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.