Here are my favourite and best iPhone photography / best instagram images .. so far.

Camera phone still cannot beat its big brothers, like the DSLR or even some of the compacts. Maybe it never will, but who knows, technology will only get better. But for now, the convenience of having a good little camera in my pocket all the time is wonderful since I cannot always be carrying the DSLR or the M9 or even the smaller Micro Four-Thirds camera, like the Olympus E-P3 or Panasonic GF-1.

Oh, by the way, thank you to those who have been asking about my mum. Thank God that she is now home, recovering well.

The mobile phone technology has advanced so much that the combination of powerful processor and many excellent photography apps has created an opportunity for us to be more creative while on the go. I just wish the iPhone battery technology will also advance so it can last for at least 12 hours of shooting before I come home and charge it. OK, minus the breakfast, lunch, dinner and coffee breaks, maybe 8 hours of non stop shooting.

The following two images below touched me a lot. I saw her couple weeks back in Little India when I accompanied my cousin to shoot there. She’s easily 70+ years old and she was pushing a cart full of flattened boxes. She probably collected those unused boxes from somewhere and was going to sell them for some cash. She crossed the road to move to the other side. A car passed by, much faster than her as you can tell from the blurry image of the car. Human vs Machine. To put things in perspective, the things I complain about in my life do not seem bad at all.

Here is another one from that morning shoot in Little India. A man crossing the road on his bike. It’s black and white, but if you can tell from the position, he crossed when the red man was still on. 

The following were taken during my recent trip to Bali in December for a short family vacation. Taken mainly in Kuta. They were processed by the Instagram app and couple other iPhone apps on the iPhone itself. Beautiful Kuta sunset.

I did very little post processing to the image below. Only bumped up the contrast a little bit and cropped to square format. Amazing phone camera.

The famous war photographer, Robert Capa, once said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you are not close enough.” When I saw waves crashing onto the rocks along the Kuta beach, I thought it would be cool if I could take some shots. To get the impact, I need to be close. Really close. And my newly bought iPhone 4s (it was less than a week when I brought it to Bali with me) was splashed with the salt water. Yummy. But I managed to quickly clean it up. It’s still functioning until now. Please don’t tell Apple when one day it stops working and I will go to claim the warranty. 

This one was taken in the morning. Beautiful morning. Clear blue sky and the beach chairs were just waiting for tourists to sit on them. And … can you see the moon right in the center of the top part? The full resolution image shows that very  clearly.

And this one was really a lucky shot. I was in the car when I shot this on a rainy day in Kuta. The car window was wet, lots of water droplets. I saw the couple waiting at the shelter from afar and I focused on the water droplets and took the shot when our car passed by them.

I tried to use the iPhone to shoot moving subjects. These beach boys were playing soccer. I was standing on a big rock, which you can tell from the angle of the shots.

And some more moving subjects.  The cousins.

And last one from Kuta, the model in Bali. 

Shooting moving subjects indoor with iPhone is challenging since we can’t really control the shutter speed. Hence, when shooting indoor and the light is not bright enough to give you fast shutter speed to freeze the movement, the subjects will be blurry. But I still love these images of the two little monkeys jumping on the bed. I tried to minimize the blur by “clicking” the shutter button when they were at the peak of their jump.

When shooting portrait with iPhone, try to zoom in in order to minimize the distortion. iPhone has a wide lens and shooting portrait with wide lens won’t be pleasing, especially when you are too close to the subject. So, zoom in.

Few more portrait shots. These were taken at the Universal Studios. I love the setting they have there.

I seem to be addicted to shooting from inside a car on a rainy day. These two shots of cabs were shot when I was in another cab on the highway. The wet car window caused the distortion, which I like.

You should have seen these two in my previous post, but let me post them again here, because they are my favorites too. The panorama, shot with the excellent AutoStitch app.

And last but not least, I love leaf on the ground. You guys have known that from my previous posts. So, this will continue with my iPhone.

So, that’s it for now. See you in the next batch of my favorite images taken with the iPhone. You all keep shooting !!

Shot with Olympus E-PL3.
I unfortunately forgot what lens I used, but I know for sure it’s one of the old manual lenses I bought from eBay. I believe it’s the Minolta MD Rokkor 50mm f/1.7.

I shot these when my daughter and I went for a date to IKEA in late February this year. A date started with ice cream and a walk around the IKEA floors and then ended with chicken wings and iced lemon tea.

They were shot using Panasonic GF1 and 20mm f/1.7 pancake lens at f/1.7 and ISO 500. The exposure metering was manual to ensure that I could expose her face well due to strong back lighting. It gave me a shutter speed of 1/30 sec.

A quick personal note to share. There are few little things that I like when going out with her, among many other things of course:

• holding her little hands
• when she rests her head on my chest when we are on the train or taxi
• when she looks up at me and asks if she can buy something she likes. Never a big item by the way and not every time we go out.

That lovely daughter and daddy’s relationship.

Back in January this year, she drew these for me on a sheet of paper. She drew on both sides of the paper and folded it to become like a card and it has a story of a little sheep too. You can see the folding mark in the middle.

And by the way … her mommy got a similar card too in case you ask. 

