I think Singapore's privatised public transport is uniquely Singapore indeed. It's a private company yet somehow it does not face any competition from other private bus companies who may want to operate those lucrative bus routes.

When TIBS(now SMRT) goes to northeast, SBS moves away. When NEL is completed, private bus can no longer operate there. So we have a private transport company that do not have any real competition that takes the role of a public transport.

I'm fine with privatising public transport, but shouldn't other private companies get the chance to compete with them?

Some backdated stuff to share. These work of art would be cherished by the students for many years to come.


More cartoons

Busy Busy Busy... There's a costume to prepare for Teacher's day dinner and the Bollywood stuff thing to worry about the next day. Don't think have time to do both... Just thought of doing the dinner stuff will do. Will model it out soon once my idea is completed. Stay tuned.

This is the result so far...

Hairy Harry Potter style outfit

Hope I don't melt that day...

Finally I get to do my half day job this week. I leave house before 6:30am and reach home after 6:30pm for this whole week. Including tomorrow, which is CCA day for me. It's my first "half day teaching" week so far.

3 Meetings, loads of admin stuff to do plus this teacher's day dinner coming and I'm in-charge of one of the major games. Waiting for the Physics papers to come in for loads of marking tomorrow too. Plus need to settle the plans for a new nano lab that I'm suppose to setup in school... why everything seems to come together at the same time?

But with student portfolios like these to grade, it makes things more interesting compared to the more mundane stuff.

Besides going for fireworks shoot 2 weeks ago, I went to this crazy National Library board sale with Sucre. Sucre loves to read and what else is better than to bring her to this sale for her support given to me in photography? Afterall, we went to the last not so crazy National Library board sale too.


The sale is so crazy that at 9am, we have to queue at Hall 6 to gain admission to the sale at Hall 4.


After a while, the queue start to take a U turn back towards Hall 4


After n minutes of waiting, we finally arrived at the entrance, again. Shouldn't have park at carpark D, the nearest to Hall 4.


The place is so packed, a mother thought of this way to ensure her child don't get lost


Sucre managed to grab a few books, while all the interesting magazines are gone, so we started to queue to pay up pretty quickly.


The actual fact is that most of the books are emptied by the crazy shoppers before us and there isn't a spare inch at the place.


After escaping from Hall 4, this is what greeted us at the entrance, more queues.

Sure beats the GSS in terms of number of transactions per day.

Thanks sucre!

All photos taken with the Sony K700i camera phone so pardon the poor quality.

singapore sale photoblog sony k700i

Having a camera phone means that you could take pictures whenever the need arises without having to drag along your equipment around. The latest Sony Cybershot phone k800i, the successor (of the successor?) to my K700i, is one such phone. It's too expensive at $800 + w/o line but is it worth it in the future when it is <$200 w line? I won't know for sure.

Here's a collection of some shots taken with my K700i over the past few months. I just don't bluetooth these photos regularly since I don't take photos with it often.


Xiaobudian at her grandpa's house. Heard that she is in the "why?" phase now. Time to train her in Physics, LOL!


A rather offensive tissue/toilet paper cover found at mini toons that says "pull me"


Helicopters during one of the NDP previews.

Even for blogging, the photos look barely passable. Luckily, there's only one more year of my contract to go and now I have the flexibility of choosing Singtel/M1 over Starhub while keeping my current number.

Best of luck to those sitting for exams tomorrow!

singapore photoblog sony k700i

So, the story goes on and I was at Marina City Park, comfortably seated and had my dinner there. Though I did not eat much since I had that buffet lunch earlier. We were sufficiently early to catch some sunset shots, something that I did not expect. It seems that there is no need to be so early to watch fireworks here compared to Esplanade area which are almost fully booked by tripods by 7pm.


Sunset @ Marina City Park


Last ray of sun before it goes away for the night


And the mysterious and ugly looking fountain starts to show up


Sucre thinks that the shadow of that tall structure on the left looks like Godzilla trying to attack the city.

All photos taken with my Sony H1, an excellent first generation super zoom camera by Sony that's a class of its own.

singapore marina city park photoblog sony dsc h1

I was looking at the street directory when I figured out that Marina City Park could be facing the fireworks and would be an ideal location for photos. So I just drop by after the National Day luncheon to look for a good spot. Besides the location for the fireworks, Sucre and I also found another nice spot during our 2nd exploration where some of the people camped.


Map of Marina City Park


There's a reason why it's known as the city park, the city is in full view from the main entrance already!


Esplanade area where I took fireworks shots for Team Italy.


Not convinced? Let's zoom in 12x. H1 was with me during the recee. A bit foggy though


This was the location chosen for the fireworks. No fountain in the afternoon, low lying trees. Seems ideal for high level fireworks but would block 50% of the low one. Not a big problem. The water and city background features would have made up for it adequately.


Nice afternoon at the park


So much so that I spotted a kingfisher and did some birding with my 1.7 tcon.


Just love the H1 colours. 4 Layers - grass, trees, clouds, blue blue sky.

It was a fruitful trip. Marina south is not a place where I would go regularly. It's not very accessible without your own transport but I'm glad that I went to take a look. There's plenty of negatives such as only one way to exit Marina South by car (towards west) and it goes past ERP (crappy) too. There's a massive jam after the fireworks because there's thousands of vehicles leaving through the same road at the same time.

All photos taken with the Sony H1.

singapore marina city park photoblog sony dsc h1

Went to ECP last weekend with my niece Yuxin and saw my old JC friend there working on the NUS triathlon competition. Was an okay day that's spoilt by the sudden rain which lasted for 10 minutes? Just enough to wet the floor and cut the outing short.


