The birds are back in town

After a couple of days away from nature, i took a few shots during my lunch break today.
Looking forward to the CNY break, so that i can go and do some serious shooting.
I was just too lazy on sunday so that one day was a wash out photography wise.





















All pics are cropped and resized :)

Chinatown..........

Its 17:42 on a saturday afternoon and i am back in the office awaiting the arrival of a VIP who is coming for a chit chat session with the residents. The chickens are running around headless as usual, so i decided to de-stress by blogging. I finished work around 1230 and was picked up by TLOML and the Moo which was lovely! We met Doo for lunch at Mooi Chin(Thanks for lunch folks), sigh i love that place......chicken chop.yum yum yum. From Mooi Chin we took the train(yes we left two cars in the car park) and went to China Town. AS expected it was chaos people all over the place, mind you it was not the worst i have seen it. I havent done any photography in crowds for awhile and it is really different from sitting quietly and waiting for a bird to land. My shots of people turned out poorly as you can see, with too much going on in the background.
The Colours are really fantastic, lots of reds as to be expected, along with orange and yellow. The thing i noticed this year was the fewer number of stalls selling pork and duck, when my office was in sago lane i would look out the window
and see dried meat as far as the eye could see...Anyhow i had a good time. From Chinatown I took the NEL back to work after a tearful departure from TLOML and DooMill.
And now i sit here and wait.........On a saturday....sigh

Hang Time

I dont blog for days then suddenly you get two in one night!! Anyway i thought these were interesting pics. And the kids were real nice too, friendly and chatty like all kids. Check out the hang time for the guy on the bike, i swear he was up there so long i had time to drop my shutter speed and check my settings lol. I did abit of paintshop magic for the kid on the skateboard.

GLAM TIME

(this post is for all those people..ok the one person who said there are too many birds on my blog)The sun was blazing, almost too bright for photography i thought. So i adjusted my camera and did a little shooting. TLOML is an expert in kampung glam pronounced glum and she would know the names of the buildings..i on the other hand just point and shoot.
I shot some of the pics as you can see in black and white, i like the pic of the man and his fan..would have been better if i had composed the shot abit more but i was too shy to ask him if i could take his picture so i just snapped and fled.




















The pic of the backdoor i took a few versions, in colour and in black and white but i like this one cause the sun is shining in it, almost like a flare. The star and the sun fixture i found on the fence of a school in the ara, it looked like a girls school .

Second fiddle

My poor neglected blog has been playing second fiddle to my other online activites this week, i have been trying to do something for me and my fellow APE members...(actually its PMS members). Its a website that has a gallery of our photography as individuals. For starters i have only placed 5 pics each, except for philip who hasnt sent me any pics yet. depending on space i will keep increasing this till it reaches about 50 pics per person. Space permitting. Of course for me i will still use my blog but i will keep the pics i really like up on the APE/PMS site.I also wanna try and figure out how they can upload their own pics onto their own gallery. Of course gallery names and clr schemes are still in the tentative stages. http://www.edwardsimon.net/pms/Index.htm

On another note, this is a long week for work. Spent the last two days trapped in the office as we were short staffed. Tonight i have a meeting that starts at 8pm, i am working on sat till god knows what time as we have a VIP coming to visit at 7pm so thats another 12hr day...but i shall endure!
As i sit here writting this i am surrounded by CNY decorations hanging around my office. Fake fire crackers, streamers, fake pinapples all waiting to be deployed. Red everwhere....reminds me of that ditty..."red red botak head"....which leads to the other ditty "botak head go to school at half past 8, teacher ask why so late? My mother cut my botak head" sigh as is obvious i went to a government primary school...

Oh yes pardon the flower background, i had a little accident with the old background .

One little sparrow

Due to the busy day at work i was only able to take a single shot of a little sparrow, not a good shot but still..my shot of the day heheh.

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.