Use what you have for creative process

Exposure: Aperture F14|Shutter Speed 1/125s|ISO 100

Exposure: Aperture F14|Shutter Speed 1/125s|ISO 100

I like to shoot through some glasses, and use them as my creative filter as I have posted previously here.

Thought Process: The glass from my hotel room is like ND with magenta color filter, with that it cuts down the light and only allows magenta color cast(blue/red) through the glass and makes it easy for me to ignore other color spectrum, this generates interesting and surreal scene to me because you don't normally get a rounded sun in mid day when shooting it. There are tricks to shoot through the glass without getting any reflection, either switch off all the lights in your room or attach the lens to the glass ;)

There's not much post-processing except enhancing the contrast.

MNS: Double Grey Moon Ring

Exposure: Aperture F8|Shutter Speed 10s|ISO 100

Moon surface is grey, and this image just tells exactly that ;)

Thought process: The moon ring is visible to the eyes, trying to capture it is another story as it requires certain exposure combination for certain cameras/lens, it's "trial and error" style this time. Composition wise, weird angle with satellite talking to the outer space, to balance it I include the red/green building block to the frame as well.

If you observe the image carefully, you might see second moon ring appeared at the top right corner of the frame, basically moon ring indicates the storm or bad weather coming, according on the wikipedia source.

MNS: Light & Shadow

Exposure: Aperture F8|Shutter Speed 1/5s|ISO 400

Kandawgyi Lake is big, bigger than I expected. As there's no way to cover every single place, finding what I like to cover is important.

Thought process: When there's light, there's shadow! In photography we always learn to see the light, try the opposite to improve the way you see things around you, been practising it with or without my camera.

MNS: Infamous Shwedagon Pagoda

Exposure: Aperture F16|Shutter Speed 25s|ISO100

Shwedagon Pagoda is one of the most sacred Pagoda in Myanmar. More information can be found in the wikipedia regarding it. Most of the time I avoid tourist attraction when taking photos at night unless I can find new perspective to present it.

Thought process: Staying in Yangon City, you will certainly see the Shwedagon Pagoda, and I have been seeing many images of the Pagoda, be it in real life, in post cards or drawings. I keep looking for new perspective to create fresh image for Shwedagon Pagoda until I found the location shown in the image above.

The big red triangle gate is not the entrance to Shwedagon Pagoda, in fact it is the gate of decommissioned army base, Shwedagon Pagoda however is located at the other end, what attracted my eyes to create image like this is the shape of the gate and Shwedagon Pagoda(they both have triangle shape), when the gate and Pagoda aligned properly in the image, it does bring our eyes directly into the Shwedagon Pagoda even though it is very small in the image, then I control the exposure properly so that the golden glow on Shwedagon Pagoda doesn't overexpose until detail is gone.

About the light steak, it requires timing and luck, there are traffic lights nearby so basically I just made rough calculation on timing to get where I want the light steak to show in the image, it requires couple of tries because you may get caught into something in 25 seconds time.

NPT: Auto-Focus At Night?

I would like to introduce new section for my blog, it's called Night Photography Trick(NPT).

One of the common challenge that must be encountered by most night photographers is to get subject in focus, shooting at low light condition is not simple as auto-focus won't work most of the time due to lack of contrast in the scene. Getting bright len may help a little but not much, seriously.

Manual focus and Hyperfocal distance are the best friends for night photographer. Night photographer usually relies on them to get subject in focus.

Two widely used techniques are -

1. To get manual focus working, night photographer will illuminate the subject temporarily with torch/flash light(just like using  modeling light), then tune the focus ring until subject in focus. Otherwise switch on auto-focus and get camera to focus quickly if there's enough contrast, then switch back to manual focus once the subject in focus. Using this technique has advantage because you don't have to re-focus again in case want to re-take.

2. Hyperfocal distance is way simpler to operate, just tune the focus ring to infinity, as long as you have your subject in effective focus range/field, you are all good.

