Crimson Tide

Well the weeked is almost over and what a busy little weekend i have had, as you know friday was dinner at my place, yesterday we went to the gynie to check out Tloml and the little growing baby. All is well! Dr.Seng says that everything is going good(touch wood) so that is great news! Very exciting, we are at 20weeks now and are still unsure of the sex..i say girl Tloml says boy. We both would be over the moon with a hapy healthy child of any sex though.
In the later afternoon we took fatty aka pepper to pasir ris to play with other dogs, she is a bit shy and tends to want to play with dogs about 10 times her size. I must admit she was very good and came when i called her. The three of us then went to charlie's for dinner. chili dog.....
This morning Philip and i went back to Mandai Orchid Garden to try and capture via digital cameras more of the sunbirds. I got two good pics but i think my bro in law may have done better. We met Mil and Fil there and i think they enjoyed themselves too. It was hard taking pictures as we were within smelling distance of people having a full on american breakfast...anyway i started a little webpage for the three of us photographers in our group, Mil and Phil are supposed to email me two of their best shots to be posted on the page listed below.
If you have shots you want to share, email them to me. 2 at a time please...

http://www.edwardsimon.net/pms/p.m.s.htm

I thought PMS was a funny name for it....heheh

All pics cropped and resized.

PICS from left to right, Crimson Sunbird,Skink,Chestnut-bellied malkoha,Olive Backed sunbird in flight,unknown,crimson sunbirds.

Dinner ........Chez Canton

So i was told that i have not been blogging lately and its true i confess, the macik in the last post was a stop gap blog. Its not that i am bored or cant be bothered, the simple fact is that i havent been doing anything worth blogging and i havent taken ANY pictures worth posting. This has been mainly due to the constant rain, didnt even take pics of our chalet on sentosa. Anyway today was a bright sunny day and i was on leave! but i didnt shoot anything. Woke up pretty early and hit the market, we were having the machado's, lucy and mil over for dinner and mischa was making her Cantonese Ee Mee..tis a noodle dish. Spent a couple of hours with sherwin, frodo and jj doing guy stuff then back home to prep for our guest. I took some pics of the early arrivals but alas i forgot to take any pics of the mil and phil jr who came abit later..also none taken of the simply awesome noodles we had for dinner. Kudos to the chef..and the mushrooms i would say. Anyhow these are just some of the pics that i took today. Tomorrow its off to the doctors for our regular check up. So far so good! Baby is fine and so is the mother! Father to be is abit shaky!
Please click on my mums pic for a larger view, could fit the whole thing in space provided. And please people in the pics dont complain you guys were asked to smile! but ignored me .
SIDEBAR- Since Philip Sr couldnt make it(played me out man) the fruit cocktail went untouched....as did the NESTLE CREAM(which i had to hunt for!!)...actually i think everyone was just too full to eat another bite.

macik-ubin

Lagoon and Tuff Tuff

Went for dinner at lagoon with moo,doo,tuffy,jamie and tloml..took a couple of pics of tuff tuff. pics have been reduced to 30% of original.

More of the same.........

You better belive it, more sunbirds...a little mynah told me that my blog is getting boring with all these birds! Anway today i tried soemthing different. I kept my lense to 200mm not to the maximum of 300mm as i did some research and found out that most of these non "l" lense have a bit of softening at the maximum focal length..i kept the aperture wide and the iso to 200 even though the sky was overcast but i did though a bit of flash in there to try and lighten up some detail of the bird. Shutter Speed was 1/80. I am only having trouble sorting out my metering but i think that will come in time. The ones with the close up of the bird are not resized, only cropped. The picture with abit of the tree is cropped and reduced in size so that you can have an idea of the working conditions.

Jost clan of USA

Got some pics from my sister Pat in the states. Thought that i would post them here. Enjoy

Sunbird in Sengkang

I fear that you my dear readers may be in for a large number of sunbird pictures as i try and improve my skills. I took alot of this little bird( i was actually trying to photograph the roof ) as it hopped around a butterfly tree chirping away, devil may care. The sun was in a good spot but the bird was actually a bit high up in the tree for really good detail it was no where near as close as the birds in Mandai Orchid Garden. Any how all pics have been cropped and reduced in size for posting.

Stalking The Sun......

Philip and i were stalking the sun in more ways then one today. We went to the Mandai Orchird Garden again this morning to try and photograph some sun birds, both the Olive backed and Crimson variety. I took almost 300 pictures and was very excited to see the shots on the big screen but alas i was to be disappointed. While my composition of the subjects was OK, i used a faster iso to compensate for the poor lighting conditions and this is where things when wrong. The pictures came out grainy to my disappoint. I am fairly happy with the performance of my new sigma lense though, it handled well and was pretty ok even at 300mm. Anyhow looks like i shall make a return trip to the Mandai Orchid Garden!
By the way check out the way the lizards clr changes in the pics..


All pics have been cropped and resized(reduced) .

A new Day..A new Year

Goodbye 2005, Hello 2006!

My wish is that everyone has a better year than the last one. 2005 was a full year with joy, laughter, sadness, passion, and the small start to what i hope will be a big future.
With the season of jolly almost over i hope that i can get back to my regularly schedulded blogpost...

Whats it store this year? well check out this space this time next year.

God Bless!