Today is the 29th of February. First of all, happy birthday to all the leap day babies out there The universe is often fulled with surprises and wonders that we can never finish exploring. To me, the 29th of February or the leap day, is one of the wonders that inspired me.

The 29th of February only occurs every four years and only in the years that are divisible by four but with the exception of century years such as 1900. 365 days and 6 hours is the time counted for a complete revolution round the sun. Therefore, in every four years time, an extra twenty-four hours have accumulated. And in order to keep the count coordinated with the sun’s apparent position, an extra day is added to the calendar.

February is already a unique month of the year itself even without the leap day because it has only got 28 days. With the leap day, I feel that February is even more special every four years.

Well, I’ve got no pictures on my post today but I hope that you’ll enjoy the rest of your day because the leap day only comes every four years.

This is how SiewPeng used the Crystal Ball. One is for Colin, and one is for SiewPeng.

Instead of using the crytal ball as a medium for plants, it can be used to make something that is decorative.

I have shown you the crystal soil in purple colour before, now I am going to show you the Tiger Tail Plants in yellow crystal soil. Please tell me which one you think looks better. Or do you think that they look nicer if you put the plants with yellow and purple crystal soil next to each other?

Yellow-purple is a set of colours that have 100% colour contrast with each other, just like Red-Green and Orange-Blue.

I still remember one of my art lessons in secondary school. We first learned to identify 3 basic colour (Red, Yellow, and Blue) and the product of their mixture (green, purple, and orange) using watercolour, next we have to know different sets of contrast colours. I used a method to memorize which colour is contrast with the other. “From the 3 basic colours, each of them is contrast with the mixture of another 2 bacis colours.” - this is the rule that I memorized. For example, red colour will contrast with the mixture of yellow and blue, which is green. It is even easier by looking at the colour chart. If you use watercolour to mix up a set of contrast colour, you actually mix up 3 basic colours, which will produce grey or black colour.

Do you know where did I get the tall container from? It is the container of Nescafé.

Close-up view of the plant in Yellow Crystal Soil.

Different colours of the crystal soil may give us different feeling. One of the most important factor is the container must be transparent.

More different colour of crystal soil is coming soon. I have prepared the red colour crystal soil.

I have printed these photos in the 8R size. Same as the previous post, they are 10 years old as well. All these flowers are from my garden.

The first picture above is the flower of a type of “LuoDiShengGen” (in Chinese) or Kalanchoe pinnata (scientific name). This plants can be propogated using its leaves, because the root will grow from its leave as what it means in its Chinese name.

I took the pot from the garden into the living room and swithed off all the lights before I took this photo to produce the dark background. And I use the touch light as the light source and to control the angle of the light.

I’m not sure about this flower’s scientific name, but in Chinese we called it “HuoQiuHua”, it means “fire ball flower”. Same as the above picture, the light source is from the touch light to produce the controlled black background. The light from the touch light is not perfect, and it has produced the reddish colour effect in this photo.

This rose was taken outdoor.

How nice if the rose can stay alive forever and produce nice smell forever. But as we all know it’s not possible, we can only keep its image using photo, and remember its fragrance using our imagination. And we may also wait for the new flowers to bloom after the fragrance of the old one’s has gone, its colour has faded, and the whole thing has dried.

One of our dream (SiewPeng and Colin’s dream) is to have a garden that is full of roses and jasmine, and we can smell the nice fragrant of the flowers everywhere in the garden throughout the year. With this idea, we hope that before the old flowers have gone, the new ones must begin to bloom, in order to make sure that the cycle continues.

Actually we may notice that many things in our life is in the state of continuaty but actually it is appearing and disappearing, come and go… I have just heard a word from Master JingKong today that says, our happiness is not the real happiness, it is only a condition where the sadness has temporary stopped. Just like we feel full is because we are temporary not hungry but not actually full… …

I was using the Canon EOS 500 to capture this picture. The grasshopper stayed still to let me take its pictures. It was easier than I expected. Due to I was using a film camera at that time, I did not take many photographs because of the limited budget.

I have attended a photography seminar, and I have asked a question, if the depth of field is too narrow especially when taking close-up photo, how should I focus on the subject. The answer I have got was - “Focus on the subject’s eyes“, let the other parts a bit blur is OK. This picture is not perfect actually because I focused on the grasshopper’s body instead of the eyes. In this case some camera can solve the focusing problem with inteligent faces/eyes detection otherwise you will have to use manual focus or base on the focus indicator.

This is the filter I have added onto the my 35-80mm lense. It’s 10x high power Macro Close Up Filter. It’s actually similar to magnifying glass, but with special coating on the lense surface.

Besides the Macro Close Up Filter, I also have a Polarizing (PL) Filter. It’s used for reducing reflexion on surface such as water. I also have a skylight filter, 0.7x teleconverter. All of them can be attached to the lense to produce different types of effects in photography. This is the advantages of using a SLR. It extremely flexible to take all kind of pictures.

But I have got another reason, why I will not get a D-SLR at this moment. It’s not convenient to bring all the devices and accesories everywhere, especially for the event photography, or travel photography. And unless the photo that I’m going to take allow me to take my time to change lense, install filters, swith to the appropriate mode and focus on the subject slowly, then I will consider to use D-SLR. At this moment, I will stick to high power Zoom Prosumer (Professional Consumer) digital camera.

10 years ago I have taken these pictures of grasshoppers; 10 years later Siew Peng also takes the picture of grasshoppers. Hey, if you have missed Luki The Locust and The Grasshopper before this, do give them a click and compare the photographs taken with those posted on the blog today.

This is a red spider on a lime leave.

You may noticed that the contrast of these photos here are not sharp, it’s because these are scanned photo, and the photo is 10 year old and a bit wrinkled. It cannot be placed smoothly and properly on the scanner. Although I cannot retain their quality, these photos will become something that will be kept as a memory, reminding me that I have taken something like this in 1996-2000.