Photos and the Reasons Why

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Taken on February 26, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 1/5000 sec
Aperture: f/4.8
Focal Length: 60 mm
ISO Speed: 500

It’s tough to make a bird look majestic when it has clipped wings. It can’t be proud and powerful when it’s so obviously missing something, and in such an unnatural fashion. Indeed, a photo of a kite that had lost some feathers in a fight would be quite interesting.

I’m just happy that it’s a sharp, well exposed photo. The framing isn’t too terrible either. That pre-sunset sky is pretty great with just the slightest hint of pink in the sky. Alas, there isn’t much detail in the kite, and the clipped wings scream “this is unnatural and wrong.”

It was taken while some employees were firing bits of meat into the air with a slingshot which the kits swooped after. It was tough to catch them with a background other than the trees, and when they were showing a nice profile. This is probably about as difficult as a shot can get while at the zoo, so having the basics right makes me happy.

With this, I am pretty close to running out of all interesting Singapore photos. I have taken my camera on a couple of experimental photo-trips, but I’ve yet to achieve anything I really liked. I’ll get something new, eventually. At the worst, I’ll be traveling for a whole week in mid-april, where I’m certain to get better photos. I may end up diving more into my archive until then.

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Taken on February 26, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 1600

Taking pictures of birds at these shows is always difficult because they have clipped wings and leashes to keep them from flying away. This bird appears to have some stray feathers that I doubt you’d see on a healthy wild hawk. I don’t know what it means in the birds, but it probably isn’t healthy.

I think it works for this photo since the strain the bird appears to be under is explained by the out of character elements. This photo reminds me a lot of the tiger about to jump through a hoop photo that I’ll post on Sunday. I imagine I’m going to post some images over the next few days as I explore my thoughts on animal abuse in zoos and whether or not animals are here for our entertainment.

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Taken on February 26, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/500)
Aperture: f/5.3
Focal Length: 105 mm
ISO Speed: 500

This photo invokes some pretty severe unhappy feelings in me. It was towards the end of the day in Singapore. I had been walking and sweating all day, and I was tired and hungry. I was feeling rather lonely and short tempered.

When I took this shot, I was really happy how it turned out, especially with the kids in the background. I figured I would offer the photo to the parents them with no strings attached, just so the photo would have some purpose. More importantly, I would have some purpose.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of the parents treated me like a hustler and refused to even speak to me, dismissing me with a wave. I’m unsure how I would have reacted, you definitely build up a lot of mistrust of people offering you things here. I don’t exactly fit the profile of the normal huckster, and I guess I figured my honesty would shine through. Alas, I was left rejected with my photo.

I felt like not just my offer was rejected, but my purpose. I could have felt great for doing a kind thing, instead I felt terrible for being unwanted.

Still, it’s a fun photo with a lot of vectors going in every which way, all of them interesting to follow. They say of action and sports photography that you want to show the player, the ball, and the goal. In this case the ball is the meat, the player is the guy holding the meat, and the bird is the goal. You can tell he is trying to keep the meat from the bird and that his expression, along with that of the audience, tells you that the bird missed it.

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Taken on February 26, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 1000

This photo was taken, once again, in the Singapore bird park. A group of lovebirds were building a nest inside a birdhouse up on a tree. I stood and watched them for a while, taking an occasional picture. The bird park has a sign referring to them as black masked love birds, but they are also referred to as yellow collared or just masked lovebirds.

Lovebirds are an interesting subject with their eyes. They have the white feathers around the eyes giving them the appearance of having enormous whites, when the eyes themselves are entirely black. It produces a slight Uncanny Valley response. That is, the birds appear to have eyes very close to what you would expect, but it’s not quite right, so you have a natural revulsion of a sort.

In any case, it’s a fun if slightly blurry shot of four birds looking quite chummy while they build a nest together. The one bird with the straw in it’s beak is essential for the setup to work.

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Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.006 sec (1/160)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 1000

This photo is not nearly as intriguing as yesterday’s photo, and I’m posting it next to explain some of the reasons why I liked the staring starling.

