Here are some photos from the past month that I’ve taken. In recent weeks I haven’t really touched my camera as I’ve been recovering from my second jab of Pfizer and just been a bit busy in general.
Sydney Park
To start things off we visited Sydney Park a few weeks back now for the very first time. It’s quite close to the city and we’ve actually driven past quite a few times but never thought to check it out properly. The featured image at the top of the page along with the 3 below were all taken with my Canon EOS M50 Mark II and EF-M 32mm f/1.4 STM lens.
It’s occasions like this that I really love having the M50 II as it’s so convenient to carry with me. I will say though that even at ISO 100 I can see a difference between the files on the R6 and the M50 II with the former being cleaner. I wouldn’t say they are really noisy but they aren’t completely noise free like you’d expect for ISO 100.
I believe this was quite common on some older Canon sensors and I’d be curious if this was the case on the M6 Mark II and its much newer 32.5MP sensor. Regardless it’s a camera that still produces beautiful images and something I really enjoy owning and using.
The Casual Fun
Over the past month when I’ve had the opportunity I’ve tried to take shots that are more casual in nature. In terms of the story behind the images, I got a new Xbox controller so wanted to try capture a few images with different perspectives. I did the casual shot of me holding the controller which is hard to do at 35mm when you hold the camera. For the second shot, I was using the ambient light from my PC monitor. I’d love to do something more technical and might later on.
The drink with the “Thank You” label was a gift to my girlfriend from her friend who was moving away and wanted to say thanks to all her friends which was quite nice. The final image is a night light of sorts that I got ages ago and I have mixed feelings about it. When I first took this image I quite liked it but after looking at a similar image I took a few years ago I like the old one much better.
I’m not sure if it’s just this image or my skills are not as refined these days but the only way I can find out is shooting these types of images more and see how they turn out.
All About The Setup
Funny enough after writing the above I ended up taking these two photos. For both of them I was using some artificial off camera lighting for a change. For the first image which you can see below, I was using my Godox AD200 through a softbox at 45 degrees to the right of the camera. I had a bit of trouble editing this one with the mixed types of lighting as the color cast on my hands and cards were different to the background.
For the second image you see above I had a much easier time editing when it came to the colors. I’ve tried to actually take several images of the Mandalorian Pop but never got something I liked until this shot. I shot it at f/2 so I could get the bokeh as large and nice as possible but I also focused stacked the image so everything would be in focus.
The more ideas I can get for shots like this the more I’d like to practice and improve on them.
Dreaming About Travel
Sometimes I like to go over my old images as they often have memories attached to them. Recently I decided to have a look through some I took during my trip in 2018. Below are 2 images that I didn’t edit the first time for some reason but I somewhat like them now.
The lighting on these two aren’t very interesting but there’s still something about them I like. The first image is of course the Merlion Statue which I’m sure everyone knows and the second image is Clarke Quay which is where I stayed during my trip. It’s quite funny as Clarke Quay is somewhat of a nightlife area but we are so old now we just made sure we were back in the hotel by 8pm most nights…
Depending on how often you frequent this blog then you may recognize the image below from my home page slider. I love this image but one thing that annoyed me about it was the horizon wasn’t straight so I decided to edit it again to fix that.
I still really love this image and one of my favorite travel images period. Looking at it now I’d be curious what I could recreate with something longer like 35mm or 50mm but I also couldn’t imagine this image looking another way.
I thought while I was at it I’d try edit another one of my main Singapore images. I remember on the day I took 3 or 4 different exposures but ended up going for the darkest image which can be seen here. When I started reviewing the RAW files I noticed some much nicer exposures so I ended up making the image below.
The image was taken with the Canon EOS 6D Mark II and the images had a ton of color and normal noise. Thankfully this was all in the corners and water so it was easy to fix with noise reduction. Either way I’m glad I gave this another edit and I’m sure the next time I get to visit here the image will be even nicer!
That’s it for this post and I hope you enjoyed it! Make sure to subscribe at the bottom of the page if you’d like to be notified when I release a new post.
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