Do you like this watch? I made it digitally.

We went to Giverny, France to visit the home museum and garden of this famous French Impressionist painter. Now run by a foundation, Monet’s Garden is one of the most beautiful gardens we have seen to-date.

 I made this watch souvenir to remember our visit there.

We visited the new Vermeer Centre in Delft, Holland. We had earlier seen his “The Girl with a Pearl Earring” in the Maurithuis Museum in the Hague. The Centre has a studio which simulated the window light that the Dutch painter used for most of his paintings.

I took the opportunity to pose my wife and tried my version of a Vermeer photograph.

I texturised the photo to simulate canvas and added the frame digitally.

I took these shots of lilies in Keukenhof, Holland, last May.

We arrived in late spring and by that time, most of the tulips had been cut. We were fortunate that in Keukenhof, they were exhibiting other flowers as well, such as lilies, amaryllis, callas and orchids.

This is the first time I have converted my photos into cubes. Other than editing the photos, it took me only 3 minutes to produce these photo cubes. How did I do it? I’ll reveal the secret in due time.

I posted a few blogs initially, then stopped and continued my blogs at typepad. Then I got approved for Adsense at this orginal blogsite. I didn’t know how to put my Adsense code in my blogs and did a lot of trial-and-error before being successful only yesterday. I did it by going to my cPanel and file manager and then locating the WP theme and sidebar so that I could insert the code. And then I remembered having paid, three weeks ago, for access to a website that showed video tutorials of what I need to monetize my WP blogs.

It took an email from the website owner, asking me for a testimonial to jog my memory. I scolded myself for not having clicked on it sooner. 

His name is Fidens Felix. He showed me in a few minutes how I could have done the same thing by going to my WP admin panel, without having to go thru my cPanel.

The other thing I learned from him was how to configure permalinks so that the search engines could tag my posts more effectively.

Lastly I was able to download WP plug-ins and various articles and PLR’s.

All at a measly $7.00!

They had been dancing non-stop for an hour, during a videoshoot for a tourism promotion documentary in Bangkok. The police were kind enough to allow me to shoot close.

After playing back the image, I knew I had to do something to the background, as it was distracting attention from the two dancers. I used Gaussian blur. However, it was difficult to do the blurring properly, as I was using the mouse instead of a stylus and I was getting impatient doing it. So you’ll see parts where the blurring was not so good.

Lesson for amateurs: When doing photo-editing, be relaxed and don’t take it too seriously. It’s only a hobby, not a livelihood!

This Rembrandt tulip was taken at Keukenhof last spring. I used a zoom lens, at a focal length of 360 mm (at 35 mm film equivalent). Because it was a bright afternoon, I knew I could use a smaller aperture (f11) and a slower speed to keep the centre of attention sharp. As usual, I mounted my camera on a tripod to minimise camera shake.

I was not quite satisfied with the bare image. So I decided to create a digital frame, taking a colour sample from the dark purple section of the tulip bulb. The white background surrounding the photo made the entire scene look nicer, in my opinion.

She was a participant in an annual parade in Singapore called Chingay, held during the Chinese New Year period. Her dress and hat were full of flowers.

She was sandwiched in a group of 50 other participants. Instead of shooting her with the others, I approached her and asked if she could step out of the group and I then asked her to pose alone.

While I was “directing” her poses, many other event photographers rushed to my photoshoot location and started snapping her. I was fortunate, though, that she only took instructions from me and gamely posed.

I’m so lucky.

I had arrived early at a month-end open-air Thai classical dance concert in Bangkok. There was a mini-fair on local handicrafts and delicacies. I spotted two ladies wearing festive costumes and doing embroidery. I approached the owner of their stall for permission to take their photos.

Although my spoken Thai  is pathetic, my “model” instinctively understood me and stopped her work for a while while I moved around her, looking for her best angle. We were inside a white tent. I used the tent as the background.

Once I started photo-editing, I played around with various layouts. I decided to focus on her head which was adorned with silk flowers and earrings. I then changed the colour of the white tent to a light lavander by taking a sample from the silk flowers.

Above, you can see my outputs at different stages of production.

I hope you like the final outcome. 

As I view this again, Ono Lisa’s bossa nova version of ‘Smile” is playing in my mind.

I had just finished taking photos of my wife at this spot. This young lady, with her aunt, asked me to take her photo with her camera. I said yes but provided she allowed me to take her photo as well on my camera. I had to direct her, including telling her to sit down and how she should place her hands and made her smile again and again.

No need to guess which country she was from–the sportshirt and her sweet smile said it all.

I took this shot with the usual rule-of-thirds in mind. Other than that, I did not attempt any other technique. Sometimes, we examine a photo to assess the photographer’s technical artistry when what we should be looking at simply is the content.

I hope this photo makes you smile as well.

This was taken at the Palace of Charles V in Granada, Spain. Flash and tripod were not allowed.

I had to be very careful in balancing the light and shadow portions of this image. I put my handheld camera at its widest aperture (f4.5) to compensate for a fast speed (1/160).

I liked not only the light-and-shadow but the contrast in texture of the floor, the walls and the columns and the contrast in colours of blue, grey, orange, and brown.