Padang Serai paddy field

When I’m required to wake up on Saturdays earlier then I hafta wake up for work on weekdays, it doesn’t exactly excite me. But heck, the meeting location was not in the office so it was worth a try. Arrived sleepy-eyed with a bunch of funny fellas and proceeded to the paddy field.

When we arrived, the weather was really quite superb at 7.30-ish in the morning, the so-called magic light. Wasn’t that hot either. Suddenly waking up before the chickens did sounded like a good idea. Nice. Start shooting!

The paddy itself was still quite young and short. So no fields of gold this time around.

Here’s an attempt at a panorama where three longkangs meet.

Looks like the footprint of some giant bird eh? I’d say it was around 190’ to 200’ view. The longkang actually looked quite crappy, but the reflection of the sky made it look like an idyllic stream.

Mr TNB had built a whole bunch of power pylons all around the paddy field. It does kinda spoil the scene a bit, but I think if shot properly, it does have an interesting look to it. Like the subject of the day with my cols with regards to boring photos…. “Nevermindla, as long as got story!”

There was some dude walking around spraying fertilisers or insecticides making a race-track pattern around one of the fields. I waited until he was near enough and facing the right direction before shooting him with a telephoto.

And then I spotted this. I guess my next bag of rice will taste like someone’s feet. “Beras Superior AAA Perisa Belacan”!

I also took this opportunity to give my macro lens a full workout.

Boy macro-ing is difficult. Had a bit of a sore back after that.

After the paddy field, we got conned big time by the organiser, who suggested we climb to the top of a hill to get a nice view. Nice view of the oil palm trees more like it! Came home, had lunch, then KO’d for 3 hours. Hahahah.

Some macro shots

Thats from my Minolta 100mm f/2.8 Macro. Bought this from dyxum.com. The seller said the condition was excellent. Well excellent my ass!! The lens came with a lot of dust inside, which affected the image quality. I finally got it cleaned out last week in KL, which cost me RM100. Bugger… but anyway…

It’s sharp, being a prime macro. Focusing is slow as heck, being a prime macro. The DOF is extremely extremely thin… a lot thinner than a Tamron SP90, so its hard to get sufficient DOF.

Here are some sample shots I took over the weekend.

Someone told me it looks drunk…

Seeds from some sorta palm tree

Some sorta bug. My brother actually snapped this because he was taller, so he gets more magnification for overhead subjects. Bugger.

The famous overlapping ovals. Not a macro shot, but sharp as heck! We didn’t know the badge had those imperfections!