Exposure: 1.6s ISO: 320 Aperture: f/22 Focal length: 18mm

View the large version to see the detail in the bottom half as it’s quite dark.

Taken without a tripod and my new D70s resting on the cathedral gate with the lens, body supported by my hand. The technique is called bracing.

When you don’t have a tripod, and you are doing street photography use whatever you can, lean on a tree, rest your camera on a wall or a fence, or even a friends shoulder to steady it.

I had to use max aperture so it was over-exposed, as with no tripod I still had to keep the shutter speed down to 1.6 seconds.

Street photography is about grabbing the scene, capturing the essence of the moment, I’m still trying to master that.

I’ve been shooting with compact 35mm cams for a long time, probably about 20 years, but I never made the step into getting serious about and getting a SLR, or even moving the next stage along.

Within the last year or so I really got more interested in photography as Malaysia is such a wonderfully colourful place, the foods, the people, the temples, the cultural diversity..There is so much to capture here. As you can tell from my blog, I really love food and taking pictures of it..

I started finding the limits of my 2 year old Canon Powershot A70, the 3.2megapixels limited how big I could enlarge the pictures and the noisy/grainy pictures in the dark (high ISO) were disappointing, plus the limited aperture.

As I started to learn about all these things, I wanted a camera to match my new found skills, I shopped around a lot until I decided on the Nikon D70s, slightly above entry level, but not yet mid-level.

So my kit now consists of:

• Old Olympus 35mm mju:ZOOM 105
• Canon Powershot A70
• SE K750i Camera Phone
• Nikon D70s dSLR

I’ll be posting pictures from all of them, I’ll talk about accessories/filters etc later.

I’ve always been into landscape, food and sky photography, I was always pretty bad at portraits and ‘street’ photography. I could capture events well, but not a single person or I never had the guts to take random pictures of people.

I’m getting better and I’m learning the art of portraits and street..

I went to Singapore to buy some stuff recently as it’s much cheaper there, it’s an awesome place for street photography, the bustling streets, the bright lights, the compact nature, you can move around easily.

I guess in the next few posts I’ll share my first efforts at street photography.

Here’s my first, I call it “Better Run”

As always, after the page had completely loaded, click the pic to view large.

You can find my pictures here:

Flickr Gallery
Old Coppermine (Will move all to Flickr eventually)

You can check out my favs on flickr here, most are from the A70.