This photo has a few advantages. First, It’s more dynamic. The motion from the birds wings blur a bit and provide a bit of forgiveness for the general softness of the photo. The branch the bird is standing on is a nice solid line along the bottom of the photo, a line that is nicely echoed by his beak.

His eye isn’t looking at us, but it’s still white with a black pupil, so we can follow it and identify with it. Evolutionary biology teaches us that one of the essential factors in human biology are the whites of our eyes. In fact, we are better able to identify with other humans because we can identify what we are looking at. This New York Times article explains it a bit better.

“An interesting bodily reflection of humans’ shared intentionality is the sclera, or whites, of the eyes. All 200 or so species of primates have dark eyes and a barely visible sclera. All, that is, except humans, whose sclera is three times as large, a feature that makes it much easier to follow the direction of someone else’s gaze. Chimps will follow a person’s gaze, but by looking at his head, even if his eyes are closed. Babies follow a person’s eyes, even if the experimenter keeps his head still.

Advertising what one is looking at could be a risk. Dr. Tomasello argues that the behavior evolved “in cooperative social groups in which monitoring one another’s focus was to everyone’s benefit in completing joint tasks.”

This could have happened at some point early in human evolution, when in order to survive, people were forced to cooperate in hunting game or gathering fruit. The path to obligatory cooperation — one that other primates did not take — led to social rules and their enforcement, to human altruism and to language.”

I’ll post a photo of a monkey tomorrow to explain why I think it’s a challenge for a photo of a primate to be as effective as a photo of an animal with white whites.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I don’t think this is a very good photo. First, its blurry. It’s a 1/160th of a second exposure, so the blurryness is not from camera vibration, but rather because it’s out of focus. I had autofocus on, so I just didn’t give the camera quite enough time to find it’s focus. Either that or it was too dark.

The real problem with the photo, though, is that branch in the background. The unfocused part of the photo, referred to as the bokeh, is often as important as the in focus section. Some skilled photographers make the bokeh itself the subject, usually when there are interesting lights, reflections, or distortions. In this case the bokeh is distracting. The line it traces right past the birds beak pulls you away from the eyes and runs you right out of the photo. You can’t look at the bird without wanting to look above or below the photo so the whole point is lost.

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Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.025 sec (1/40)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 1000

This is a haunting photo. I left it up on my screen in full screen editing mode and left to get dinner. I came back into the room and the starling was staring at me, a very chilling moment.

The bird is a Superb Starling, taken in the same African Aviary as the last photo. This guy was just standing around doing whatever it is that starlings do when they aren’t currently eating. I was able to get extremely close to him. This photo is, unlike nearly everything else I will post, completely uncropped.

There are a few reasons why I think this photo is so haunting. First, it helps that the bird is directly staring at the lens with those intense eyes. It’s helpful that adult starlings have milky white eyes around black pupils. His beak points almost directly at the camera. You can’t avoid his eyes, but it’s more than just the bird that causes that.

Part of it is the layout of the photo. His eyes sit right at the upper right hand corner of thirds. That is, if you were to draw a line a third of the way down the image and another a third of the way across from the right, those lines would intersect right on his eye. The thirds are natural points of focus and the other three thirds corners sit on blurry areas, so you’re forced to look at those eyes.

The photo also has a very complementary vector analysis. The line through the bird’s body and out it’s tail moves in roughly the same direction as the line down the hand rail. The hand rail stops halfway down the tail, but the slightly out of focus terminates the line in a pleasing way that brings you back up the bird into the eyes.

More importantly than that, however, the top line of the hand rail runs directly into the eye, then hides neatly behind the bird just below his back. That line is quite important. Two of the lightest sections of the photo are in the bottom right hand corner. The half-moon of colored feathers on the starling’s breast and the near side of the railing merge together in a nice shiny way. Incidentally, the half-moon points right up at the eyes, a nice vector. That is to say, if you start at the bottom edge of the railing, your eyes will trace along it, across the half moon, and right up at the eyes. You can’t avoid them.

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Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/640)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 1000

Returning to Singapore here, this photo was taken while at the Singapore Jurong Bird Park. I’d like to say I knew what the birds are, but I can’t figure it out. I took pictures of the signs explaining the birds and I thought these were Bee Eaters, but it turns out I was wrong. It was inside the African Walk in Aviary, so I suppose they are birds native to Africa. Other than the color, that’s all I got.

