Mainly a gallery post. Couple weeks ago I finally had a chance to go around the botanical garden and took some photos. Now since this is Spring in Melbourne (at least it should be), there was plenty of great flowers to take photos of. 

The gear that I had at that time was quite minimal. One fixed 90mm macro lens and my Nikon D300s body. All was taken handheld as I didn’t bother to bring any tripod. Like always, the secret of taking macro photos handheld is patience. Always keep a steady breathing and don’t get agitated if the wind does blow the flowers.

Personally I found taking flower photos is always relaxing in some ways.

Last week I went to Darwin on a business trip, very interesting as I have never been there before. On some of my free times I was lucky enough to be able to snap the few photos below.

For your information, the crocodile and the lizzards were taken inside crocosaurus, which you can see in one of the photos below.

This weekend we decided to go around the Tullamarine Airport location for some plane spotting. Fortunately it was a nice day, bit cloudy but not raining at all. It actually helps that the sun wasn’t so strong, had it was stronger we might have problem with back-light.

With any photo-shoot like this one, where most of the time the subject (in this case the aeroplanes) are mostly backlit, I set the camera to spot metering mode most of the time. . This way I can lock the exposure on the plane, preventing the plane from being capture as a silhouette. 

As for the gears, I used my trusty Nikon D300s and 70-300mm lens. Now, my lens is not exactly the latest and greatest, in fact it is almost 10 years old now, I used to use it when I was photographing with my film SLR. Meaning it doesn’t have any VR technology which should reduce vibrations. So, in order to get a sharp shots at the maximum zoom level, I followed the ‘golden rule’ which is maintaining the speed above the lens focal length. Therefore most of the picture in the gallery is being shot at around 1/400 s.

Anyway, enjoy the gallery below :

As an extra, we went for a meal at Footscray after the shoot. Great place to get some Vietnamese food!