Challenge: Challenger’s Choice (Portrait)
Apps: Camera+, Snapseed
Switched the viewfinder to the screen side of the camera so that it is easier to take a picture since I am strapped down in the car. Oh look, I got caught in the frame as well, sans head. So there you have it, me and my dog. :P
Mr P was driving so he couldn’t be in the picture :P
For the last couple of months, I have started to worry that perhaps Donna is missing out on building social skills now that she has started life afresh from the shelter. I guess you could even say she perhaps never had social skills to start with. This, after all, was the dog that was isolated with an old man dog (who is too chill to care about crazy pups) because she couldn’t get along with the other dogs in the other bigger fenced yards.
We took her to the dog park, but she couldn’t deal with the dogs that home in on her and got fearful. I introduced her to our cousin’s dog Doudou, but they seemed to prefer the grass around them compared to each other. Oh she wanted to meet the other dogs we pass by on our walks alright, but a lot of times her tail would be wagging stiffly, which apparently can mean that she is undecided if she wants to be friendly or no.
But over the weekend, we drove to a doggy cafe and then to the dog park and she did great with both. She was gentle with the small dogs in the doggy cafe and a little submissive but friendly with the big dogs at the dog park! The people we met remarked at how calm and gentle she was! Good progress given that we have only had her for half a year so far! :D I’m pretty stoked!
We were in the Marina Bay area on Saturday night. This area is part of the country’s urban redevelopment plan to extend the existing financial district to the waterfront, emulating London’s Canary Wharf and Shanghai’s Pudong area. More on the Marina Bay Vision at www.ura.gov.sg.
Marina Bay Financial Center
Across the street from the Financial Center is the Marina Bay Waterfront Promenade.
Breathe, kinetic sculture, a legacy sculpture from the Youth Olympic Games in 2010.
One would have thought this is a dead-town on a Saturday night, being the financial district, but not so. This area is also one of the vantage points for taking pictures of the city skyline, particularly around these couple of months. And while not packed, there was already a healthy crowd hanging about the waterfront area…
… including the country’s many photography enthusiasts staking out along the waterfront. The country celebrates it’s National Day in August so the rehearsals for the parade and celebration have begun. The crowd was waiting for the fireworks display that typically is the finale of the celebration.
Wait, wait, wait… … Kaboom!
I found it pretty challenging to take good, unfiltered night photos with the iPhone. So this set is pretty heavily edited with Snapseed and HDR Art.
Phoneography Monday Challenge: Challenger’s Choice
(Architecture, Night Photography, Street Photography, Travel)
Apps used: Gorillacam, Camera+, Snapseed, HDR Art, Camera360
App effects:
Picture 1 – Snapseed – vintage blue filter
Picture 2 – HDR Art – mysterious filter
Picture 5 – Snapseed – vintage blue filter
Picture 6 – Camera360 – black and white (red) filter
I had an impromptu City Timelapse Vimeo marathon on Twitter today – one short movie clip for each hour. These are the city reels if you are interested ;)
[ Bangkok | Dubai | New York City | Seoul | Shanghai ]
[ Singapore | Sydney | South Africa | Toronto | Tokyo]
You can go directly to my Twitter page @weliveinaflat where each tweet can be expanded to play the videos all on the same Twitter page (go before they get buried by other tweets!! I shall improve on unique hash tag handles next time round!! :P), or visit any of the above links directly to Vimeo for any city that gets your interest. I found it pretty fun to watch those of cities I’ve been to before and see if I can identify the landmarks there. :P
Related articles
- Phoneography Challenge: (Almost) Portraiture (lensandpensbysally.wordpress.com)
A long shot. And for the birds, how near and yet how far from the sky. And how far away are you reader from Singapore where this picture was taken?
Phoneography Monday Challenge: Black and White
Pic #1 Apps used – Camera+, Gorillacam, Snapseed
Pic #2 Apps used – Camera+, Snapseed, Blendcam, Camera360 (Jelly), HDR Art (Red October)
Pic #1
This is a scene from my mother’s neighbourhood. Keeping birds seem to be more a pastime for elderly man. The birds get to go out on their “walks” and a bit of sun when the elderly men congregate at the bird poles to socialise and enjoy their feathered friends. Perhaps hanging them up high helps the bird song weave through the atmosphere further. I can’t really say.