In any case, these birds were landing on a stranger’s hand because she was holding a small cup of grubs like the one you can see about to be swallowed. Birds would land, get chased off by the next bird, land, get chased off by the next, etc.

I fed some birds myself, holding the camera in my off hand attempting to take pictures. I misjudged the distance and came out with a bunch of very blurry blobs landing on my hand.

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Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.02 sec (1/50)
Aperture: f/11.0
Focal Length: 80 mm
ISO Speed: 200

I don’t know if I can portray singapore more accurately than this one photo. The city was practically covered in various signs telling you not to do things. Don’t sit on the railing, Don’t lean over the railing, don’t stand on the bench, don’t walk on the grass, don’t smoke here. They usually also informed you that this advice was either for your own safety or for the consideration of others, just so you know that your nanny state was doing it all for a reason.

All of the policing does lead to a clean and orderly city, but visiting here almost felt like cheating. It was just too easy. Better in the long run, probably, for leaning over railings is dangerous and smoking outside doors is not considerate. I’m sure there will come a time when Singapore is the place for me. For now, I’m still enjoying the excitement of the fare more unpredictable Thailand.

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No EXIF data for this photo, it is HDR’d from 9 exposures in order to keep the buildings, clouds, and items in the room visibly exposed.

I feel like this photo is a representation of some personal hubris. I feel like the taking this trip, staying in this hotel was trying to prove to myself that this is real, this is who I am. It was to prove to myself that I belong in this part of the world. Not only The East, Asia, Thailand, but in five star hotels on resort islands.

I still have trouble figuring out what I should be doing with myself. If I deserve this. If I’ve earned this. It’s so hard to tell. Under a very slightly different set of circumstances, I could be doing nothing even slightly interesting. Two years ago, I was living on a friend’s floor. I had $50 to my name.

Last weekend I slept in a 5 star hotel in Singapore. In this picture you can see the fresh orchids, a personal letter describing the benefits afforded to me, and the pillow menu. The Financial District is off in the distance and you can see the edge of Singapore’s Theatre/Operahouse down on the waterfront. I keep referencing the quality of the hotel, but I suppose I shouldn’t get too far ahead of myself, the pillow menu only had 16 options. It is, of course, just the entry into the high end hotel market, but it’s definitely enough for me at the moment.

Before I left on this little trip, I had trouble explaining to people why it was so stressful to me. Why I was so worried about it. I flew to China a couple months ago and was barely worried, but that was different. That was for work. I had to go and do a job. I wasn’t being extravagant, I was being a businessman.

The Singapore trip was for pleasure. It was full on out and out ego fulfilling self enjoyment. I didn’t have to do it and I wasn’t sure if I should. I wasn’t sure if I deserved it. I don’t know if I can really describe the doubt I had about visiting Singapore. I’m not sure where it comes from.

I’m fairly certain that this photo will be important to me later in life. It says a lot about who I am right now and I think I’ve put a lot of emotion into it, despite it being a very stark emotionless photo of it’s own right.

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Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 1/3200 sec
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 135 mm
ISO Speed: 500

This is the first of several photos which will be posted here that were taken at Jurong Bird park. The Bird Park is the world’s largest bird zoo containing the worlds largest aviary with the world’s largest man made waterfall and the world’s biggest this and the world’s most that. It was quite impressive and I spent most of the day taking pictures. I took several which I’m quite happy with and it will take me some time to pare them all down.

This shot was taken during the “Birds and Buddies” show which was a somewhat interesting show with crazy high production values. They used lots of well recorded appropriate music from to set the mood and the MC was both entertaining and lively. The script was well written and the tricks the animals performed were fun and not depressing.

In this case, three people stood up in the audience and held out hoops for the parrots to fly through. I took this shot just as the parrot came through the hoop. The gentleman who is holding the hoop has a very unsure look on his face. It’s as if he doesn’t trust the parrot. The parrot, on the other hand, thinks the whole thing is a grand old joke with a very jovial expression.

I’m saying parrot, and that is technically correct. More specifically the bird is a Scarlet Macaw, a bird native to the tropics of South America.