Southern Star Observation Wheel

Today I was fortunate enough to be able to go out and enjoy the festivities of the long weekend on Australia Day, in particular at Docklands. There are bands, attractions, people and lots of stuff to see.

Sand Sculpture at Docklands

Check out the sand sculpture to the left for example, isn’t it amazing? The description said that it took 1 tonnes of sand to make this sculpture, incredible. Also to our surprise, this piece of art can withstand 3 days of rain!

While I was strolling about the complex and taking a few photos, I suddenly remembered the thing about cameras that most people do not really understand how to use, and that’s the metering mode. I have this sudden jolt of idea to put this up in this blog when I took the picture of the interesting entertainer on the right.

Horsemen Underexposed

The picture of this funny “horsemen musicians” was very dark when I previewed it. I was using aperture priority mode (I control the aperture the camera decides the shutter speed) with matrix metering. That’s when I immediately remembered to change the metering mode in my camera to fix this. Of course there is another way to avoid this kind of problem by ensuring the right direction of the light source, checkout the “Frequently Missed Items” post.

A quick look at the metering modes

At the very basic level, most of modern cameras would have: matix metering, centre weight metering and spot metering.

When using matrix metering, the camera estimates the amount of light needed to capture an image by averaging the light intensity in different parts of the image. So if you have a camera with say 15 dynamic areas metering, it means the camera basically divided the current scene into 15 areas and uses them to average out the light needed. The downside of using matrix metering is when the subject is dark and the background is very light, the camera is fooled into thinking that there is enough light needed, like the horsemen underexposed picture.

The solution that I decided to use is setting my camera into centre weight metering where the camera uses the centre part of the image as an average area of reference for its calculation. You can normally see the area used for the centre weight metering calculation through your viewfinder; ie. the round marking in the middle.

Horsemen Centre Weight

After using that metering, there result is as “Horsemen Centre Weight” picture. The camera is no longer fooled by the light background.

Another more accurate solution is the spot metering, with this activated, the camera relies on a certain point in the scene as the point of reference. Normally this can be seen in your viewfinder as the smaller circle or the square right in the middle of the scene. I used this metering to take a picture of the band below. The scene was tricky because the subject moved around and most of the background was very light.

Band Underexposed

Band Right Exposure

I locked the spot exposure on one of the band personnel, compose the scene and took the picture.

More festivities

Mini Children Tennis

As I moved on, more interesting attractions are scattered along the area. Even the excitement of Australia Open can be felt here, from the big screen and from the children playing.

I’d have to say that this area has become much more alive than it used to be a few years ago. Lots of shops, restaurant and of course the Southern Star Observation Wheel are now in business. With the weather as nice as today, it was indeed a great day out for recreation!

Docklands Shops	Festivities at Docklands
Melbourne Sunny day

I guess I’ll start of the 2009 post with a little bit of my short trip to Indonesia. I went to a small town of Pati in Central Java to look for something different than the capital city Jakarta. Of course, while there is not much modern entertainments like those large shopping centres, pubs, etc. This town has its own unique appearance.

The buildings remains the same as it was when I went here a few years ago, time seems to go slower here. If we look at the picture of the houses, those are the typical house + shop buildings.

Among other things however one of the best activities that I did was hunting for food. My favourite would be the traditional food called “Nasi Gandul”.

Its most prominent characteristics is having to place the food on top of a sheet of banana leave, giving the dish a very traditional look. I’m not quite sure what part of the cattle is the meat , all I know is that this food taste great and I love it! By the way, this is why we have to bring our camera everywhere including restaurants, so that we can take a picture of those different looking foods.

That was all exciting, unfortunately there are some sad aspect of this city (probably throughout the nation); it is the fact that most of the historical and old buildings are not being cared for. Take a look at the picture below, this was the once great looking sports hall, now a “ghost” looking hall.

From this city, I then moved on to a village, kind of rural suburb area I guess; it was called Trangkil.

Trangkil Sugar Factory

This place was once one of the biggest sugar factory in Central Java during the time of Dutch Colonial. I went there because my Grandpa was one of the head machinist in that sugar factory. Let’s take a look of the few shots that I took during the visit:

Although looking like a worn out factory, according to the caretaker there, this factory is actually operational. Too bad they didn’t take care of the facility like it used to be, could have been a good tourist attraction, especially there are still a lot of younger visitors who are the family members of the ones who used to work here. The saddest part is when the caretaker said that the last remaining old building will be destroyed as well.

The factory visit was a great thing to look at a portion of the Indonesian history.

Photo Tips: In the dark places like the factory machines above, use high ISO settings and the highest aperture (eg. f/2.8) possible to ensure sharp result. If you use a zoom lens, use the lowest focal length.

From the visits in Pati I then moved to the Semarang city. It is much larger than Pati and more modern in a sense. As usual however, I prefer to visit historical places. I’d like to show you one of the interesting place in there, the Pagoda Avalokitsvara.

This is a realtively new place with great aesthetics. Maybe with a little bit more publication it can be a good addition to the city’s tourism. The pictures that I took here could have been better. The rainy day when I came here didn’t help with the photography aspect of the visit . Here’s a little bit more shots from the site.

All in all, I am delighted to say that my trip had been a wonderful one. Great sites to see, great historical view, great food and most of all great chance to take good photos!

Today’s post is a listing of things that we frequently missed or forgot, subconsciously and consciously.

The aim is to avoid “…I should have…” or “I wish I had…” moments.

1. Dark Faces

This happens when the light source eg. the sun is behind your subject. This kind of mistake happens all the time even to someone who has taken a lot of photographs (less frequent though).

Example:

One way to fix this is by using a flash or a reflector or set the camera to centre weight metering.

The rule of thumb: “If the shadow leans towards you, use your flash or a reflector or set to centre-weight metering”

2. Missing Feet

So you’re on a trip and pretty excited with the things surrounds you. You take a snap of your trip group and by the time you came home you noticed something isn’t right… Their feet were cropped out!!

Example:

Maybe not everyone noticed this, but having the feet cropped out is a very common annoying mistake and many times a photo that should be great in the living room is lost.

3. Slanted Horizon

Sunset on the sea (or a storm cloud in this example) is always a great view to snap. However we have to take care that we don’t tilt our camera a tad bit. The horizon is very sensitive to angle and can be very annoying when slanted. Look at the picture below:

Slanted horizon gives an unsteady feeling, to address this, turn on your guide lines in the camera viewfinder.

4. Forgotten Manual Focus

The title speaks for itself. There was one time when I got a batch of blurred image because I had forgotten to turn my auto focus back on. The LCD preview will not do any justice since most image looks clear in there, however once viewed on your computer screen, great disappointment awaits.

5. Lazy to Take Another Shot

If you feel your shot is not up to scratch, shoot again. Trust me, there are many things that photoshop cannot fix; and you only know this after you got home!

That’s a starter list, there are many more common mistakes that we do, however above are the ones I felt most frequently happen.