The first technique has shortcoming, especially the subject you want to focus is quite far from the camera position and you can't throw enough light on them easily, and this technique is more practical when you have accompany(since you can't move away from your camera when focusing so getting someone to help is a must), second technique is good to get subject in focus, but it also brings greater depth of field and you can't get close distance subject in focus easily(need to do some calculation), you may want to avoid this technique as well when you are shooting below F5.6 aperture setting.

 I have experimented with new technique to get subject in focus at night, one of the problem I want to solve during focusing at night is to focus anywhere I want in the viewfinder, and to get subject in focus as quickly as possible. I normally out for shooting alone at night, and this technique works very well even if you don't have accompany.

The key to this technique is make use of laser pen(laser pointer), I get green laser pen because it works very well in low light condition, read the link here and you will get what I mean. With green laser pen, I can point to the main subject and get my camera auto-focus easily, once the main subject in focus I can quickly switch to manual focus mode to lock down the focus. It also allows me to work quickly when I just want to move my camera slightly for better composition, I can re-focus by pointing the laser to the subject again. Do you want to focus on mid-range subject, no longer you have hard time doing so. The only catch with using laser pen is you must be careful not to point to someone which may cause eye damage.

Grab a green laser pen, it's so small and portable, and experiment with the technique I'm sharing here, then tell me about your experience, the laser pen has become my best friend for the night out for a while now.

MNS: We Are Colourful

Exposure: Aperture F11|Shutter Speed 20s|ISO 100

In Myanmar, it's quite easy to see old-school car, I always think that old car has better design in term of outlook compares to new one, maybe it's just me. There are many hawker stalls painted with vivid colour can be found in Yangon, Myanmar as well. 

Thought process: Colourful car, colourful stalls, and extreme orangish background, there's fluorescent light on the camera right(45 degree). I really like the color contrast setting here, but I want to add some light so they have little bit of cartoon look; snooted blue light on the car head lights and generate specular green light to the bumper of the car to show its iron teeth.

Most of the time we will try to separate the foreground and background subject using low aperture number(below F8) to blur the background so they get less attention, but for this one, it's the RGB color!

MNS: Painting The Rusty Beauty

Image 01. Exposure: Aperture F16|Shutter Speed 74.5s|ISO 100

Image 02. Exposure: Aperture F9|Shutter Speed 30s|ISO 100

For this post I will go straight to thought process since the location is introduced in previous post. This location basically opens up a lot of opportunities for night photographer to try out stuffs.

Thought process: There are times when I want to be playful with light so the image comes out interesting and dramatic, there are also times I want added light to look real.

When I want the subject to look real, I usually fill neutral/warm white colour(high colour rendering index(CRI)) light to the subject, especially to bring out shadow detail. If I want them to look surreal, I will blend different colour of light into the scene.

This time I want to add different colour of light while making them look real and believable as if no light has been added. I'm still experimenting and hope to improve over time. Two important keys here, one is looking at the ambient light around so that you can plan on how to blend your light into the scene, second is examine the surface and its colour you plan to paint the light on. For me I want to create the image that brings the feel of rustiness here.

Image 01. 75 seconds exposure, just enough time to paint the light, I painted two portions in the image, one on the camera right, I filled the shadow with red colour light, it plays well with the background because you can see few stripes of red colour light at the back wall which illuminated by the existing light. The second portion is actually done inside the car, where I actually ran into and illuminated the wind-shield with green colour light, why green light, apparently the wind-shield has growing moss and I want them to be seen.

Image 02. Only one green colour light is added at the open door of  the second truck which is just beside the main truck, I hid behind the main truck and illuminated the open door, I tried to narrow the light as much as possible to bring out the detail even though it looked subtle.

Post processing wise, no image stacking here, just tried out couple of times to get the result, and slight contrast adjustment in lightroom.

More experiment to come, stay tuned.