The Spire

This is the most famous landmark of Dublin City. I am not sure what it purpose is but we (my friends and I) use it as meeting point when we have outings together.
I am sorry that it is actually slightly off-centre but he combination of colour compensate it (I hope). I do plan to take the same photo in different seasons of the year, featured by the trees on both sides of The Spire but hmm, city centre is not my favourite spot.

Technically, what do you think of this photo? Feel free to share your thoughts, I would appreciate them very much.

London

I think you have to agree that I was so lucky to be able to capture this moment. It was not easy for an amateur photographer like me. Look at that pigeon, I am blessed!

Anyway, I shoot this photo from the famous Tower Bridge of London last year. It was on a sunny winter day. Alhamdulillah.

Technically, what do you think of this photo? Feel free to share your thoughts, I would appreciate them very much.

Kinvara

It disobey the rule of third, it has flawed composition, there's a lot of empty spaces, but it's lovely.

Technically, what do you think of this photo? Feel free to share your thoughts, I would appreciate them very much.

The Dawn

I took this photo at Kinvara, County Galway when I was attending a spring camp which we call 'Mukhayyam Rabi''. It was plainly lucky timing. I got out of my room for breakfast and there, in front of my eyes a beautiful scenery of sunrise. Subhanallah, I appreciate it very much. Hope that you do too.

Technically, what do you think of this photo? Feel free to share your thoughts, I would appreciate them very much.

Simpoh Ayer 1

I just discover that the name of this particular species in Malay is Simpoh Ayer. It was all over girls chelet area in KYUEM. Ok, may be that's exaggerating but there's a lot of them filling the area between the road and our chalets.

May be this is not particularly a great photo by itself. I did sent this piece for a competition back in college under the action category (d'owh!) because of the ant there. As you can guess, I didn't win but the organiser (not the judges) love my work.

Technically, what do you think of this photo? Feel free to share your thoughts, I would appreciate them very much.

Daffodils

I was bored waiting for my friends in front of her apartment in Harcourt, Dublin. Lucky enough, I got my camera in my pocket. So, here it is... the famous daffodils of Ireland. (heh, I guess so since they can be found everywhere during springtime.)

I like this piece of photography for some reasons. However, you can see that tthe background was flawed. It shows that I tilted the camera during the shot. Something that shouldn't be done but who cares? I still love the result.

Technically, what do you think of this photo? Feel free to share your thoughts, I would appreciate them very much.

Desert Rose 2

Another shot in my dad's garden. This time, I choose a fuller composition to minimise distraction. I aim to focus on three flowers in the middle as well as highlighting an emerging bud above them.



Technically, what do you think of this photo? Feel free to share your thoughts, I would appreciate them very much.

Desert Rose 1

I captured this photo in my dad's garden. He had a garden almost full of desert rose or we call them 'kemboja cina'. This close-up as well as some others are tributed to my dad and his love for gardening.




Technically, what do you think of this photo? Feel free to share your thoughts, I would appreciate them very much.

Environmental Portrait

The environmental portrait is a portrait executed in the subject's usual environment, for example their home or workplace, and typically illuminates the subject's life and surroundings. It says something about the subject within the framework of their own environment.

Why do I prefer environmental portraits?

• they give context to the subject you’re photographing
• they give points of interest to shots (something you need to watch as you don’t want to distract from your subject too much)
• they help your subject relax
• they often give the viewer of your shots real insight into the personality and lifestyle of your subject

These shots sit somewhere between the purposely posed shots of a studio portrait (they are posed and they are unmistakably ‘portraits’) and candid shots which capture people almost incidentally as they go through their daily life.

Two good rules of thumb when attempting to photograph people in their surroundings:

1. "Half of all location photography is moving furniture."

2. "'Available light' means any light that's available."

Both sayings have been attributed to the great location portraitist Arnold Newman. More importantly, each can help spell the difference between a good environmental portrait and a great one.

