Today, the Arian Ox was in the mood to explore and lead the nomadic life. She led the walk out of the park, across the overhead bridge and into an adjoining neighbourhood across the road. And then, the “pack leader” couldn’t make up her mind where to go from there.
There she is standing quietly in the big courtyard. Nevermind, let’s take you where you can wrap yourself around a tree.
You’re welcome.
Somehow the image of an woodcutter chopping up a tree and yelling “timber!” as the tree fell is ingrained in my memory, even if there is no woodcutting culture or industry here. Hah! That’s the power of the media for you.
Anyway, the tree cutting has started. Here’s the guy who will take the tree apart, limb by limb.
Phoneography Monday Challenge: Nature – I seem to be making a habit to take pictures of man and/vs nature nowadays.
Apps: GorillaCam, Snapseed, Camera+ (Cyanotype and Toy Camera filters)
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Phoneography Monday Challenge: Architecture (challenger’s choice)
New flats less than 2 years old on the left; old flats easily more than 20, 30 years old on the right.
As buildings grow taller, trees are growing shorter.
Excerpt from The Sunday Times, May 19, 2013
I have written before about the impending removal of some tall Angsana trees downstairs to make way for three new blocks of flats.
Change is inevitable, but I do like trees that stand as tall as 12 to 13 storey flats. When walking the dog, they provide welcome shade in our hot, bright climate although yes, they also harbour poop-dropping birds and life-threatening falling branches when it storms.
Wherever they stand, trees and the oxygen they produce enable life.
This is the main road junction of our neighbourhood. Look how well the trees obscure the blocks of flats behind them, and then scroll back to the first picture. How hard and stark the buildings are with the small trees. And then I think about the haze and know that I will always still prefer the big trees of life that cleanse the air around us faithfully.
Note: Copyright of the newspaper belong to SPH, I will be obliged to remove the clipping if requested.
Not the smartest advertising around but this will have to do :P Just a quick banner pointing to the Phoneography Monday Challenge since this post below is my late submission for it :P
Chandeliers in Formal Dining Space
Hanging Lights in Casual Dining Space
We were at Tim Palace (pictures #1-#3) for Fathers’ Day lunch.
The colour laser lights dancing on the chandeliers made them flash and sparkle above where we were sitting. It was interesting how different they look closeup from the bottom up (#1-#2) compared to the long shot (#3) of the dining space at the other end of the room from where I was sitting. Over there, the main light source was from the large screen display and the curved floor-to-ceiling windows since it was mid-day. The light and sound crew were setting up for a formal dinner later in the evening. There were security scanners being set up outside, which according to our uncle meant that either or both of the two key figures in our country will be attending the dinner that night.
On a different day, I took a more casual snapshot (from the moving escalator at the basement) of the organic cafe called Real Food where I had lunch. One sees straight lines at first, but notice the curved wash of light from the lamps that mirror the darker curved design in the flooring.
I didn’t plan it but once I had all the pictures in one post, I thought the way the pictures were taken were pretty reflective of the formal and casualness of each of the different dining experience:
| Formal Dining | Casual Dining | ||
| > | bottom up | > | top down |
| > | details | > | general long shot |
| > | planned shots | > | shot from moving escalator |
| > | more time to be trigger happy | > | 1 hasty shot |
Chandeliers in Formal Dining Space
Location: Tim Palace, Toa Payoh Safra Club
Picture #1, #2 – App: Camera+, Ansel filter
Picture #3 – App: Snapseed, Black and White filter, Center focus (vignette)
Hanging Lights in Casual Dining Space
Location: Real Food, Novena Sqaure 2
Picture #4 – App: Snapseed, Black and White filter, Center focus (vignette)
My last entry for Black and White Phoneography Monday explored light reflection, light and shadow in the interior of a mall called iVillage. I seem to like to picture interiors in black and white.
