Office Family Day

My office organized a wonderful family day on the 26th and 27th July 2008 recently. Held at Port Dickson. Time to hone my skills in picture taking art:)

Office mate pointing to a cargo vessel in the distance

A kid playing poke-a-hole-in-the-sand before he got bored and joined his sister later for a dip.

Da Playa. My mate doing his thing

A vacant hut on a vacant beach

Contrasting flower surrounded by its leaves

Merchant vessels moving off in the distance

The entrance to our apartments. It was nearly dark when I took this picture.

An old trishaw displayed prominently in front of the main stairs

View of the pool at night. Peace & quiet. Quite a different story during the day.

My favorite pic in this series.  Taken from the 9th floor using EF-S 55-250mm IS glass. The table could also be seen in the picture below.

View from the 9th floor using EF-S 18-55mm IS glass

Trying out the shutter settings to get the motion blur. Shutter speed at 1/20, EF-S 18-55 IS glass from 9th floor

Great contrasting colors! Chlorine helps here :)

Nice looking flower near the pool

My office mate attempting a backflip before landing in a pool

A girl offering a smile to me

View from a different perspective

This flower is from a type of weed that grows in our front yard. I normally won't give a second look at this flower and just cut it away. It's weed anyway. I can't find any interesting object to snap today and I just took a snap and it looked beautiful. A view from a different perspective.

Tridax Procumbens

Long and slender stem. How can it support itself? One flower? No leaves? :)

The flower from top view. It's about 1cm across.

Random Pics

Water droplets on a leaf from a parasite type plant

Cat relaxing on top of my car's roof

Some wild flowers growing from the front yard

An ant looking for sweet nectar on one of the petals

Yummy

Went out with some of my friends to Taman Tun on Saturday and had lunch with them. I ate Nasi Daging Merah and as I was ordering my drink, I saw this strange looking picture of a drink in the menu. I ordered it and wow, it looked much better than it was in the menu. On top were ice shavings, on the middle was orange fizzy drink mixed together with ice cream soda (i think)and at the bottom were some red jellies/jello. It was thirst quenching in the midday :)

Had these fresh water prawns for lunch today. I experimented with some ingredients; rosemary, Sarawak black pepper cooked in a pan with a little bit of olive oil. It was good :)

To wash down my lunch today, I made myself and my wife ice-blended chocolate drink I learned from my sister when I visited her in Switzerland back in May. Ice blended swiss chocolate drink with a hint of premium coffee and a hint of vanilla, topped off with generous amount of whipped light cream and sprinkled with swiss chocolate powder. Mmmmmmmm...

New Hobby

Photography.... it is kind of hard to understand at first with the f-numbers, apertures, shutter speed, etc and how they relate to each other. Day by day as I explore my new hobby, I found out that if you want to take great shots you will need 2 essential skills; technical skills to play around with the settings and creativity skills (you can get sharp images technically but if you don't have any creativity the shots will become oh so plain). Well, here's some shots of my roses, close up.

The picture I like the most. I will update as the rose blooms.

Taken in haste. Focus point a bit too near to the camera.  Wanted to focus at the center of the rose.