Christmas Tree, Raffles City

Raffles City is quite consistent: every year they have a Christmas tree at the street corner. The tree is  different, but it's always a tree.

I don't usually choose unusual angles when taking photos. Seems to draw attention to the photographer's technique instead of the subject. But in this case a normal street-level view didn't look good. It was plain and boring.

This upwards angle looked good, but I also wanted the Raffles City sign in. Both to balance the photo and to document the location of the tree. Had to walk around a bit to get the right position.

Nikon D7000, 18-105mm f3.5-5.6
At 25mm, f4, ISO 800, 1/15 seconds
Manual exposure, center-weighted metering, incandescent white balance
Picasa: Auto contrast, fill light

For night shots like this, you usually set the aperture wide open, shutter speed to as low as you can safely handhold, then increase the ISO until the exposure looks good on the LCD playback.

Christmas Decorations, Mandarin Gallery

The red lanterns are the Christmas decorations. They are LED lights that change color. I waited for the colors to cycle through one complete sequence, and decided that red was the best. I also took a few "safety" shots of the other colors just in case.

This side of Orchard Road (Ngee Ann City, etc.) is more fun to walk along (and take photos) because the pedestrian walkway is wider, compared to the other (Lucky Plaza, etc.) side. 

• Nikon D7000, 18-105mm f3.5-5.6
• At 18mm, f4, ISO 400, 1/60 seconds
• Manual exposure, center-weighted metering, sunlight (neutral) white balance
• Picasa: Auto contrast, fill light, straighten, crop

The critical element in the photo is the red lanterns. So I exposed the photo for them, made them glow but not so much that the color was washed out.

This made the floor unattractively dark, so I increased the fill light later with Picasa on my PC. Fill light works great most of the time because it adjusts the mid brightness areas, but doesn't affect the very dark or very bright areas much; unlike the brightness or contrast adjustment in simpler photo editors.

Tangs Christmas Decoration

The sign is about 10 to 20 feet high and is on the front of the Tangs building.

It's good to see a bible quote used as a Christmas decoration. I'm not religious but I'm all for not losing sight of where Christmas comes from (yes I know, Christmas is not really from the bible, but still). 

The businessman who started Tangs was a staunch Christian. Tangs was well known for being one of the few shopping centres that did not open on Sunday. The policy was changed after his children took over the running of the business. 

• Nikon D7000, 18-105mm f3.5-5.6
• At 38mm, f5.6, ISO 100, 1/4 seconds
• Manual exposure, center-weighted metering, incandescent white balance
• Picasa: Straighten, crop, warmify

Photo was taken with the camera on a tripod. With so much light, I could have boosted the ISO to 400, shutter speed to 1/15 seconds, and taken the photo handheld.

I set the color balance to incandescent because without it, the photo came out a stange-looking dark orange. But that corrected the color too much, made it colorless, so I used Picasa's warmify function to add back in some yellow.