The Gardens Photo Walk

The Gardens By The Bay (hereafter known as "The Gardens"), is one of Singapore's newest tourist destinations. It definitely looks impeccably designed and you will surely not want to miss taking at least a single photograph when you see it.

I have never been really that interested in gardens. Flowers are, of course, beautiful things but sad to say they don't excite me that much. That is also why I haven't gone inside the gardens ever since I arrived here.

Not until recently, when I discovered that one of my housemates, who is also a photography enthusiast, owns a wide lens. I got lucky that he is also a Nikon user. And I have always wanted to shoot with a wide lens. I love wide angle shots. And I have this thing for landscape photos with teeny tiny people in them.

There are a number of attractions, the two domes you easily recognize from afar are the Cloud Forest and the Flower Dome. Those tree-like structures, are the Super Trees in the Super Tree Grove. There are fees required to see each attraction and there are some packaged fees if you want to go and see all of them, by yourself or with a group. Discounts are offered if you are a resident (not a tourist).

I went there on a Saturday, a lazy one, as all Saturdays are to me. I got there mid-afternoon leaving me very little time to explore the entire place. I decided to go in the Cloud Forest. I'm no flower person but I'm definitely one who gets excited about unusual looking things, buildings and structures in particular.

Here are some of the gazillion photos I took with an iPhone and a D90 armed with a Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 and my trusty Nikkor 35mm 1.8D (a.k.a the lens I almost never take off my camera). I used the latter in a few detail shots and the former in anything extra wide you see below.

The Gardens viewed from the side of Bayfront Station

This will meet you at the entrance, albeit artificial, still looks grand and towering.

A first look at Xander

You'd think photographing a newborn is easy because all they do is sleep or lie on their back, but it never actually is.

My friend's new bundle of joy, her firstborn Xander, popped out of her recently and at day 22, we thought we'd take pictures to remember the beauty and fragility of babies and what joy it can give you just by looking at their wrinkled skin and cute little teeny tiny hands toes.

I'll be honest, we just managed whatever blanket and pillow we found in their house. I wish I had those stretchy woven fabrics that you can easily wrap around the baby, but had none. Instead, we had a scarf. It would have sufficed except that we were inexperienced with posing babies. We were in a room with a nice big window, we just placed him on the bed with a lot of pillows underneath a blanket.

Extra care was taken in wrapping him and making sure he kept sleeping. He woke up in the middle of the shoot and well, we continued anyway.

We tried our best and decided it would do for the afternoon.

 

Post-Valentine Thoughts

Yesterday was Valentine's Day. In some parts of the world, today is still Valentine's Day. In my opinion, it has become a highly-commercialized day when people (have this notion to) feel obliged to give flowers and sweets to their significant other and later on share photos of those on Facebook.

I would like to think that Valentine's Day, (although St. Valentine started all the flowers and sweets kind of stuff) is a special day to reconfirm love that you show to someone everyday. I think of it as an extra special day to express love in doing something special and meaningful. I mean, you can give flowers and sweets any day, everyday. What's so special about doing that on Valentine's Day? There should be so much more than merely giving something you can buy from a store. 

What is special and meaningful are the intangible things. They are those that you never forget somebody made the effort of doing for you despite anything. The effort behind a gift is what matters the most. That, to me, is a gift that trancends time; a gift that doesn't wilt nor melt in your mouth. It speaks so much more of a person's desire for someone to be happy, and isn't that, my friend, what love is all about?

A colleague told me yesterday, that no matter how small or insignificant something is, if someone gave or did it for you without you expecting it, it will definitely mean a whole lot more than the expensive ones.

Nevertheless, i hope all of the people i love and care about are happy and content with how they spent Valentine's Day. After all, the most important thing is to be happy. Life is too short to be anything but that.

More of Ubin Island

This is part two of my first Pulau Ubin entry. These are the rest of the photos I took with a D90. Everything shot from 25 December 2013.

View From The Top: Mount Talinis

Enter 2014, I seethed with a sense of adventure. I don't know where it came from but I hope more is coming. And I believe I started this year right, crashing out the first thing on my list: to climb a mountain.

I had never been an outdoor-kind of person. I like the outdoors and I enjoy travel but I never thought I would enjoy doing things like biking on rough trails, let alone climb a mountain. I promised myself I would do more firsts this year, learn a new hobby, go to a place I have never been to and meet new friends along the way. It's the best resolution I've had in years.

I took the opportunity to climb Negros Oriental's second highest peak, Mount Talinis at 1,903 m.a.s.l. I had little to no expectation as to everything I would be seeing or doing. I just knew I wanted to do it and that I knew I could.

Bathe In Golden Light

One good thing about having a sister when you are a portrait photography enthusiast is that you always have somebody to model for you, even if they don't want to. Lucky for me, my sister likes to have her pictures taken so it was easy to plan a portrait session and get things in order.

We took these photos in a beautiful garden in Sibulan, Negros Oriental fronting Jo's By The Sea. It's a huge place situated on a hill with a large sculpture of Mother Mary to welcome you near the entrance. I had done a couple of engagement sessions in this garden before. The sun shines from the west at golden hour giving you beautiful light that never disappoints. Every. Single. Time.

My CNY Vacation to Dumaguete

The past two weeks had been a great refresher to my seemingly (and slowly becoming) monotonous life in Singapore. It was a great way to kick off my year and to start putting some new plans into action.

Where did I go to, you ask? The one place every person wants to go to. Home.

I took the chance to return to Philippines as Chinese New Year in Singapore commenced. I had been looking forward to that trip for months. It had been six months since I last saw Dumaguete.

Coming home felt a bit weird at first but as soon as I saw our house, my family, my friends and everything familiar to me, things felt right again.

One of the highlights of my vacation would be my first mountain hiking trip, which was so kindly organized by a mountaineer friend. It was quite an adventure and a memorable one at that. It was packed with so many firsts. I was proud to have reached that high up from the ground, as I never was the outdoor type of person. I aimed to go up and back down without any help but due to some unexpected foot and leg pain, I had to humbly accept help.

I will tell you about that climb in a dedicated blog post but one thing I can tell you is it's true what they say: "it's the journey and not the destination." My only (slight but negligible) regret was how I missed a lot of opportunity to take photographs along the way. I was (and still am) a newbie mountaineer and I got too focused on every step I took in climbing up and down so as not to injure myself. In the end, my companions had more photos to take with them home to share with friends. It's actually not really a big deal because there are always more chances to go back. At least I still have vivid pictures of the fantastic views I saw from the top.

Overall, it wasn't bad for a first climb. Here is a scene I photographed while we stopped to rest along the way. I must tell you that photographs will never be able to give justice to the beautiful scenery up there.

The rest of my vacation consisted of painful trips up and down the stairs because of body pain caused by the hiking adventure, dinner and lunch dates with my few good friends as well as occasional walks along the quaint but disheveled streets of Dumaguete.