Breakfast with Yuxin (A100)


3 Generations (A100)


Not very stable (H1)

Two abstract shots taken with the Sony H1 using slow shutter speed and by moving the camera meaningfully during the shoot. Maybe I could think of some fun experiments with the slow shutter to explain some physical phenomenons or something... Something along the line of projectile motion or free fall etc? I see ideas flying around for 'A' level physics lectures already.


CBD: R10, D4, L10, U1.


Sony A100 and Fuji F11, our other camera babies that went for outings.

singapore photoblog sony dsc h1

Reading Barney's blog made me feel better that at least something is done about 'A' levels SPA. He actually emailed the higher management to reflect his views on SPA and urged for a review to look into the current situation in SPA. I did not comment on the SPA thingy until today, after my first day of SPA course on skill B. SPA for Physics does seem like a good idea that just did not work out the way it intended to be. And I'm concerned since I will most likely be doing it next year, hopefully not alone.

SPA is a form of assessment that focus mostly on the process rather than product, which could lead to many controversial issues. Just today, we saw something obviously wrong with the table in a sample practical report but yet the trainer told us that because we are accessing skill B, we can't penalize that which comes under skill C, even though skill B specifically states that we are supposed to assess the table! Does this make sense? Some teachers in the course raised a valid and important point that was not really dealt with in the class.

Wouldn't we be sending the wrong message to the students if they get full credit for a pratical report that has obvious mistakes?

One fine day, pointy hair boss of education thought that writing is important but students don't learn how to write by writing composition because they never picked up the relevant skills in writing. So pointy hair boss decided to implement a skill-based assessment for composition in all the languages. A committee was formed and they came out with the following skill for writing composition. These are skills that reowned authors used to write their bestsellers like "Notes from an even smaller Island" and "Harry Potter".

Skill A: Planning - To plan the for writing an essay/novel/complain letter/straits times forum. The students have to take into consideration of who are the intended audience, what is the moral of the story, the twists and main characters involved and any humour involved blah blah.. They have to justify the style of writing that they would choose to write for that piece too.

Skiil B: Implementation - To write in a grammatical manner in present tense, past tense, present perfect tense. In speech, reported speech, a quote or how to truncate your quotes for straits times. To write with flair that includes at least 10 uncommon words that falls into categories like 1.) 15+ letter words, 2.) Words that include 5 different vowels. Use of metaphors and idioms would score more marks. Students are also expected to demonstrate that they would edit and review their own statements as they write by cancelling ungrammatical sentences. They need to suggest a reason why they wrote the ungrammatical line in the first place to score.

Skill C: Content - To write with a rich content that includes as many twists as channel 8 drama serials and as many characters as the Chinese classic, Water Margin. It would be good to describe the setting that your writing is based upon in some details. For example, the colour, texture, height, width, thickness, density, flash point and wavefunction of the door of the bedroom in your story. The content must be relevant to the topic assigned too.

Skill D: Evaluating - To critic on your own piece of writing. To state and explain some of the problems in the writing and the difficulties faced and suggest possible ways to overcome those dreadful writer's block. Be able to discuss the limitations of the style of writing chosen for the genre and suggest improvement that could improve on the style or how you could synthesize 2 distinct writing styles to satisfy the aim of say writing a humourous complain letter.

So an sentence like "My grandmother, who's favourite song is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, learned the word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis after spelling hepaticocholangiocholecystenterostomies." would make little sense in skill C but would score for skill B. (see here for the meaning of those tongue twisting words)

Yes, I gave the France team a missed, was getting a bit tired over getting stuck at traffic for ages just for 12 minutes of fireworks for 3 days in a week. Plus I had to go out early in the morning the following day so I decided to give the finale a miss.



Anyway, I found that I have reached a bottle neck for my fireworks shooting techniques. My first attempted ended up with many half-baked fireworks shots becaused I sticked too closely with the 2 second exposure rule. I didn't do the exposure right too partly because I'm too close to the fireworks (end up with too much smoke) and partly because that was my first fireworks attempt with a non point and shoot camera. (Had 2 previous attempts with my old P3).



As for the Singapore round, I had my Alpha running out of juice before slapping my H1 on the tripod in double quick time before screwing up the focus manually. I found many of my Alpha shots were slightly blurred due to handshake even though I had it on a tripod. Why? Because I left my hand on the camera at times after pressing the shutter so I could hit the shutter again.



The third time round, I made no mistakes like the first two tries and I end up with a lot more keepers. And luckily, the Team New Caledonia was much more exciting compared to Team Italy and Team Singapore.



Making less mistakes does not mean that there's no room for improvements. I heard from other photographers there that some use a black card to control exposure in bulb mode to make sure that they get the best possible shot. That way, they could control exposure precisely by moving the black cards. Since no one knows exactly how long does each shot in the fireworks last and what to expect next, this technique may be low in efficiency but high in effectiveness. Is it better than my random shoot and pray? No one knows. But I'd seen great H1 fireworks shots (which most likely used random shoot and pray since H1 does not offer bulb mode).



Another way to improve my shots slightly would be the use of a remote. It's a necessity for me to use bulb mode anyway. A remote would eliminate camera shake when pressing the shutter. But given that I'm on a budget, I have to make do with the tools that I can get my hands on without jeopardising my financial plans. (I'm pretty much done with spending for the year unless I get a really big red packet from bonus).



Of course, the next big thing is to get a good location. Like setting up at Sheare's bridge (and risk getting lung cancer) or trekking to the far edges of Marina East or be super early to get vantage points that includes the Merlion. Given the Kiasuism culture here, I would settle for the 2nd best locations anytime. Unless I get paid to do so.

All shots seen here were taken with the Sony Alpha 100.

Bulb mode = Total control on when the shutter opens and closes for your camera

singapore fireworks photoblog sony a100 alpha essay