On one of those random days, I was just hanging around downstairs waiting for Mr P to come by and pick me up in his car. I had just discovered iPhoneography Monday then. So I was trigger happy and adding junk shots to my camera roll.
This is a skinny young tree right by the foot path from our block of flats. You can barely see the bark behind the green stuff growing on it.
Not unlike my dog, I wrapped myself around the tree and tap, tap, tap… and before I knew it, I was at the back of the tree and this was clinging quietly right there. To tell the truth, I almost missed it because it blended with the tree so well.
I do confess my timid heart and this was as close as I dared to go for macro. :P Yes, even if I do believe it was quite dead. Mr P said otherwise and intimated that it will jump on me at any time.
And yes, I took liberties to add mysterious purple and deep green wounds to the tree to show you the potential or imaginary poison contagion left by the spider.
And then on my way home today, I found a section of the railing removed from the fencing running along the path. If I had a toy train, I would slip it inside and pretend it was a city rail tunnel.
Yup these are my close up shots for Phoneography Monday: Macro
Apps used: Camera+, HDR Art, Blendcam, Snapseed, InstaMag, HelloCamera
There’s a rainbow in the sky! Out came the iPhones and it was not just mine.
There is always something very compelling about the sky that makes me fill up the majority of the shot with it. The sky is the sky and yet it is so changeable. At times mild, at times dangerous. The sky is all wild nature, albeit sometimes tainted by man-made smog.
The strange thing about nature phoneography, at least for me, is how I am so tempted to make nature to be so much more than what it really is in real life.
The rainbow doesn’t look obvious enough. Let’s use the vibrant filter in camera+, let’s up the contrast in Snapseed, etc etc. And yet, I wanted the clouds to retain their soft colours and fluffy nature. So yes, I did continue to edit using Photoshop so that the editing was more specific to certain areas of the image only when it came to the clouds.
Quite some time back, I was awestruck by how the cross-winds sent the raindrops aflutter at more than twenty storeys high. Usually one sees the rain streak down in obvious pinstripes according to the direction of the prevailing wind. But that day, the rain drops flew like confetti in the air in all sorts of directions. Their frenzied activity caught in the light and I was mesmerised. What happen in nature in motion does not translate very well when one is using one’s phone to point and shoot.
That light-hearted flutter of tiny drops in the light gets lost. And so I try to achieve a sharper image with the clarity filter in Camera+, up the contrast, applied a gentle emo filter so that the tiny droplets show up against the darkened colours. It is of course a futile exercise.
What one ends up with… kind of like a stylised, sharp image of a moody scene peppered by dandruff for rain. I like it though. It looks like a town where Batman may visit :P
And then I wonder, what if I had taken my camera camera, not my handphone camera, and set it to achieve a longer exposure. Would that have captured the flying rain? Do I even know what I am talking about? :P
But still at least one image within this entry I would like, to be simple, basic, unedited and still interesting. And so, this is the one I have for you. The anvil-shaped cumulo nimbus in its gentle luminescent glory.
Which appeals to you more? Nature untouched or Nature made hyper-real?
Phoneography Monday: Nature
App used: Gorillacam, Camera+, Snapseed
It’s kind of hard to relegate Donna to the background when I’m supposed to be holding onto the leash, so we’re depending on some multiple-exposure app goodness here! Hah!
I guess the Japanese doll graphic is copyrighted to the tissue box manufacturer whose product I took a photo of. It was handy since I was busy blowing my nose off from the influenza. :P
Another one, this time comprising photos of the dog at different distances away from me in the living room. Can you spot the one in the background?
iPhoneography Challenge (Abstraction)
It seems we can choose from the list of themes provided this week. I was keen to further explore multiple exposures, so I chose to do Abstraction. Although I’m not sure if this really fits. :/ Heh~
Apps used: Pudding Camera, Blendcam, Gorillacam, Snapseed
Today, the iPhone is a mysterious man that offers to sharpen your sense of sight and dull everything else, your taste, your hearing, your ability to touch and to smell. Right away, wouldn’t your world start to seem one dimensional?
