I am most delighted to obtain another inclusion in Schmap’s guide. The featured item this round is Sullivans Cove. Thank you once again Schmap! 
It felt real good to see a message in my flickrmail today saying that 2 of my pictures have been shortlisted in Schmap; somehow it just felt like passing an exam.
Hopefully it will be selected eventually. Whatever the outcome may be, the feeling of recognition is a little there, enough to make myself happy.
This is a long overdue post but imho, ever-controversial.
The work of Wu Xiao Kang which humbly attracted much cyber attention turned out to be a product of a few artists. Read the discussion here. ‘Nuff said.
In view of integrity, I have removed it from my blogroll.
The site underwent facelifts following the revelation on the local paper. See the site here.
I’ve been getting away with the technical aspects of photog.. doing pictures only is really something that touches my feelings. Recently, it’s kinda boring - perhaps nothing to explore - not that I’ve taken all that I wanted to.. just empty.
So why not get back to picking up some tech knowledge to make that shooting more effective? These words encountered “hyperfocusing”, and the great “infinity focus” (stumbled upon this on an article on taking fireworks) are still alien to me.
Which brings me up to learning all about focusing *yawn* like another physics class. No choice, I guess that is another key factor to making a picture look great.
Right now, we have hyperfocusing, internal focusing, rear focusing, infinity focus.
Let’s just start simple: how do lens work? Food for thought..
I guess this could be one of the most basic fundamentals of photog.
Disclaimer: All posts expressed are personal opinions.
Just a share of my views on this one, not really trying for a technical reference material writeup; instead of defining composition like “Composition is …”, I’d just like to say composition is really about feeling and how to express that feeling, and without composition, the image fails - in delivery of its intended message, thereby failing to obtain the desired judgement… hmm wonder if there is a technique known as decompose (whatever that means). Lame thought, nevermind that.
Composition is an essential part of the cognitive process behind making an image, part of previsualization, a technique I read somewhere.. not sure if it was from Ansel Adams’ books.
I have been trying to practise making “award-winning” compositions but they didn’t really work for me, probably because that thought was right at the top of my head, and the work was probably “synthetic” — well, not really synthetic, but something which is not coming deeply from me (It’s hard to write it down but hopefully it can be understood, something like close to my gut feeling), hence yielding a feeling of “plastic”.
Probably a good way to improve composition would be like what a fellow photog said, “self-critique more”. Will be posting a self-critque section on my own works.
Composition is the first topic on a personal agenda. Still trying to improve it with every shot.
It wasn’t a fact I could reconcile my feelings with “growth”, when I got the obtained critic from my first post of a picture I felt was great. It was like a stab right into my pride, hurting my ego, bringing along a seemingly timeless eternity of mixed emotions - wondering what went wrong, what made a good picture, and why people don’t see it the same way as I do.
The remarks did not slap me onto the ground, thankfully. Pondering over a few days hard, the questions raged countless battles over days, filling up my entire memory space. After seemingly a great while, my senses responded by seeking advice for improvements using the warlords in my head - why, how, etc.
The advice from the critics were, I would say, “abstract” - take more pictures. At that time, taking more pictures sounded the best “solution” to the problem and I thought “ok”, so off I took for more shots.
As time flew by, my newly acquired DSLR lasted 2 to 3 months and I realised that “taking more pictures” did not really mean “taking more pictures”; the real meaning was to involve more cognitives than just running around, trigger-happy. It made me laugh at myself for the silliness; like a small child who cannot rationalise or judge, charging around, rushing to do many shots. After talking to some artists, it made sense to go by feelings, intuition, rather than burning down hard on the road of technicalities only. According to them, photography is about expression.
With that, I began taking this subject with some agenda.
After building the content halfway, it seems like photography can be a portal into the past, and also become a transport to bring you through that portal. This site, supposedly intiated to be photography seemed to have sidetracked to exploration instead! A new house has been built for containing the urge to build that content here
