Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Fireworks at Putrajaya

The inaugural Malaysia International Fireworks Competition attracted thousands and I mean thousands of people to Putrajaya. The show started at 10pm but we were there before 8.30pm to make sure we get there before the gridlock started. We wanted to give Josh a treat so to be comfortable, we bought tickets to watch it from the Putrajaya International Conference Centre (PICC).


The show was spectacular with the music aptly playing to visual cue. Great job Team Italy!

We would love to see other teams' effort but the jam going home was just horrendous that we opt not to. I would advice those going to check-in the Shangri-La and just retreat to your room after the show and not get stuck in a 2hr jam just to get home.

I didn't have a wide-angle lens so the pictures look too close-up for a perfect shot. Nevertheless, I was happy with the outcome as it was my first time taking pictures of fireworks with this camera. Next time, I'd choose a vantage point across the lake to get a nicer angle.

Friday, August 03, 2007

Got me new lenses...

I always wondered how the adverts on billboards have really nice close-up pictures of people or objects with very blurry background. Technically this is done by using the biggest aperture in your settings.




However, the lenses I had before never managed to go beyond 1:4.5 (cheap amateur lenses). So the desired effect didn't quite turn out to my liking unless the background is really far away. I always knew this will set me back quite a bit if I were to invest in better lenses. I stumbled upon a Canon 50mm f1.8 canon lenses by chance. It was housed together with the ones that cost well over RM3000. Surprisingly, this one only cost a fraction of that.




Here are some of the pictures I took. Of course you could also edit the pictures in Photoshop and add the blur effect, but where is the fun in that?