When making an environmental portrait, there should be a connection between the subject and where it’s photographed. When photographing animals, this is not a problem in that where it’s photographed is where it lives. It can be an issue if you’re into photographing bugs and you unknowingly place an insect on a plant that is poisonous to the species. With people it becomes more of an issue as the story as to why a person is photographed in a specific location needs to be logical. If the person and the setting conflict, chances are the image won’t work.

So lets turn our attention to some ‘how to’ tips on environmental portraits.

1.Know your subject

Find out where they spend their time, what the rhythm of their life is like and observing their personality. Out of this you’ll not only find appropriate locations but will begin to get a feel for the style of shots that might be appropriate and you’ll begin the process of helping your subject relax into the photo shoot.

2. Location

Sometimes a location chooses you but on other occasions you need to be quite deliberate and purposeful in making your choice. When choosing your environment you ideally want to get one that:

• says something about your subject
• adds interest to the shot - every element in an image can add or detract from your shots.
• doesn’t dominate the shot - Try to avoid cluttered backgrounds (and foregrounds), colors that are too bright etc.

3. Camera Settings

There is no right or wrong way to set your camera up for an environmental portrait as it will depend completely upon the effect you’re after and the situation you’re shooting in. A wider focal length in these situations also to give the environment prominence in the shot. This doesn’t mean you can’t shoot more tightly cropped or with a large aperture and shallow depth of field - ultimately anything goes and you’ll probably want to mix up your shots a little.

4. Posing

What sets the environmental portrait apart from candid portraits is that you post your subject. Some of the poses might seem slightly unnatural and dramatic but it’s often these more purposely posed shots that are more dramatic and give a sense of style to your shot.

The expression on the face of your subject is also very important in environmental photography. It should fits with the overall scene.

5. Props

Props can make or break an environmental portrait. If they are subtle and naturally fit within the context of the environment they can be very appropriate and add to the image nicely but you’ll want to avoid anything that doesn’t quite fit or that potentially distracts the attention of viewers. The same goes for the clothes that your subject wears. Try to be true to the context without getting too outlandish.

Blue

Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.

Blue slows human metabolism and produces a calming effect. Blue is strongly associated with tranquility and calmness. In heraldry, blue is used to symbolize piety and sincerity.

You can use blue to promote products and services related to cleanliness (water purification filters, cleaning liquids, vodka), air and sky (airlines, airports, air conditioners), water and sea (sea voyages, mineral water). Avoid using blue when promoting food and cooking, because blue suppresses appetite.

Blue is a masculine color; according to studies, it is highly accepted among males. Dark blue is associated with depth, expertise, and stability; it is a preferred color for corporate America. When used together with warm colors like yellow or red, blue can create high-impact, vibrant designs; for example, blue-yellow-red is a perfect color scheme for a superhero.

Light blue is associated with health, healing, tranquility, understanding, and softness.
Dark blue represents knowledge, power, integrity, and seriousness.

Yellow

Yellow is the color of sunshine. It's associated with joy, happiness, intellect, and energy.

Yellow produces a warming effect, arouses cheerfulness, stimulates mental activity, and generates muscle energy.

Yellow is often associated with food. Bright, pure yellow is an attention getter, which when overused, yellow may have a disturbing effect; it is known that babies cry more in yellow rooms.

Yellow is seen before other colors when placed against black; this combination is often used to issue a warning. In heraldry, yellow indicates honor and loyalty.

Yellow is very effective for attracting attention, so use it to highlight the most important elements of your design.

Men usually perceive yellow as a very lighthearted, 'childish' color, so it is not recommended to use yellow when selling prestigious, expensive products to men – nobody will buy a yellow business suit or a yellow Mercedes.

Dull (dingy) yellow represents caution, decay, sickness, and jealousy.
Light yellow is associated with intellect, freshness, and joy.

COLOUR & PEOLE OF THE WORLD…

In Egypt and Burma, yellow signifies mourning.

In Spain, executioners once wore yellow.

In India, yellow is the symbol for a merchant or farmer.