All shots with Micro Four Thirds camera, Panasonic GF1 and Voigtlander Nokton 40mm f/1.4 lens. Manual focusing with this lens on GF1 is challenging. Stretching your arms out so you can see the image on the LCD when focusing will cause you to be unstable. Hence, I really hope that GF3 will have a built-in high resolution viewfinder. GF2 has already been in the market for several months, but I didn’t want to upgrade because it still doesn’t have the built-in viewfinder. Yes, it has an optional external viewfinder you can buy, but I don’t quite like the idea as I want to keep the entire setup small.

When I shot these, I was lying down on the floor in order to be at the same eye-level as my daughter. I put the camera on the floor  too. That helped to stabilize it during the manual focusing.

I am going out shortly to meet a friend for a quick shoot and I will be taking this setup with me. Will share some photos later tonight if I can get some interesting ones.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

I seldom use flash. Very very seldom even though I have had an external flash, Canon 580 EX, for few years already. I love natural light and any other available / ambient light when shooting. Almost all of my photos at Masakecil were taken without flash. But every now and then, I use flash for some creative photography, like the ones here. They were shot using stroboscopic flash technique.

I first used this stroboscopic flash technique in 2006 when I shot my cousin’s pre-wedding photos. See below. Do you notice the softer flash light for the photo below? That’s because I used the LightSphere flash diffuser. I didn’t use it just now.

I wanted to do it again tonight, so I asked my daughter if she would like to help her daddy. She ended up having too much fun and didn’t want to stop. I had to stop it because she has a field trip to a library tomorrow morning with her school and she is not a morning person … yet. She’d better be next year when she starts her primary school.  

When a flash is set to be in Stroboscopic mode:

• the flash will emit pulsating flashes of light
• the camera will be able to capture (read: freeze) moving subject multiple times in one shot

Cool right? No photoshop needed.

Most of the theory on stroboscopic flash will recommend you shooting against black background in order to avoid the background to be over-exposed. But, for me,  I like to mix it with ambient lighting in the background, unless the shot is for some specific subjects that really require black background. I will try to find some time to do this later.

Some important factors to note when setting your flash in stroboscopic mode:

• the firing frequency or cycle per second (Hz). 1Hz means something happen once in a second. 5Hz means something happen 5 times in a second.
• number of flashes per cycle.
• the speed of the moving subject (usually the faster the movement, the more flashes you would need in order to capture / freeze more movements).
• you need to set your camera to Manual mode. The minimum shutter speed to use is (number of flashes per cycle) divided by (the firing frequency or Hz).
• the power of the flash.

So, for 10 flashes at 5Hz, you need to set the shutter speed to at least 2 seconds. This will give the flash unit enough time to fire the number of flashes you choose.

What about the power of the flash? When your  flash is set to function in stroboscopic mode, the flash unit is splitting its power to each burst of light. So 1/16 will mean each burst will have 1/16 of the full power of the flash. Less power will mean less light. Just go ahead to experiment how bright you want the subject to be.

Have fun.

Strawberry smoothie made with love by my daughter and all shot at f/2.8 and ISO 2000.

I think she poured too much milk since the color of the smoothie was not that red anymore. Still tasted good though and I love milk. 

Photographing childhood means much more than just taking portrait shots of your children. It means photographing memories. Sometimes, some of these memories cannot be repeated anymore, or sometimes they become very important because they happen for the very first time.

These memories happen every day, from small things like when they first put on their own clothes to a bigger event such as a trip to a park or birthday party. Memorable shots from these events may not always mean shots that show your child’s face or expression, but it can also be shots of details of what they do. The shots can also be about what they have or what they create at certain point in time.

At home, I always have my small camera ready to use. The battery is charged and the memory card is either empty or has enough space. The camera that plays this role now for me is my Panasonic GF1 + 20mm f/1.7 pancake lens. It’s smaller and simpler compared to its big brother DSLR and it’s freeing. Don’t get me wrong, I still love my big DSLRs no matter how heavy they are, but I use this Micro Four Thirds camera for a lot of daily photos shot at home or sometimes when I am out with my family and I just want to travel light.

The photos of my six-year-old niece tying her shoelaces here were all shot using this GF1 and 20mm lens. Shot using aperture priority, the chosen aperture was wide-open, f/1.7.

My daughter was bored when our flight out of Singapore on Tuesday was delayed for the second time. We left home in Singapore at 3pm and only arrived home in Jakarta almost 7 hours later. I was so bored too that I took out my camera and started shooting her while she was eating all her cookies.  :)

I have had this entry in my draft folder for many weeks. Not sure why I didn’t post it immediately then. But now, overseas and with no access to my photo archives at home, I decided to post this one to keep this blog updated.

It is a photo of my daughter that I shot more than a year ago. She got the butterfly wings from her friend and wanted to put them on when we went for a walk. You can also see the shadow of some flowers she was holding, that she picked for her mommy.

My fellow blogger friend, Daphne, at Mother Inc is organizing an event for children battling against cancer. Yes, you read it right, children battling against cancer. The event is called Happee Day, on Sunday, October 31st, at Hort Park. So, if you are in Singapore or planning to visit Singapore and you have couple hours to spare, please come to share your blessings with those children with cancer. Please visit Daphne’s blog entry to read more details about this event and what you can do to support.

Be grateful and share your blessings. Thank you.