What is food without scent and taste to colour it?
But hang on a minute, with sharpened sight, you start to notice details that you may have decided not to notice when you were dealing with all your senses at once.
You see light and shadow, pattern and movement. Little things that once escaped notice because they were insignificant, or in odd corners. Or because they helped form the part of the whole impression of a place, rather than demand your central attention. These little details enrich without calling attention to themselves.
But no, life is incomplete without all the senses at play. And even as you revel in your newly achieved clarity, your dulled senses start to return as the hypnotic iPhone runs out of battery. Slowly, you smell the Peking Duck and hear the buzz of chatter in the background. Sweet relief.
iPhoneography Monday
App: Gorillacam, Snapseed
Black and white photos can be so emotive even with its limited palette. It shows up the interplay of light and the dark in spaces, makes more pronounced the profile of people and things, removes the clutter that is colour and creates a moment of stillness that makes me anticipate the future that follows.
Pictures taken at myVillage, a little mall that we were visiting for porridge and some light dim sum.
Instead I was pottering in my kitchen snapping macro-views of things with, I would like to say childlike wonder, except that from what I read that phrase is usually used to describe other people and never yourself. But I did get rather excited and shuffled around looking for more things in the kitchen to take macro pictures of.
But let’s start from the beginning shall we?
So I just started to pick up iPhoneography skills. This week’s topic was “macro”, a format that I was not familiar with. I failed in my first attempt. My dog ate my homework subject. Right. Some things are better done indoors, and with more research.
I knew macro pictures had to be taken with macro lenses so I was uncertain how I was to do that with a camera phone. Is there any specific macro photo app that I should download? Research ensued in which I was educated by a bunch of harebrained people to shoot through a magnifying glass, a water droplet (at the detriment of the phone!), etc, etc. Of course there are macro lens for iPhones on the market if you are so inclined. I’m not.
So anyway, let’s give those harebrained suggestions a shot. Why not, I’m as harebrained as the rest of them anyway. It seemed more prudent to place the drop of water on the lens at the front of the phone rather than the lens on the back of the phone. The front is all plastic covering over the lens, so I thought there would be less worry about the water seeping in there. So what conspired was, the phone was resting stably on a box in front of the window (so there is some indirect light), and the tiny toothpick drop of water sitting on the plastic covering the lens. The rest was just a matter of holding the object to be photographed over the drop of water and positioning it to get as sharp an image on the screen as possible before tapping the phone.
Note: Please understand that Apple does not provide warranty for water damage and iPhones are definitely not waterproof.
And since I was at the same time having an interesting time looking at Meg Greene’s multiple exposures, I thought to try that out. Searched and downloaded the first app Google threw up at me.
I narrowed down my selection to a set of four objects, each with one close-up and one macro snap of it. For each double exposure, I layered a close-up view of an object with the macro shot of another object. Made it into a four-tile collage and this is what I ended up with.
Can you match each close-up to its corresponding macro image?
.
.
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Here are the answers:
Dust, scratches, detail and fibre. I was quite amazed by the degree of detail in the macro captures.
Then the light grew bad, so I stopped.
Hello sleepy.
iPhoneography Challenge: Macro
Apps used: Camera+, Instablend, Moldive
By the way, this is the exact size of an image saved from Instablend, so tiny!
I couldn’t find the settings to increase the resolution. The advertising was also very obtrusive and irritating. So I won’t really recommend it. Let me know if you have an awesome double or multiple exposure app to share, k?
By the way, you guys should check out echo/sight if you are interested in double exposures. Their work is amazing.
– http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1068932801/new-york-london
– http://instagram.com/echosight
References
– http://osxdaily.com/2012/10/07/tips-better-iphone-macro-photos/
– http://osxdaily.com/2012/07/07/take-an-iphone-photo-remotely-using-the-earbuds/
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