In tenth-century France, the doors of traitors and criminals were painted yellow.

Hindus in India wear yellow to celebrate the festival of spring.

If someone is said to have a “yellow streak,” that person is considered a coward.

In Japan during the War of Dynasty in 1357, each warrior wore a yellow chrysanthemum as a pledge of courage.

A yellow ribbon is a sign of support for soldiers at the front.

Yellow is a symbol of jealousy and deceit.

In the Middle Ages, actors portraying the dead in a play wore yellow.

To holistic healers, yellow is the color of peace.

Yellow has good visibility and is often used as a color of warning. It is also a symbol for quarantine, an area marked off because of danger.

“Yellow journalism” refers to irresponsible and alarmist reporting.

The Rule of Thirds

If you are taking photographs for your own pleasure, as I assume you are, then you only have to come up with pictures that please you.

If you ask around randomly what composing a good photo is, they'll tell you to put your subject dead centre and you can't go wrong.

Let’s see if they are right…

Why don’t you go through your family photo album right now? You'll find dozens, maybe even hundreds of photographs demonstrating this very advice. Some of them might be good pictures, capturing the essence of your uncle, your mother, or your pet dog, but maybe not great photos.

You may be able to overlook the huge empty spaces or people with their heads cut off but no-one else will. Producing pictures that are pleasing to someone other than yourself will make your photography much more rewarding.

One of the most popular 'rules' in photography is the Rule of Thirds. It is also popular amongst artists. Think this photo below looks polished and professional by chance? Not really...

The Rule of Thirds is a term which means taking the viewfinder, or photograph, and dividing it with imaginary lines into thirds, both vertically and horizontally. Think of it as setting a tic-tac-toe board across your viewfinder, creating 9 small squares. (Some digital cameras even offer this grid as an option to toggle on and off using your viewfinder or the LCD on the back of the camera's body. This is very helpful to the beginning photographer if your camera has this feature.)

By placing your subject on one of the cross sections, where the horizontal and vertical lines meet, you're creating a much more pleasing snapshot. As well as using the intersections you can arrange areas into bands occupying a third or place things along the imaginary lines. It is fairly simple to implement.

Good places to put things; third of the way up, third of the way in from the left, you get the idea.

Duff places to put things; right in the middle, right at the top, right at the bottom, away in the corner.

In general, place people or things (your subject) to the right or left of the center (on those imaginary dissecting lines).

For landscapes, put the horizon or the point of interest above or below the center of your frame (again, on the imaginary bisecting lines)

Rule of Thirds helps produce nicely balanced easy on the eye pictures. Also, as you have to position things relative to the edges of the frame it helps get rid of 'tiny subject surrounded by vast empty space' syndrome.

Example
In example above, the subject is framed by placing it in the very center of the shot. It's an okay photo. But, if you move it slightly off-center, notice how much more pleasing it looks? More polished and more professional?

Once you have got the hang of the Rule of Thirds you will very quickly want to break it! This is fine. As I said earlier these 'rules' are best used as guidelines and if you can create a better image by bending or ignoring rules then fire away.

RED

Red is the color of fire and blood, so it is associated with energy, war, danger, strength, power, determination as well as passion, desire, and love.

Red enhances human metabolism, increases respiration rate, and raises blood pressure. Use it as an accent color to stimulate people to make quick decisions; it is a perfect color for 'Buy Now' or 'Click Here' buttons on Internet banners and websites.

In advertising, red is often used to evoke erotic feelings (red lips, red nails, red-light districts, 'Lady in Red', etc).

Red is widely used to indicate danger (high voltage signs, traffic lights). This color is also commonly associated with energy, so you can use it when promoting energy drinks, games, cars, items related to sports and high physical activity.

Light red represents joy, sexuality, passion, sensitivity, and love.
Pink signifies romance, love, and friendship. It denotes feminine qualities and passiveness.
Dark red is associated with vigor, willpower, rage, anger, leadership, courage, longing, malice, and wrath.
Brown suggests stability and denotes masculine qualities.
Reddish-brown is associated with harvest and fall.

