An adventure in Bollywood...

Bollywood Veggies, that is.

I was on leave from work two Fridays ago (July 24), and Joan suggested going to a farm for a breath of fresh air. (We all know how small Singapore is) She'd learnt about the farm through a friend, so off we went, on a early Friday morning into the Singapore countryside.

There is a free shuttle bus service that runs from Kranji MRT to the various farms in the Kranji cluster, but here's the catch: it runs every 1.5 hours only. We made it on the first bus at 9am just by a whisker, and got to the farm at around... 10am? (can't quite remember, too lazy to check) The bus driver was a man called Larry, and he was quite chatty, introducing the Kranji farms to us during the ride.

The owner, Ivy Singh, was a very interesting person to talk to. As we were eating our breakfast at the cafe (we were the first visitors that day), she told us of the farm's struggles to get started, her brushes with the law (she was due to appear in court the following week for some complaint filed against her by a gov agency) and how Joan and I have the same type of smile (lol). Then work came in the form of a group visit and she left us to explore the farm on our own.

Here are three of my favourite shots:

f16, 1/100s, ISO400. © Lin Zhaowei, 2009.


f11, 1/60s, ISO100. © Lin Zhaowei, 2009.


f5.6, 1/320s, ISO400. © Lin Zhaowei, 2009.

All taken with my trusty 60mm. The first two shots were taken with an SB900 to camera left. The third was taken with natural light. No tripod, so a relatively compact flash unit is your best friend in such a situation.

After a short 1hour-plus jaunt around, we sat down for lunch at the farm cafe (there were a few other diners around, surprisingly!). Had banana curry, bamboo leaves and papaya salad with brown rice. Nothing too fanciful but it was probably the healthiest meal I had in a while.

Grad Trip - Photo of the Day 1

It was certainly a long flight -- the longest I've been on so far anyway. It was thus a major relief to finally meet Rita at Schiphol Airport on Apr 22. I was initially confused about the time zone because I didn't expect the Netherlands to be on Daylight Savings Time. It's still a rather foreign concept to me, actually.

Anyway, as soon as I settled into my lodgings at Rita's place (her landlord was kind enough to let me sleep in the study) we went to the famous Keukenhof, the world's biggest flower garden that is only open from March to May annually. And we effectively spent the whole day in that beautiful place.

Anyway I was the only person I saw walking around with an SB800 mounted on tripod and an SU800 mounted on camera. Despite all that, it was not easy taking good photos... I wasn't happy with most of the pictures I took that day and on the whole, the portraits I took of Rita and her friend were my favourite shots of the day. But the last couple of the hours produced a few surprises, such as the photo of the day:

© Lin Zhaowei, 2009.

What you see behind are tulip fields. The colours of the tulips in the background, together with the water and greenery in the foreground, somewhat made up the full spectrum of the rainbow.