I took a picture because there aren’t so many of such pole-dotted landscape nowadays. I imagine it would be quite a sight and soundscape should the poles have been filled to capacity.
Pic #2 (colour version on instagram, click.)
While the clear sky showed up the bird cages on the bird poles really well, I found the surrounding trees noisy and disrupted the pattern of the poles. I decided to disrupt the image further by blending in a previous picture I had taken of clouds over the surrounding landscape of blocks of flats. What you see is a triple exposure of two images only. Perhaps the ghosts of apartment blocks predict the future removal of this public interaction space? That is not impossible.
The colour filter I used for the picture (before conversion to black and white) has a pretty distinct signature to it which I do not favor. Hence if you look carefully, a bird silhouette added in photoshop helped to shield the number “5” that comes with the filter. In my mind’s eye, I could see a swarm of ghostly bird silhouettes building into a crescendo from the poles to the sky to create a visual image of bird song. That could be cool :P
I recently created a Twitter account for this blog. I was surprised to find people using the hash tag #unfiltered for their images. This makes me wonder, do you prefer your photos clean or filtered so that they become virtual/alternate versions of what exists in reality?
If you visit now and then, you may have met Donna’s pink hippo and blue dog soft toys. Donna generally amuses herself with them by spreading them all over the floor or giving them love bites and shaking them into submission. So yes, the human is very much relieved that dogs do not show their love for their humans in the same way. *phew*
Over the weekend I needed something calming to do so I started mending her many grimy plush toys before washing them. So here are the cuddly toys hanging out to dry.
Blue dog: You can torture me all you like, my lips are sealed!!
Toys hanging outside on the balcony to dry
In the flat, a couple of her stuffed toys escaped the wash for her amusement.
Toying with some less used apps and filters and serendipity found me creating a mutant of a cuddly toy bear butterfly with clothes peg feelers, that has caught a duo of evil-doer defaced teddies! Can you see it? :P
Picking cuddly toys for dogs
- Avoid choking hazard
- toy should be bigger than the dog’s head
- toy should not be filled with small pallets or beanies
- always mend rips or remove damaged toys to avoid dog swallowing toy stuffing
- dog-proof by removing all loose/attached decorative details like buttons, ribbons and other small detachable pieces that can be chewed off
- supervise the dog’s play with any cuddly toy containing a squeaker, remove damaged toys with squeaker exposed
- Maximum fun!
- small/light enough for dog to carry around
- consider providing a variety of cuddly toys – one to carry, one to kill, one to baby
- run second-hand toys through a wash so that any smells unattractive to the dog is removed
- choose cuddly toys made with fleece or plush material which retain the dog’s smell and is more attractive to the dog
- dog toys not childrens’ toys (tougher and safer materials for dogs; dependent on manufacturer)
To be honest, we don’t practise all of the above. We have bought a couple of $2 stuffed dog toys with squeakers or bells within from Daiso. But all of Donna’s cuddly toys in the photos above are hand-me-downs, regular stuffed toys from home/office spring cleaning and also $1 second-hand soft toy listings from classified ads. But I made sure to dog-proof them and only buy stuffed toys that are not filled with beanie pallets. They don’t look too shabby do they? I do confess I am particular when it comes to toys that I have to see spread across the floor everyday, so no hideous toys for me! :P
Dogs aren’t particular and they are happy to reuse toys, so good for wallet, good for earth :D
Sources:
– http://www.humanesociety.org/animals/dogs/tips/dog_toys.html
– http://www.safemadepet.com/what_is_safe.html
“Oh, grandmother, what big eyes you have!”
“All the better to see you with.”
“Oh, grandmother, what big hands you have!”
“All the better to grab you with!”
“Oh, grandmother, what a horribly big mouth you have!”
“All the better to eat you with!”
*chuckle*
Accompanying text: Excerpt from Little Red Cap, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Phoneography Challenge: Macro – Donna
App: Camera+
People who are unfamiliar or have a fear of dogs may see the dog as the sum of its parts – the staring eyes, the long black claws, the gaping mouth, the sniffing nose atop the fangs, but most of all the unpredictability that comes with an unfamiliar animal.
But what I see is a lovely canine companion, fun-loving, playful but also patient and smart enough to put up with all sorts of non-dog things I make her do, like playing dead and high-five. How else could I get a dog to let me take pictures of her parts at such close range? :)