COLOUR & PEOLE OF THE WORLD…

For the ancient Romans, a red flag was a signal for battle.

The ancient Egyptians considered themselves a red race and painted their bodies with red dye for emphasis.

In Russia, red means beautiful. The Bolsheviks used a red flag as their symbol when they overthrew the tsar in 1917. That is how red became the color of communism.

In India, red is the symbol for a soldier.

In South Africa, red is the color of mourning.

It's considered good luck to tie a red bow on a new car.

In China, red is the color of good luck and is used as a holiday and wedding color. Chinese babies are given their names at a red-egg ceremony.

Superstitious people think red frightens the devil.

A "red-letter day" is one of special importance and good fortune.

In Greece, eggs are dyed red for good luck at Easter time.

To "paint the town red" is to celebrate.

Red is the color most commonly found in national flags.

A "red eye" is an overnight airplane flight.

If a business is "in the red," it is losing money.

CAMERA

There are many different kinds of cameras. We will restrict our discussion to still photography, not motion pictures or videos. Still cameras are available to fit various sizes of film. For our purposes we will deal exclusively with 35mm cameras, which are the most popular still-film format.

35mm cameras are manufactured in a variety of styles:

• one-time use - sometimes called "disposable"

• point and shoot

• fixed focus and autofocus

• fixed focal length lenses and zoom lenses

• single-lens reflex (SLR) with interchangeable lenses.

There are others, but these are the most widely used. Both good pictures and bad pictures can be made using any of these styles.

The most versatile camera is the 35mm SLR. With the SLR you are viewing the scene through the actual picture-taking lens rather than through a separate viewfinder. Also, these cameras allow you to use interchangeable lenses. You can use a normal focal-length lens, a wide-angle, a telephoto, a macro, or any of the special-use lenses available for these cameras. Most of these cameras offer through-the-lens (TTL) exposure meters.
The exposure is determined by the amount of light actually striking the film plane. If you place filters or accessories in front of the lens, exposure compensation is automatically achieved without your having to do any calculations. Shutter-speed synchronization with electronic flash is the only real drawback when using an SLR .

inspiring photographer : MARY ELLEN

one of my favourite among her work

Mary Ellen Mark has worked as a photojournalist for around 30 years, travelling worldwide and being published in leading magazines around the globe. Mary Ellen Mark began working for Look and Life magazines in the 1960s. She has since created photo essays for a broad range of news and fashion periodicals including Esquire, Holiday, the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Stern, and Paris-Match. She was a member of Magnum for some years, resigning in 1981 to create her own company. She was voted "Most Influential Woman Photographer" in a recent poll of American Photo readers.

Having conceived the idea for many of the articles herself, Mark often returns to subjects (and places) for an extended period, producing book-length documentary projects. Her most well-recognized subjects include Mother Teresa and the Mission of Charity in India: the inmates of Ward 81, a locked ward for women at Oregon State Mental Hospital; prostitutes on Falkland Road in Bombay; and members of an Indian circus.

Mark photographs people, often people who are living on the edge of society. The works included in Mary Ellen Mark: In American, in the Bell Gallery collection, concentrate primarily on subsections of the middle and lower-middle classes: Christian bikers in Arizona, retirees in South Beach Florida, the Latin community in Miami.

Her pictures also show the women as individuals, and illustrate her ability to get close to people. She showed them and their emotions directly and without sentimentality in a series of moving pictures. Another essay from the 70s that was widely published was on customers in singles bars in New York.

		Indian Street Performers. India 1981

Acrobat Sleeping. Great Famous Circus, Calcutta, India, 1989

learn more about her at http://www.maryellenmark.com/

inspiring photographer : BRASSAI

“What characterizes a good photographer is that he has both that journalistic sense (he seizes whatever is interesting in the world) and, at the same time, the sense of form. For me, the criterion of a good photograph is that it be unforgettable."

