December 22, 2009

Photography Excursion @ Sekinchan Part 1

I apologize for my belated post. It's been a hectic couple of weeks for me.

As well as wrapping up some documentation for the project before the end of the year, I had to get some stuff ready for Christmas.

Anyway, some ex-colleagues and myself decided to embark on a trip to Sekinchan for a photography excursion. Now, my geography isn't so great but Sekinchan is northwest of KL, towards the border of the state of Perak.

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When we arrived at Sekinchan and spotted the lovely fields of green paddy fields, we didn't know what to do... We stopped the car at the side of the main road and had a short discussion to see where we can go. So, we drove into the fields and began our session.

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As we drove into the fields, we noticed that it was close to harvest time. Lots of other friends have mentioned that we may not be able to photograph the lovely fields during this time of year. But, luck was on our side - we had fantastic clear weather and GREEN fields!

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As I looked around, I noticed that there were no scarecrows (contrary to popular belief) but there were plenty of grey buildings dotted all around the fields for the swallows to nest. These buildings are where people can harvest birds nest which is great for Chinese herbal medicine and delicious as a dessert.

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We were lucky to still spot that some parts of the fields were harvested, which provided us great photography opportunities to capture the entire process.

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Rice is a grain and once the rice is extracted from its husk, it needs to be polished. So, what we have on our table is essentially processed rice.

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We drove deeper into the fields and managed to capture some very good shots of some people at work as well as a rare sight of the harvester coming around to harvest the rice. Can u imagine the amount of effort it took to harvest a large paddy field of rice?

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We were backing out of a small lane when we spotted the harvester from far away. Not wanting to miss this opportunity of watching the machine at work, we stopped to take lots of photos. This shot was taken through the tinted window of the car, which acted like a "filter".

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It was cool watching the machine work. In the distance, other parts of the paddy field were already harvested and they had done some back-burning to prepare the soil for another round of planting.

We also spent some time around the fields taking lots of different photos. I brought my 50mm lens and was quite happy with the effect. As for the exposure settings, since were under direct sunlight, we were using f/stop f/22. When we photographed our "models", we used a fill-in flash to illuminate the face. Thank you Digital Camera magazine for those tips!

Psstt... I'm not at liberty to post pictures of the "models"... So, it'll only be pictures of food and rice fields for now. LOL!

5 comments:

  1. nice nice pics...i love to take this kind of scenery ...

    wish to get my 17:200 f2.8 ...aihhh...hope to strike lottery first

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  2. So close to nature huh this post. Or to be more precise..so close to our staple food. :p

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  3. Hi via, tekkaus,

    vialentino - Landscape photography is always fun but hard to do. Got to watch out for barrel distortion for those superzooms.. ;-)

    f/2.8... fuyo... pricey...

    Tekkaus - Yeah, rice is so interesting. ;-)

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  4. Nice green paddy fields! So relaxing to the eye! : )

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  5. Hi foong,

    Have you been to Sekinchan? It's a nice place to go as well.

    ReplyDelete

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