Singapore Botanic Gardens in B&W

Last Sunday, the old man dropped me off at SBG, at the Bukit Timah exit.

I was to walk to the Nassim exit while he sang karaoke (haha, our old family tradition of weekend karaoke) and then he'd pick me up when I was done shooting.

Sweet! It was the perfect excuse to carry my monster of a TLR, the Mamiya C330, two lenses - 80mm f/2.8 and 55mm f/4.5, tripod, shutter release, and lots of 120mm film.

If you saw a person struggling with and dragging along a weird old school huge camera on a tripod with legs extended and poking everywhere, holding a huge spotmeter in the other hand, that's me!

Anyway, let's cut to the chase.

It was a pain in the ass to shoot flowers in B&W (cos flowers to me are colours) as well as do macro using a very-susceptible-to-parallax-error Twin Lens Reflex camera. But hey, I'm a masochist!

OKAY, moving on. Here's the first shot I did, at the entrance to the carpark.



Needless to say, many cars had to try and avoid an ass sticking up in the air at the roundabout, with a head stuck to the waist level finder of the camera, oblivious to cars. I'd love to upload this really LARGE so you can see how sharp and detailed it is (oh the beauty of using a tripod) but the blog layout is too small unfortunately. This might imply a change is coming. OKAY moving on...



I LOVE this plant. Crazy plant that resembles fireworks. I'd love to shoot it top down to get a circular formulation, but I have no idea how to attempt that with a crazy heavy monster TLR (:



The sense of satisfaction, seeing your huge negatives, so perfectly focused and sharp. I LOVE THE TRIPOD!! Even if it takes me more than 10 minutes just to take a shot sometimes. Okay, most of the time.

Cute little orchid wannabes:



This here's a cute ginger plant that I didn't fancy doing a macro on.



And this is the ONLY shot I didn't like from all three rolls I shot:



I suppose I should have used a narrower DOF to throw the background out of focus... ah well, at least I got the water smooth and silky.



Did I mention how much fun it is to dodge and burn in B&W too? I LOVE the darkroom. But when it is not at hand, digital darkroom's fine too (: Burning the highlights for the photo above sucked though, for the scanner was unable to capture enough details. Will shall have to see what the real darkroom produces (:







Ahh, flare, reminiscent of fungus on a lens ):

And this is the last shot from my first roll, Ilford FP4, at SBG, from the Ginger Path.



Its a prelude to things to come! (:

Till part 2 of SBG.