National Day 2011

As part of the celebration for Singapore's independence day, me and my photography friends all gathered together (haven't meet each other since years ago) and sort of celebrated it by taking pictures of the celebration and also had fun catching up and chatting!

Our main purpose was to photograph the fireworks which only started at 8pm. I met Ryan early before that to scout for a location, and also to get a place early as tons of photogs crowd the place every year! See photos of the crowd later in the post.

So this was our viewpoint for the fireworks later at night. Not the best but better than nothing!

We reached around 2pm and had to wait hours before it started. What else could we do besides chatting all day long? Snapping unglamorous candid photos of people!

Out of focus photography!

Saw this man doing some cleaning of the river before the event starts.

The crowd starts to stream in and fill the empty spaces up very quickly!

Chilling out with a carton of apple juice under the hot sun.

Photographers of all kinds are all set up and ready to shoot.

And all of a sudden everyone was looking in the same direction!

Guess what were they looking at?

The Singapore Red Lions parachuting team doing an aerial show.

The artillery gun firing during the Fue de Joie for the parade.

It became dark soon after that and we just waited around until the fireworks started.

After the fireworks ended, we went to somewhere with fewer people and took a group shot, not of ourselves but our cameras!

Image credit to Ivan, who was unfortunately the only Canon user there and didn't fit into the group shot and hence shot with the Canon.

Streeting

Went out and did a different type of photography yesterday, called Streeting! Not sure if the term 'Streeting' is used anywhere but I called it that because my and my friends went for street photography today. So, I thought that a short form would be good, hence the word, Streeting. Maybe it makes no sense, but never mind (just like the sound of it)!

Street photography is quite different from the other types of photography as you need to be daring to go up to someone taking pictures of them. I think street photography doesn't look too good in all telephoto so a wide angle zoom was used, meaning we had to get closer to the victims of our cameras. Kinda scary when some of them gave evil stares back at me. But as with all the negative things, there were people who gave a friendly smile after being pictured.

First of all we went around the City Hall area for a starter.

We went into an alley way, saw a black bird (not sure what breed it was), and saw an abandoned building. It's the Capitol Building that stopped its operation many years back and has since been left as it is for years.

After briefly exploring the building, we went back to the streets to hunt for targets to shoot. Challenging with my 85mm Ais lens due to the lack of auto focus! Nonetheless it was still fun.

After lunch Minghui had to go off to attend church so myself and Ryan walked around a market area somewhere in Bishan.

The picture above can be found in my 500px here!

Times where taking pictures of people wasn't that nerve wrecking!

Hm, what a name for a super-mart.

Walked around the bishan HDB area and saw some cats (who loves lenses as well)!

Meow wants the 70-200/2.8!