[UPDATE: Goodness gracious me! I need an editor. This is an updated version with some of the grammatical error corrected]

October is over and November is here.

When I started this blog last October 11, I made a small promise to keep on updating this blog every day, or if that is not physically possible, to post an average of one entry a day for six months.

I’ve kept close to that promise so far but November is here.

Just yesterday, I receive received official notification that I’m to move out of Singapore, and back to Malaysia, this month. My term in Singapore is coming to an end and during the transition period, I might not able to update this blog for about two weeks.

I shall try tough though to arrange for several posts to go live on certain days during the transition period but I doubt I’d be able to come up with enough stockpiles of pictures. So, I’m going home. Not sure though which pastures is greener.

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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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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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The pictures below are among of the many flower shots I’ve taken over the years of shooting in macro. Flowers are relatively “easy” to shoot because unlike insects or other living things, the just stay where they are, giving you ample time to compose your shots.

But even then, this does not mean you can take it for granted. You still need to consider several other issues such as setting the right aperture to get the most desired results.

To put it in simple term, if you want everything about the subject to be in focus, choose the smallest aperture, or largest aperture if you want only certain part of the subject to be in focus.

Okay, I admit it’s not as simple as that — because you still need think about shutter speed and manual focus, if your point-and-shot camera has a setting for manual focus. However, varying the depth of field of a subject, is already a good concept to start experimenting with.

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When everything else fails — or when you think you have photographed everything — look under the shrubs.

That’s what I do when I go for an outing, when I thought there was nothing more to photograph and it was time to go home.

But this doesn’t mean you have to deliberately rummaged into the shrubs or turn stones over just to have a look what was beneath them so that we can take their pictures. That would be counter-productive.

I hold the view that as a photographer — taking pictures of nature at their natural setting, or any other subjects for that matter — it is our job to try and minimise disturbance to the subjects which have given us the pictures.

Here’s an example of life under the shrubs. I took this last week at the Memorial Park, Singapore, just opposite Swissotel The Stamford, the tallest hotel in Southeast Asia.

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One of the subjects that delights me most is the lalang grass or scientifically known as Imperata cylindrica.

Farmers hate the grass and treat it as nuisance. They can grow real fast and are very difficult to eliminate. You don’t just cut the lalang grass to kill them, as they would grow again the next day. What the farmers always do is to either burn the whole field or spray them with weedkiller.

But imagine for a moment standing among the field of lalang grass with their fresh flower clusters swaying in the wind, and you should be able to see beyond its reputation as a nuisance.

You’ll begin to see the potential for a very nice panoramic picture, depending on the landscape of the surrounding area.

Lalang dispersal can also be a nice subject for macro photography but you’d better pray the wind stop blowing while you frame the shot because just a slight drift would cause you to lose the focus.

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Macro photography is about giving a new lease of life to what the eyes — and by extension the mind — take for granted in our everyday life.

It’s about looking closer at things and to be able to examine them — and to contemplate their existence — a little bit more with the benefit of seeing the finer details.

This series of close-up pictures are taken from my parents’ paddy field in Sabah, the Malaysian state on Borneo island. The paddy itself is about a week old.

I did not plan to take these pictures when I took my camera to the paddy field just before sunrise not very long ago.

Actually I had wanted to take a picture of the paddy field against the backdrop of a rising sun but was not satisfied with the results.

Then I saw the few remaining drops of water on the blades of the young paddy saplings. The rest, as they say is history.

I hope the pictures here would inspire you to go to the field early enough to catch the morning dew before they evaporate. A DSLR would have done a better job, but I had to make the best of what I have.

So, as you can see here, it was not just the early birds that catch the worms. Early point-and-shoot photographers too, can catch their own worms.

So, get out of the bed early, take your point-and-shoot camera out and explore the little universe in your backyard… up close!

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