OK, I guess from all the teasers you can guess that this jumbo post has something to do with the beach. Well yeah, on the 4th of March I was lucky enough to be asked to cover the NUS Arts & Social Science Beach Fiesta. Can imagine how excited I was coz this was my first ever photographic assignment. No, I wasn't paid la, but the experience I got from shooting at a beach is priceless! Not many people can get to do it without kena hoot by over-protective boyfriends. Anyway I had some regrets though. But more of that later.
Just a short intro first to what this fiesta is all about. It's organized by the NUS Arts & Social Sci faculty and comprises of two parts. A beach volleyball tournament and a beach pageant. Reached Sentosa around 10+ and immediately started shooting. Received an official tag which served as a talisman to protect me from being hoot. Most of my shootings alternated between my 70-300mm and 18-55mm. Didn't wanna use my 50mm coz I thought it might be too restrictive and I didn't need the f1.8 anyway. Sigh if only I had a 70-200VR f2.8 or 80-200 f2.8.
Initially I thought that I would post the pageant photos here but dunnoleh... is it ethical to post their photos here without consent? Some of them can send to FHM one leh. And also since I don't have the habit of watermarking my photos, other ppl might use it for ulterior purposes like kidnapping or stalking. Then also they are ordinary students, no celebrities. So they might want privacy? But haha... I think very few people read this blog anyway. Update: I decided to post some non-controversial pics. I don't want to break any rules.
People post AV girls and bikini babes in their blogs, I post bikini hunks. Sure win NUS Best Blog one. Wahaha...
Managed to capture some dramatic shots.
Some volleyball pics.
Even a pseudo-artistic attempt.
Before the pageant began, there was a performance by this duo from a local music cafe. Imagine having to sing with a less than acceptable sound system at 12noon. They were hot, literally!
Here they are, all the contestants in a row to face the firing squad.
After 3 rounds of grilling under the sun, finally here is the King and Queen.
Actually I have many more shots of the pageant but I am not going to post them here. Want to leave them to your imagination mah. Haha... If you are keen in any of the photos which you think exists, contact the event organizers for it. I've send them all of the good ones.
After the pageant was over, my job was more or less done. After bumming around a while more, me and CY headed home, but not without trying the luge ride first. Hehe...
One major lesson I learnt was to always be prepared for the worst. Halfway through the pageant, my 1GB SD card was nearly full. I couldn't spare the time to get my 128MB card which was a distance away so I had to resort to changing to lower quality JPG and deleting some of my earlier volleyball photos. And while the judges were determining the winners, I had to run several hundred meters away to download the files to my notebook which had only several hundred MBs left, so I had to delete some other stuff from my notebook. Lesson learnt: Will be getting another SD card before my next major shoot and if I bring a notebook along, it had bloody better have some space in it.
Another lesson is to always experiment with the camera settings. I almost never applied the depth-of-field effect in all my shots. I think what was going through my mind was that setting a smaller aperture will result in shaper images, hence my settings were f8 and f11 for most parts of the day. This is true of course, but then I am shooting portraits, so less sharp images are not really a problem and a nice bokeh will be better instead. Also by setting aperture priority to small apertures, there are times when the shutter speed became too slow and some of my shots were blurry due to handshake. Normally the speed is still high enough but as I was using a long lens, the shaking was amplified. Lesson learnt: Experiment with large apertures as well as fast shutter speeds.
Third lesson is not to be lazy. There was a total of maybe 24 volleyball teams but lazy me only shot a maximum of 6 teams in action only. Why? Because the rest were in the area which had no shade so I was lazy to shoot there. WTF! How can I be so lazy?? Now ended up I don't have that many volleyball photos to show and most of them are kinda repetitive anyway. Lesson learnt: Be more hardworking and to slog it out.
Final lesson is to improve my warming up skills. What I mean is the ability to build a rapport with strangers and get them to pose for me. I noticed alot of event photography involves taking posed photos of people, either groups of friends, couples, etc. But I only took very few of them. And because I haven't warmed up yet when I first arrived, I missed the chance to take photos of the pageant contestants as they were having their hair and makeup done. Lesson learnt: Be brave!
