Ranan Samanya Photography
fashion runways, portraits & personal branding, environment, and documentary photography
Chilli crab leftover
Yesterday I had a lunch feast. It was our Company’s doctor last day, and he just got his research proposal acceptance in Singapore, so he treated us in one of the few authentic seafood in northern Bintan, Waeju. Its signature dish is chilli crab, but I couldn’t get a nice frame of the plate (and after all, the presentation of the plate was not attractive).
So I focused on my stomach first, and when all dishes were empty and our stomach were full I arranged the leftovers. I added some sea-snail shells to cover the dull colour of the vinyl table cloth, and started framing. At first I thought the out-of-focus green plastic plate at the background was a distraction, so I moved down and shot low-angle with the window as the backdrop. Later during review I found the green plastic plate not that distractive, as a matter of fact it looked as if complementing the main object.
Next time I think I’ll rinse all the shells first to get a cleaner image. What do you think?
Hot from the kitchen, delicious but not presentable.
Colours of our hearts
What are the colours of our hearts? We may find the answer by looking around us. Here are two colours that you may like.
I found the red leaf on the road in front of my office. Well in fact the second one is also from a tree in front of my office. The afternoon sun was again unusually luke-warm for a few minutes, creating a transparent effect enough to highlight the bone structure and enhance the green colour.
All were taken using my HTC Legend handphone camera. I increased the saturation to the maximum (which is 2 levels up).
Blackforest for fun – the setup
Remember yesterday’s pictures of that yummy blackforest? They were all done in my company’s unit living room, which is not much of a living room any more since I am the only one living in this 2-bedroom unit. The good thing about food photography is that we don’t need a big studio set-up. As you can see, I just piled everything on my table to one side, leaving a small empty space at the corner where I put the cake. A few white sheet of papers completed the background. They were not even blank papers, but the use of a 70-200mm lens removed even the stapler from the frames!
The tripod used is a 20 years old Cullman. The small ballhead with the quick-release camera plate is not the best combination for a long lens, and it was a bi tricky to compose. But that’s all I have, so I will just have to live with it for the time being.
I should also have used my old Canon Speedlite 430EZ flash bouncing off the ceiling to produce better and evenly distributed white balance, but again, there was no batteries inside nor in my stock, hence the living room’s circular florescent lamp 2.5m above was the only light source.
Blackforest for fun
Two days ago I was given a huge blackforest cake. While enjoying a big piece of it, I thought, let’s do an experiment. So I set-up my camera, and started to take a few shots. All were taken with the available florescent light, hence I set my white balance to Tungsten. All frames were pushed up either 1 or 2 stops. I used Manual focus so I can specifically focus on one tiny spot (especially on the corners), as I wanted to emphasize on the white icing sugar on top of the superlicious chocolate chips, while at the same time maintaining part of the sweet and juicy strawberries to be sharp. Tripod mounted with 10 seconds shutter delay to reduce the terrible camera shake.
Mangrove Jetty at the end of the day
It was not planned. I didn’t have my equipment with me. The day was almost over; the sky was a near perfect blue, and the sun was setting in, its ray was soft and gave a warm yellow tone to the wooden mangrove jetty. So I took out my HTC Legend handphone running Android 2.2 Froyo. It has a 5MP autofocus camera, with adjustable focusing point and different metering modes (I left it to the default center area mode). I increased the contrast and saturation one level each, decreased the brightness also by one level, increased the sharpness to the highest (which is two levels) and took some snapshots. They didn’t appear that bad.
Here’s another example showing that advanced camera is not the only deciding factor of our photo quality, after my initial post on it here. Happy hunting!
High resolution images below:
Midnight walk – Marina Bay Sands
A quick note to share with you all one frame from a midnight walk in Marina Bay area, Singapore, last weekend. In the foreground is the DNA bridge, and on the far right is the casino-expo-shopping mall. I pushed down the meter by 1²⁄3 stop to reduce the lights. Tripod mounted. The camera’s electronic level was used.
More stories along the way sometime next week.
Fighting Cock – Ha Long
Here’s a failed shot taken under an unfriendly direct sun. The fighting cock (Gà Chọi) are a group of two islets in Halong bay that according to the Vietnamese looks like two fighting cocks. Well some though that they look more like kissing cocks!
In this situation I should have cropped in as much as possible, filled the entire frame with the islets instead of leaving room for the shiny sea and bright background. When I realized my mistake, the cruise had moved further and I lost the scene. Lesson learnt.
Panoramas – Ha Long
Time for panoramas. Due to the many interesting and unique objects scattered in Ha Long bay, it is very nice to have panorama images. These are pictures stitched together from several frames. All were shot with a handheld Canon EOS 7D using EF 24-105 f/4.0L IS USM at 24mm. You need to open the high resolution images to see more details.
With ISO 400 and f/13.0, I was able to do a quick shooting while the cruise was moving. The exposure was all above 1/100sec. Shades of dark blue was the artefact from CPL filter, which should be easy to correct digitally, but I prefer to leave it this way.
Still in ISO 400 and an aperture of f/11.0, 5 frames were used to make this image. It was in the morning just before breakfast. Our cruise was still anchored off Cat Ba island (at the back). Two other cruises were also anchored here for the evening before. Because CPL filter is only optimal at 90 degrees from the sun, the three rightmost frames were not as polarised as the other two, resulting in a brighter colour. Similar with the first one, this should be easily corrected digitally, but this time I was too lazy to do it.
Ranan Samanya Photography 
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