Plaza Singapura Christmas Tree 2012

This is the first Christmas since the major renovation that was completed this year. You can see the new facade of Plaza Singapura in the background. Their Christmas tree is usually placed further to the right, but there is now a plastic pop art sculpture in that location. 

• Nikon D600, 28-300mm f3.5-5.6
• At 52mm, f4.5, ISO 1600, 1/15 seconds
• Manual exposure, center-weighted metering, auto white balance
• Picasa: No editing

It's good to get a sign or something showing the name of the place, into the photo. It's not just for informational purposes. The sign often adds an interesting visual element to the photo.

Take a few minutes and walk around a bit, look at the Christmas tree (or fountain or statue or whatever) from a few different angles and distances. You get better photos, enjoy your photography more, and train your observational skills.  

Orchard Road Christmas Light Up 2012

The traditional Christmas decorations along Orchard Road. This year's lights are red, last year's were blue. Maybe next year's will be green.

I don't know what the bird is. Maybe a partridge (in a pear tree), turtle dove or French hen.

Photo of the 2011 Light up is at
http://sgsnaps.blogspot.sg/2011/11/orchard-road-christmas-light-up.html

• Nikon D600, 28-300mm f3.5-5.6
• At 300mm, f5.6, ISO 3200, 1/60 seconds
• Manual exposure, center-weighted metering, auto white balance
• Picasa: Straighten

Aside from the exposure (use manual exposure, check the LCD) and focal length (zoom in to collapse the lights together), the thing to watch out for is the cars on the road. Chances are that if you take one photo at random, the cars will look messy and will be distracting to the viewer. Take a few photos until you get one where the cars are neatly lined up and don't draw attention to themselves.

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.

Orchard Road Christmas Light-up 2011

The spiral decorations remind me of Tim Burton's movie, The Nightmare before Christmas.

I haven't bothered with photographing the Orchard Road light-up for years. Seemed too touristy and tacky. But I happened to be at Central and their Christmas display was pretty cool (see previous photo), so I thought I'd give the whole thing another go.

I think Singaporeans have gotten tired of images of Santa and reindeer too. Decorations are more abstract this year, which seems less tacky to me. 

The 2012 Light Up is at
http://sgsnaps.blogspot.sg/2012/12/orchard-road-christmas-light-up-2012.html

• Nikon D7000, 18-105mm f3.5-5.6
• At 105mm, f5.6, ISO 800, 1/60 seconds
• Manual exposure, center-weighted metering, sunny (neutral) white balance
• Picasa: Straighten

For most night scenes, setting incandescent (tungsten) white balance works best. It's like putting a blue filter over the lens, to counteract the too-yellow light in most night scenes.

The lights here are blue and are bright enough to neutralize a lot of the yellow light (from the sodium streetlights). I tried setting incandescent white balance and the photo looked artificially blue.

For this kind of photo, you want to collapse the overhead lights together to get a solid mass of them. This means zooming in with a telephoto focal length. Natural reaction is to place the cars in the center of the photo. You need to force yourself to tilt the camera up, so that you don't get a lot of boring empty road in the foreground of the photo.

Didn't need 1/60 seconds. Could have gone down to 1/30 seconds and ISO 400 (maybe blurred the cars a bit, but less ISO noise), but this is fine anyway.

Exposure is done by checking the LCD playback. You want to have some light from the cars and road, but without over-exposing the lights until they lose their color. In the old film days I would have metered off the road.

Christmas Display, Central (Clarke Quay)

No Santa or tree. One of the classier Christmas decorations in town. Central is the name of a shopping center at the start of Clarke Quay. 

• Nikon D7000, 18-105mm f3.5-5.6
• At 18mm, f8, ISO 100, 1/45 seconds
• Aperture priority, center-weighted metering
• Picasa: Auto contrast

Technically simple shot. Even at ISO 100 there was enough light to stop down to f8 for depth of field and image quality (many lenses are sharpest at around f5.6 to f8).