Disastrous Photo Outing

note to self: next time, before going for seaside photography, check the tide condition first. else, it'll end up like today...

was heading for the jetty at teluk kumbar for some photo-taking, but what greeted me was muddy dirt-brown sea shore with the water line far beyond the end of the jetty. plus, the sky was overcast with grey clouds... not exactly a picture-perfect day i'd say.

on the way back, passing near the airport at bayan lepas, i saw a plane approaching from far away. and i stopped at the roadside, wound down the window, zoom to max telephoto, and took a shot of the plane preparing to land...

doesn't seem like a local airline's plane (mostly boeing or airbus) based on the engine locations. too bad planes took off towards the north side, while i was at the south side of the airport. loitered around for a while, but saw only a few more planes taking off and none landing, so i left soon after...

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a lesson learnt today: never put your cam on the front seat of the car unsecured. driving in penang, you won't know when you may need to perform emergency braking - and when you do, the cam will be flung down from the seat. and that's exactly what happened, no thanks to the idiotic PFN1951 Proton Wira... common sense would've tell any driver to wait for a car less than 3m away, travelling at 70-80kph to pass first before turning out into the main road, but this obasan couldn't care less...

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from south end of the island, i head to the north end. gurney plaza, to be exact - and a supposedly photo-shooting trip became a shopping trip instead :p... note to self: remember to snap a pic of your food before your mouth snap 'em...

as i was nearby, and not wanting to join the after-office rush hour, i made an unplanned stopover at the botanical garden. the last time i came here was around 9 years old, during a vacation to the peninsular... and the first thing that struck me is how few 'cannon-balls' there are on the 'cannon-ball' trees. i remember taking a picture with one of these trees during my childhood trip here, and there were a lot of 'cannon-balls' on the trees then.

saw a signboard pointing to a lily pond - went there, and what greeted me is a small, neglected pond with hardly any lily leaves floating on the water, let alone lily flowers. wtf...

and i realised that i don't have the knack for photographing small insects up-close. stood motionless and waited for a few pretty butterflies to stay still, yet after a few minutes, they're still fluttering around like nobody's business. i give up...

moving around, taking close-up photos of various flowers, it doesn't took me long to realise the limitation of a compact camera in this kind of situation: the depth-of-field of a compact is way too large for me to be able to take photos with properly blurred backgrounds, even at the largest aperture. and without blurred backgrounds, close-up images of flowers fall flat as the flowers blend into the background instead of standing out. sigh... times like this make me wish for a DSLR...

and i noticed that i get better results by using the far end of the telephoto zoom rather than relying on the macro mode in taking close-up photos, as the background blurs out more. hmm... and 6x optical zoom is just never enough, especially when trying to take spy-shots of a leng lui :p - not that i took any .