Singapore at Night

Later in this course there are some exercises around the use of cameras in artificial lighting conditions, one of which considers the city at night.  I am not there yet in the course, but whilst in Singapore I set out to try and capture the colour and energy of the city.  This is best visible at night when  the brightly lit buildings contrasts against the black tropical night sky.

My goal was to have some fun and to see what my new camera was capable of, the Olympus E-M5 coupled with the kit lens and an 8mm fisheye.  I knew the ISO capability would be good, but how good?  As I have discussed in a previous post I am trying to travel light these days to lose the weight of conventional DSLRs.  This also means not carrying a couple of Kg of tripod around, so being able to hand hold a camera in marginal light was going to be important to me, especially for travel photography.

So here is a little fun and diversion from the seriousness of documentary photography.  And, by the way, Singapore is as much fun to be in as it looks!

I started out in the Boat Quay area, a strip of small quayside restaurants backed by the skyscrapers of the business district:

I started in the twilight.  Key was to correctly balance the exposure in the photos, managing the sky versus the buildings.  Something I have learned is that it is important to deliberately underexpose the photographs, by 2-3 stops as the cameras own exposure meter will keep trying to lighten the background darkness.

Later in the evening I was back at Clarke Quay with its canopies and creative lighting.  The canopies cover the streets to permit outdoor seating in an area where daily thunderstorms are the norm.  The canopies are then illuminated with a changing light scheme.

Added to the overhead lighting the bars could also be quite creative in how they lit there seating.

Time to bring out the fisheye.  Really not a good choice for buildings, the curvature can be quite distracting and looks overly styalized, but at night the lens does something different.  It enables the whole scene to be captured - the angle of view diagonally is 180 degrees.  This creates a sense on inclusion within the image, but care needs to be taken to fill the frame

Indoor shots are a little trickier, but I think this works, or at least having been there it captures the sense of the place.

Back to the kit lens and a boat ride.  A real test for a camera and it's image stabilization - full dark and a moving platform from which to shoot

At the size I have presented these images they are OK, I think I could print to A4, but much larger and the noise will become apparant.  However, as a documentary tool when grabbing the image in low light is all that is available I am very happy with the camera and again it is so much fun to use.  Small, lightweight and discrete.

My last two shots from my Singapore trip are once gain with the 8mm fisheye, this time the view from the balcony in our hotel room.

We got very lucky as only a handful of rooms had a balcony.  The bridge leads to Clarke Quay.

A bit of fun and again an attempt to enjoy photography, but also to make a serious stab at capturing the essence of a place, combining (I hope) the eye of the photographer and the tourist.