100 Strangers - Stranger No. 2 - Matteo and Daniela

My stranger no. 2 is a lovely couple. They are Matteo and Daniela from Italy whom I met in Bromo, Indonesia, in August 2010.

Matteo said that he had been to many other places but had never seen something like the one in Bromo. They loved it and they were looking forward to be picked up at 3am the next morning to ride the 4×4 jeep to Mount Pananjakan to watch the sun rises. The weather was good the next morning, so I bet they enjoyed the beautiful sunrise there. They spent one night in Bromo and moved on to Ijen Crater the next day.

By the way, when asked about volcanoes in Italy, Matteo mentioned about Mount Vesuvius whose eruption long time ago buried the ancient city of Pompeii.

Even though Italy does not have something like Bromo, I told them that I love seeing pictures of Tuscany with its beautiful landscape. Maybe I will meet them there one day. 

100 Strangers Project - Stranger No. 1

It’s always hard to start something new, and the key is to just start it and get your behind off the chair, get up and do it. So, I am glad that I started this few weeks ago and posted the announcement that I would do this 100 Strangers photography project. I have officially made myself obliged to complete this project.

So, here is my stranger no. 1. His name is Azmi, 19, a Polytechnic student. I met him at the Somerset Skate Park, Singapore in mid August. He lives in the north of Singapore and prefers the skate park at Somerset as it’s closer for him compared to the one at East Coast Park. Azmi has been rollerblading for 8 months and told me that he’s still learning the craft even though he looked quite good to me. He has 2 more years to finish his study and will go for his National Service right after that.

Taken at Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park during sunrise. You will see lots of horsemen in this place especially in the morning. They are out from early morning offering their horses for the tourists to ride. If you like riding horses, you should try it.

By the way, Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park, that should be the correct name of this place instead of saying just Bromo. It’s true that a lot of photos you have seen on the internet about this place have Mount Bromo in it. But this place offers much more than just Mount Bromo. When you are there, you are surrounded by mountains. Mount Bromo is just one of them. The photos above do not have Mount Bromo in it, just to give you an idea.

To those who missed it, I have started my 100 Strangers photography project and I am going to post the first two strangers today. So, come back here again to check it out. Thank you all and have a great weekend.

I wrote about backlighting photography before here and would like to emphasize again to encourage you all not to be afraid of backlighting scene when taking a picture as it can really give you a lovely image. Do you agree?

When I first learned photography 10 years ago, I read and was told that I should position the subject or look for a subject where the main source of lighting is from behind me so the subject is nicely lit. It’s definitely true and I still practice that a lot in many situations. But, I would like to encourage you all to also shoot a backlit subject like the above. The key to a successful backlighting photography is to balance the exposure between the bright background and the subject. You can easily use flash for this, but if you are like me who prefer to keep the flash at home, you can still do that. The foreground subject won’t be perfectly / uniformly exposed, but that’s perfectly fine to me. The overall image may lose some contrast, but to me that’s perfectly fine too. After all, I know it’s a backlit subject and I want to show that in the final result as I don’t want to lose the mood. So, check your exposure metering for the background and the foreground and compare the two. Settle for somewhere in between. You don’t want your foreground to be too dark.

If you are shooting in aperture priority or shutter priority mode, dial the exposure compensation to +1/3 or more depending on how bright the background is. Dial more for brighter background. Notice that the logic is the opposite, but that’s how the camera works. Its metering system can easily be fooled by the bright background and hence telling its metering system that the subject is very bright and thus compensating the exposure by underexposing the overall image. That’s how you get dark photo when shooting a scene with bright background.

So go out and look for some backlit subjects to practice. Hope this is useful.

The photo above was taken in Singapore’s Chinatown before the Chinese New Year in 2009. It’s a lovely place to visit if you want to shoot photos that say “Chinese New Year”.

I love mountains, especially in the early morning when the air is cold and crisp. It’s serene with only me and the mountain and my camera in between. This was taken when I visited Mount Bromo in East Java, Indonesia last week. The mountain you see in the photos here is not Mt. Bromo, but I unfortunately forgot to ask the locals when I was there. I will ask them when I go back there again … soon … my fourth visit to this lovely place and it won’t be the last I believe.

I was lucky that morning as the sky was clear and hence I could see the layers of mountains and mist changing colors from dark foreground to the orange sky. What a beautiful scene. The image below was taken about 8 minutes after the above and you can see that it was getting brighter fast.

On a separate note, I have been working on a personal photography project since few weeks ago. I will reveal the details of this project in my next blog entry. So please come back to check it out.

I shot these few weeks ago when I was waiting for the couple to arrive for the pre-wedding photo shoot I did for them at the end of July. You can probably guess, especially from the three photos of the green leaves, that they are back lighting images. Backlit subjects can give you an interesting images as they will reveal the textures and other characteristics of the subjects which you can’t really see when they are lit from the front. Try this the next time you are out shooting. Look for backlit subjects and shoot them. Be careful with the exposure as your camera can easily be fooled to think that the scene is bright enough and hence underexposes the image. Use positive exposure compensation if you are shooting in auto, aperture priority or shutter priority mode. Depending on the brightness of the background, you may want to set the exposure compensation to +2/3 or even more.

Keep shooting everyone.

You can see the heart shape which is the symbol of love as we all know in the picture above. But what was the subject I used to shoot this? Read on to find out.

You can find many items at home to shoot if you are bored and with a bit of creative thinking (Note: I don’t claim that I am a creative person though), you can have lovely photos to grace the wall in your house. The ones I have here were shot using a macro lens with ambient lighting in my living room. No studio lighting at all, so you all can do this easily. The light came from the overhead fluorescent bulbs in my living room. And the subject is a book. Yes, a book.

First, open the book and divide it into two with each side having about the same number of pages. Use two pages from the left and right sides and bring them together by curling them toward the center to form a heart shape, like this:

I then placed the book on a sheepskin rug which I got from a friend of mine, but you can  use anything really, like a chair covered with white cloth, a table, a sofa, etc. I then placed a white styrofoam board as the background. My 100mm macro lens was set to shoot at its maximum aperture of f/2.8 and the ISO was 1000. The choice of ISO 1000 was necessary to give me fast enough shutter speed as I was shooting handheld. I could have used my tripod, but not this time. Even with ISO 1000, the shutter speed was only 1/60 sec. The f/2.8 aperture and the close shooting distance blurred everything except the part where I focused on and that’s the beauty of shooting macro. You can bring out something unusual and interesting out of something ordinary. I then played with the compositions to get the following two photos:

Now … how about the top photo? The one that gives you only the bright shape of the heart? As you can probably guess now, that one was shot by focusing on the far end of the book hence everything else including the book itself became out of focus. I actually looked for the focus point through that paper hole and on the fur of the sheepskin rug on the other end. Got what I mean? The bokeh (the out of focus portion of the photo) is now in front of the main subject, if I can say it that way. Play around with the compositions and the angle of your camera and shoot away and have fun. It may not be for everyone, but for those who like this kind of photo, go experiment with it. Have fun and share what you shoot in your blog and let me know too so I can have a look at them.

Here is another one:

Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father! ~Lydia M. Child, Philothea: A Romance, 1836

For more collections of my children and family photography, please visit www.masakecil.com if you have a moment to spare. Thank You.