Explore Bay East Garden 。。。

Woke up to see thunderstorm befalling & wonder if the photoshoot later will materialise? Luckily, the rain reduced to a light drizzle & I went to meet up wif Leonard & guys from the ECP fotogroup at Stadium MRT.  My right shoulder still felt a slight tinge from the Gardens Festival shoot :( However, a tripod is a neccessity today as we would be shooting the National Day's Rehearsal fireworks later.

The organiser thought that there is a direct bus from Stadium & it turned out to be wrong info! The 7 of us ended up taking a half hour stroll all the way to Rhu Cross. This newly launch garden is pretty inconvenient if one is not driving. Thou it is situated in the CBD area, it is not near any MRT station or bus-stop.

Upon arriving at the garden, I remembered shooting the rehearsal's fireworks from the flyover (hanging over the garden) last year! Time flies! Now, this garden is offically ready. I am surprise upon stepping into the garden, it is really nicer than I thought! It is a serene place to take an evening stroll & popular with joggers. The long stretch of path gives one a breath-taking view of the Marina area's skyline.

After some random shoots & stacking our tripods neatly along the path-way, one of the guys stood guard over our belongings while a few of us went off to hunt for macro shots. I do not own a macro lens & utilised my zoom lens Canon 55 - 250mm instead. There's still a light drizzle on-going, which made the macro shots more interesting! Leonard is the macro expert, hence i definately gotta 'steal' some knowledge from him!

As we strolled along the path, thanks to Leonard warning me not to step onto the millipedes...it's really disgusting as many were crawling on the path due to the rain! We spotted many butterfilies fluttering around. Then, Leonard took over my dslr & demostrated how to get a good macro shot of the butterfly high on the tree! Wow! It's really challenging to stablise the zoom while lifting up your arms! The most difficult part was searching where the hell is the butterfly among the leaves/branches? Subsquently, gotta use manual mode to focus.

I tot i miss this shot! Pretty sunbird!

I learnt pretty fast thou i must say training one's eye to spot the insects is still a long way to go! These little creatures move alot & have to be fast too! We were lucky as this is the evening time when butterflies tend to move abit slower, hence there were points of time...we could practice firing a few shots at 1 spot. Finally, i got my 1st decent butterfly photo ^o^

My fav Skyline shot of Singapore!

When the national day parade rehearsal commenced, we returned to the waterfront & set up our tripods. Not too long after setting up, we could feel raindrops falling again! The drops seems bigger & bigger!!! All of the people in my group flashed out their umbrellas, while i put on my raincoat, haha! It's juz the 2nd time i used my raincoat while out shooting. There's 1 guy who gave up waiting in order to protect his gears. Basically, there's no shelter within 100m in this garden!

At around 7.45pm, we managed to take the fireworks photos...however, there was a lack of satisfaction as the fireworks seem far off! I only like the panaroma view & the brilliant flora & fauna in this garden... I wish this place to be more accessible thou! (pref a pedestrian bridge linking to the Bay South area)