I'm a Singapore event photographer; specializing in corporate events, weddings and birthday parties.

2011-06-12

Mandarin Gallery, Orchard Road


High-end shopping centre. Opposite The Heeren, near Cineleisure. There's no big entrance in the front, no fast food restaurants. Think that all malls are the same, with the same chain stores? Take a look inside. You'll find a lot of specialty shops that you've never seen before. 

I find it easiest to get in through the escalator in the front, and get out the same way. I've tried getting out through the ground floor and have gotten lost. 

  • D7000, 18-105mm f3.5-5.6
  • At 18mm, f4, ISO 800, 1/15 seconds
  • Manual exposure, center-weighted metering, auto white balance
  • Picasa: Crop, fill light.
At 18mm, the image stabilization of the kit lens allows you to handhold at 1/15 seconds, probably down to 1/8 too. But it doesn't help with movement in the scene. You can see that the pedestrians are a bit blurred out.

There are very bright and very dark areas in the photo. Difficult for the camera to know what to expose for. This is why manual exposure is best for night shots. Set manual exposure, maximum aperture, slowest shutter speed you can handhold safely, then increase ISO until the photo in the LCD playback looks okay. As a starting point for the exposure, meter off the floor. 

I would have preferred to shift the photo more to the left to get more of the trees into the photo, but there's a lot of clutter on the ground that would have been distracting.