Since I got not much to blog about recently, let me blog something related to National Day. Singapore National Day is slightly over a week more to go, and my condominium is decorating the place with more banners and flags.
In conjunction with the celebrations on National Day Eve in my condominium, I took part in the 3-on-3 basketball tournament with a few friends. We played the qualifying rounds last week. And my team made it into the semi-finals! The photographer that day took some photos and posted them here. You can go ahead and view them. See some of the un-glam photos of me playing basketball. Like seriously, some of them are stupid. =X Make me wonder what the heck I was trying to do too on the court. Haha! But I guess it was all the adrenaline.
However I doubt I am playing on the actual day finals because I will need to let another of our teammate play as he is bigger than me. Because the opponent that day will be too big for me. This one more teammate is not in the above photo, he was not there that day. At least I enjoyed that day and played my part for the team! And I was happy with my performance that day! :)
For this month’s Sakae’s blog entry, I travelled to Bugis to have lunch with Louis at Sakae Teppanyaki! He wanted to go Bugis to buy a pair of jeans from Bugis Street. So on the same day, we dropped by Sakae Tappanyaki to have lunch. Unlike the previous times we went, we always ordered Beef Lunch Set. This visit, we tried something different. While he ate the Chicken Lunch Set, I ate the Venison Lunch Set. Since they changed their menu few months ago, there was no more Duck Set. I would not have mind that because the duck is really nice. Nevertheless, the venison was just as good. And for the price of $11.99, the Venison Set Lunch included salad, cuttlefish, assorted vegetables, rice and soup.
The egg you see in the above photo is Teppan Seafood Chawanmushi. Now, that is a must-try dish! Previously there were set lunch that included that dish. But now you can order that from the ala-carte menu for $3.99. The quality of the food is still superb! Therefore all my experiences with Sakae Teppanyaki have been good!
Craving to try this now? :)
It was my first time going for Singapore Garden Festival. This festival takes place biannually (I think so) in Singapore. I was drawn to the festival because of the advertisements I saw on television and the festival official website. I thought it would be a wonderful place to take photos! In fact I went not once but twice within the same week! On the first day I went, I took more than 400 photos. And just half-way through the second exhibition hall, my batteries died on me! I brought along two fully charged batteries and yet I ran out of batteries! Never had it happened before. I must be due to the fact that I took most of my shots that day with flash. And when I came home to review my photos, I really did not like them. Flash photographing is really hard!
So on the second time I went, I went prepared. The night before, I asked in forum about how I should be taking my photos in such low light environment and what kind of settings I should be using, etc. I took another 400 over photos on the second day. I thought I would be taking even lesser since I know what to take and such. But on the second day, my batteries were able to last me throughout because I hardly took any flash shots. Most of my shots were fully manual. So in total of two days, I took almost 900 photos. But after going through 3 rounds of filtering, I deleted half of the collection. The photos I deleted are repeated shots; under exposed shots; over exposed shots; ugly shots; no meaning shots; etc. And I still do think that my photos are not very nice. Erm, seems like I am hardly satisfied with my photos every time I come back from a photo outing.
Out of all my photos, I have chosen 25 of them to display on my website. All photos went through post-processing using Adobe Photoshop. To view all the photos, you can head to My Gallery. I think the hardest part of uploading the photos is what kind of a title and caption I should give the photo. Haha! Because I do not know what are the flowers called. So I name them simply as “Yellow Flower”, “Purple Flower”, etc. Hehe! But now looking at those photos, I quite them those actually. :) Too bad I do not have macro lens.
Do I have any photographing friends? I want to make some!
Two nights ago, Cheryl and I chatted over MSN for more than 2 hours. It was many years ago that we chatted for such a long time! So she insisted that I blog about it. “Haha!” :D
It all started when I asked if she was interested in Jay Chou’s concert ticket. That question was done and over with in just less than 5 minutes. But what followed was a whole lot of chat about photographing! That was when she introduced me to a new term (to me at least), Lomography. Lomography (LOMO) is the term for an approach to photography that emphasizes casual snapshots, spontaneity, ubiquity, randomness, and close-ups, rather than being concerned with the technicalities, aesthetics, and the conventional world of photography. It was then I realised she was into taking photos too! And was shocked to learn that she owns up to 7 toy cameras (well plus her iPhone, make that 8)!
As long as it is a conversation about photographing, it will get me all excited. And that was how I sensed Cheryl was feeling too. Indeed she was excited too because she mentioned it is hard to find friends so interested into photography. I shared with my girlfriend about it, but she thought otherwise. =) Well I supposed that is because she is in Photograph Club in her school. Hehe! For me, I can even just name the number of friends whom I know interested in photographing only. Of course number one is my girlfriend; second my good friend Jiayun and now Cheryl my old time friend.
So anyway Cheryl and I have planned (err wait, okay Cheryl planned it) to have a “When DSLR meets Toy Cameras” photo outing! However due to her busy schedules as an (poor) undergrad, the outing will take place only a month from today. But we are so looking forward to it already! And I hope my girlfriend will be free to join us!
Photographing rocks! :)
I was blessed with a new external hard drive because my mom agreed to sponsor me one! The budget was $150. So I was thinking of getting a 1TB drive. After shopping with Louis at Sim Lim Square last Saturday, I was considering between an external drive and a portable drive. Portable drive of course should be the way to go now since I can bring it around to use (portable, duh!). However the price of a 1TB portable and 1 TB external drive is so much difference! So since I have no intentions of bringing my drive around (since I still got an 8GB thumb drive), I decided to go for the external drive instead. And with the budget of $150, I could add another 500GB to get a 1.5TB drive. So I have a brand new Western Digital 1.5GB external drive!
Main purpose of this drive is to store my ever-growing photo collections! With this, I should be able to store up to 300,000 photos (according to the box). Although it did not say how big each photo size should be. =)
“Thank you Mom!“
Bryan Chung
