Sungei Buloh Portraits

It was a bounty of photos at Sg Buloh yesterday (9 Mar). I took over 400 shots over 3 hours and it wasn't even a day of fine weather. It was drizzly and cloudy most of the time, and what I saw was mostly spotted by Lin's cousins, Cath and Maggy. I lugged my heavy tripod all the way but never used it because we were walking all the time and most of the shots required constant change of angles. The problem is compounded by the fact that the 80-200mm lens has no macro capabilities, i.e. the closest you can get to the subject is 1.5m away. A Canon user pointed a rare butterfly to me and saw I had to move way back to take it and he said, "you should get a macro lens... " He meant well and my hats off to Canon for cornering the nature photography market. Lots of photographers on the bridge with cameras mounted on tripods were Canon users, with lens barrel twice the length of mine. Makes a man feel inadequate. So I had to rely on the old tricks: steady hands, no breathing, keep the nose away from the camera when I depress the shutter, and use flash or window ledge where possible. To compensate for the high ISO, I set the image quality to 12 mpixels, which caused each image to be 3.5MB at "medium" size (at large size, each image would've been 6.0MB). I wanted to test what my Nikon baby can do. As it turns out, it was OK. Still long way off from what the Canon pros can do, but enough to make me happy for a day. Cropped and subjected to highest possible compression, these shots were still 400-500kB, so I had to compress some of them twice to post them here... Btw, the 3rd photo shows the Golden Web Spider. The female is the giant in the centre of the photo. The male? It's that tiny speck at the left. It's kinda like the relationship between Lin and I at home...

Chup