Whenever I travel, I made it a point to bring back macro shots of things I found unusual, like this tame seagull resting on wooden planks at Cockle Bay in Sydney, the place I visited from Sept 3-10, 2007.

But the photo didn’t come out good, I think. You could see the burnout effect on its shiny feather.

Actually there were dozens of them basking under the sun, but I’m hoarding their pictures for future postings.

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I was so engrossed in the process of shooting this spider web that I totally forgotten about the Rule of Thirds.

Wikipedia says: “The rule of thirds is a compositional rule of thumb in photography and other visual arts such as painting. The rule states that an image can be divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines. The four points formed by the intersections of these lines can be used to align features in the photograph.

Proponents of this technique claim that aligning a photograph with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the photo than simply centering the feature would”.

Perhaps that’s what I did when took this picture — I simply centered the center of the subject. Here’s another view about the Rule of Thirds: you must first know the rules before you can effectively break them.

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After going it alone for two weeks now, I decided today to see if I can hang out over at Digital Photography School, by signing up as a forum member. The process was easily done and in less than five minutes, I got myself registered.

“Back to school” was not really an appropriate title for this entry because I had no photography school to go back to — I’ve never been to photography school before. All I did was to learn through trial and error with whatever equipment I had.

Speaking of equipment, I got my first camera when I was 15 years old. That was decades ago, when computer was still rocket science to mankind. It’s a small camera that uses 110-type black and while film.

Wanna know I got it? I was in Secondary Three at a boarding school in Sabah when I saw an advertisement in the paper about cameras for sale by mail order.

I filled up the mail order form and had it sent to the retailer with a cover letter, saying “Please send me this camera by registered mail. I’ll pick it up at the post office. As for the payment, I’ll pay it at the post office once I receive the camera.”

A month later, I receive a notification slip saying my camera has arrived at the post office. When the time come for me to collect the parcel, I asked the man at the counter about the payment. He told me I needed not pay the post office anything.

Huh? I took the camera anyway and played with it until it broke down about two months later.

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How time flies. It seems just yesterday that I started this weekend series which I titled, “When Not Shooting Macro…”. This is a series, a Sunday Special if you like the term, where I post pictures other than close-ups photograhs.

Last Sunday it was “When Not Shooting Macro, I Shoot The Sky“. This time, it would be “I Shoot The Rising Sun”.

The six pictures here — posted in chronological order — are from about 20 photographs I took of a sunrise with the Canon PowerShot G6’s intervalometer set to shoot within a minute interval.

I mounted the camera on a tripod, set the dial to programme, ISO at 50 and the number of shots to 20. Then I just left the camera by the window, shooting obediently once in every 60 seconds for 20 minutes.

If you like the photos, you can download and view them, preferably as slide show so that you can see the dramatic birth of daytime. Refer to this blog’s Terms of Use if you intend to use these pictures other than for personal viewing.

There air was still at that time, but if if you view the picture in rapid succession, you’d notice the tree stirring, as though breathing like a living being.

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This close up photo of a wild flower is taken against the backdrop of flood water back in my unnamed village, which is located in between Kampung Tingkalanon and Kampung Morion in Tandek, in the northern part of Sabah, the Malaysian state on Borneo Island.

Flood water, or for that matter any large bodies of water, can be an excellent background for close up photography. Not only that the watery background can easily be diffused to give a very blurry background for a subject, using water as a backdrop also gives the photo a sense of tranquility.

If done correctly, you could have a picture with which you could almost listen to how “peacefully quiet” the surrounding is.

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Dead leaves, dying leaves, fresh leaves. We don’t normally pay attention to these things. They are there around us — and will always be there for us — that we tend to take their existence for granted.

I too ignore them most of the time, except when I had a camera with me.

I was trekking inside Singapore’s MacRitchie Nature Reserve recently, and with a camera in hand, I tend to be more observant of my surroundings. This is one of the pictures I took from such an observation, thinking at that time to just fool around with the camera and see how it would turn out.

The picture turned out okay, I guess. From this picture on, I made it a point to be always on the lookout for things unusual that might be a good subject for macro photography.

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This is a close-up photo of a pelican, which I took yesterday at the zoo in Johor Baru, the southernmost city in the Malaysian peninsula. My camera was about half a metre from the bird, which thankfully, stayed still in that position for a while.

A pelican is any of several very large water birds with a distinctive pouch under the beak belonging to the bird family Pelecanidae, according to Wikipedia. There are several species of pelican, not sure which one this is. This could be from the pink-backed pelican species.

It’s a nice, tame and graceful bird but you still need to be careful when taking their close-up pictures because sometimes they like to peck at moving things.

According to Wikipedia, pelicans have two primary ways of feeding:

Group fishing: used by white pelicans all over the world. They will form a line to chase schools of small fish into shallow water, and then simply scoop them up. Large fish are caught with the bill-tip, then tossed up in the air to be caught and slid into the gullet head first.

Plunge-diving: used almost exclusively by the American Brown Pelican, and rarely by white pelicans like the Peruvian Pelican or the Australian Pelican.

John Grisham has a book titled “The Pelican Brief”. I think I should get a copy.

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Think you know what this is? I bet some of you don’t.

Well, this is the egg cluster of a species of snail known scientifically as Pomacea canaliculata.

The species of snail which laid these eggs is no ordinary snail. Pomacea canaliculata has been listed as among the “100 of the World’s Worst Invasive Alien Species” by the World Conservation Union.

Pomacea canaliculata, known in Malaysia as Siput Gondang Emas or literally, Golden Snail, is a freshwater snail with a voracious appetite for water plants including lotus, water chestnut, taro, and rice.

According to the Global Invasive Species Database, the snail was introduced widely from its native South America by the aquarium trade and as a source of human food.

It is now a major crop pest in Southeast Asia and among the most affected are rice farmers, including my parents who had to set aside hundreds of ringgit each rice planting season to buy special pesticides to fight this type of snail.

There would be hundreds of thousands of them spawning virtually overnight at the start of rice planting season. If not controlled properly, they are capable of destroying a whole six hectare of young rice crop in less than 48 hours.

These two pictures of a Golden Snail egg cluster and the dead snails are taken from my parents rice field in Sabah, the Malaysian state on Borneo island.

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I was wandering almost aimlessly at the Singapore National Orchid Garden when I spotted a tree with rather unusual bark.

On closer inspection however, I found out that it was not the bark, but rather what has been done to the bark. I wanted to carve my own name on the tree branches to mark my presence, but thought that the tree had suffered enough.

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It was when I was in high school that I first learned about microeconomics, which — if I remember it correctly — is the study of the individual parts of the economy.

Then we had moved on to macroeconomics where we were taught about the whole economic systems — a look at how the economics principles worked at the national level, said my teacher then.

I was therefore a bit confused when later in my life I come to the term “macro” in relation to photography — where a photographer zooms in to take a close-up photos of things.

The macroeconomics of macro photography

I remember how I had pondered this question: shouldn’t this be called “micro photography” instead of macro?

Macro, as I understood the term then — no thanks to my macroeconomics teacher — was about a view of the larger scenario, hence, macro photography should not be about closing in on things with camera lens, I still remember myself pondering the issue.

(more…)

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