Brassaï was born in Brasso, Transylvania in 1899. He lived in Paris for most of his life. He died in 1984. He is known for Brassaï, the "eye of Paris," is known for his urban photographs of Paris during the 1930s.Among his popular images are "Rue de Rivoli, 1937"; "La Femme De 'L'homme Gorille' Dans Sa Danse De Loie Fuller"

Rue de Rivoli, Paris, 1937

Hungarian-born Brassai (real name Gyula Halasz) come to Paris to be a painter and took up photography at Andre Kertesz's suggestion to make a living. Paris by Night, (1933) showed pictures taken inside the cafes and clubs frequented by the Paris underworld.

Brassai photographed many scenes of Paris, from urban graffiti to dancing in the streets. He sees Paris as a subject of infinite grandeur, his photographs providing a sensitive and often extremely dramatic exploration of its people, its resplendent avenues, and endlessly intriguing byways. Brassai’s reputation was established with the publication of his first book, Paris at Night, now a modern classic. Some of the pictures in this book are sharply defined, brilliantly lit, while others capture the mistiness of rainy nights. Still others concentrate on the shadowy life of the underworld.

As Brassai created more and more pictures of Parisian life, his fame became international. His pictures of "Graffiti" (writings and drawings scribbled by countless individuals on the crumbling walls of buildings) were the subject of his one - man show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Brassai has indicated something of his reason for making these pictures in the following statement: "the thing that is magnificent about photography is that it can produce images that incite emotion based on the subject matter alone."

Brassai has said many useful things about photography; one of the most valuable is the following statement: "We should try, without creasing to tear ourselves constantly by leaving our subjects and even photography itself from time to time, in order that we may come back to them with reawakened zest, with the virginal eye. That is the most precious thing we can possess".

inspiring photographer : ARNOLD NEWMAN

ARNOLD NEWMAN

New York City. 22 October, 2004.

Arnold Newman was born in New York and studied art at Miami University. He became a photographer because he couldn't afford to finish his university course. He left and was offered a job through a family friend as an apprentice to a professional photographer.

His first pictures of people were taken on the street, but he was particularly influenced by the photography of the FSA photographers including Walker Evans. They posed their subjects in their living rooms or in front of their bomes for their documentary portraits. It was an approach Newman used and developed as 'environmental portraiture' more than six decades ago. In his images, his subjects were carefully placed amid surroundings that commented in some way on their personality or achievements.

"I didn't just want to make a photograph with some things in the background," Newman said. "The surroundings had to add to the composition and the understanding of the person. No matter who the subject was, it had to be an interesting photograph. Just to simply do a portrait of a famous person doesn't mean a thing."

Newman became one of the 20th Century's foremost photographers not only because of who he shot, but how he shot them. Over the next 50 years, Newman went on to photograph most major celebrities of the 20th century for magazines such as Life, Look, Fortune, Holiday, The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, including Igor Stravinsky with the lid of his grand piano making a note, Leonard Bernstein, George Harrison, Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Francis Bacon, Edward Hopper, Salvador Dali, Georgia O'Keefe, Berenice Abbott, Alfred Stieglitz, Franz Kline, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Max Ernst,Isaac Asimov, Eugene O�Neill, Paul Auster, Harry S. Truman, Yitzhak Rabin, Dwight Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, and even that so-called invisible man of the camera, Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Some of his famous work

MARYLIN MONROE, Hollywood, 1962 © Photo Arnold Newman

ANDY WARHOL, New York, 1973 © Photo Arnold Newman

IGOR STRAVINSKY, New York, 1946 © Photo Arnold Newman

see what people can do with photography

why photography?

it's fun ~ lots of experimenting

it's meningful ~ captured my sweet, bitter & tasteless memories

it's challenging ~ not as easy as thought :p

it conveys message ~ sometimes more effective than thousands of words

... i can list a lot more, but isn't it simpler to say,

I JUST LOVE IT!