It's the last school day of the year for the lower secondary students and also the last assembly of the year, though it's not held on Monday. As most of you all know, Mr Pang Choon How, Principal of Chung Cheng High School (Main), will be transferred to Ministry Of Education Headquarters next year. The school took this opportunity to give out awards and also to conduct a farewell ceremony for Mr Pang.
Mr Pang gave his final speech as the Principal of the school during the assembly and also presented awards to those who did well in their academics for the recent End of Year Examinations. They played a CCA Video Montage which was created by Media Club and a video to thank Mr Pang by Ms Eileen Kan.
Next, John Fu, the President of the Student Council, and the Chairperson of the Parents Support Group, gave their speeches to thank Mr Pang for his contributions to the school.
By this point of time, the lower secondary students were getting restless as they are supposed to be dismissed already (the prize giving ceremony was too long and the event overran by half an hour). Nevertheless, the event continued and the Student Councillors put up a singing performance, which was followed by the presenting of souvenirs to Mr Pang by staffs and students of the school.
We will, without misgivings, miss Mr Pang after he leaves the school and he certainly has impacted this school for good. Thank you, Mr Pang, for all you have done!
The photographer for this event is Hoe Jian Wei from 3 Empathy. Below are the pictures for this event and the CCA Video Montage as mentioned above.
Written by Hoe Jian Wei
OKAY TECHNICAL PARTS SCROLL UP IF YOU DON"T WANT TO READ
In this set of event notes, I want to focus on the editing on RAW files and the advantages and disadvantages of a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens.
I realised that in the last event notes I didn't really talk about the editing components of a RAW file so I am going to talk about that here.
I realised that in the last event notes I didn't really talk about the editing components of a RAW file so I am going to talk about that here.
The first components are the White Balance bars. There's a temperature bar, which varies from blue to yellow and there's another tint bar, which varies from green to pink. One is required to balance these 2 bars to make the white in the picture look white and not any other colour.
An example of a bad white balance, where the white on the screen is slightly more to green and blue.
The second group of bars consist of exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks.
- Exposure increases or decreases the brightness of a picture as a whole.
- Contrast increase the outlines of objects and the colour intensity in a picture when increased and turns the picture grey when decreased.
- Highlights increases or decreases the exposure of the bright parts of the picture.
- Shadows increases or reduces the brightness of the shadows in a picture.
- Blacks increases or reduces the brightness of the blacks in a picture.
- Whites increases or reduces the brightness of the whites in a picture.
The third group of bars consist of clarity, vibrance and saturation. This part is a little confusing as it comes with experience. You will understand once you use it.
- Clarity is like contrast, except when you decrease it, it reduces the details of a picture instead of turning it grey.
- Vibrance and Saturation both increases or decreases the color intensity of the picture. The only difference is that they make the colours darker and saturation is stronger than vibrance, thus saturation can decrease the picture to black and white but vibrance only can darken the colours.
That's about it for editing. Now about the lens.
For the majority of this event, I used a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. If you read the notes on photography, you would know that f/1.8 is a wide aperture, thus leading to increased bokeh and exposure. Caden banned me from using my flash and therefore, the pictures would be underexposed. So, I must find a way to increase the exposure and therefore, I used this lens to increase exposure. It also gives me nice bokehs as well.
Advantages:
- Increased exposure, thus the use of flash is redundant. This part is useful for events in the dark and events that ban the use of flash.
- Nice bokehs, like the first and second picture of this event. I seriously didn't expect the bokeh in the first picture and it turned out to be the best picture I had of Mr Pang.
Disadvantages:
- It can't zoom! During the prize giving ceremony, I had to borrow a 18-135mm lens from Riduwan, the computer lab assistant who was at the event as well, and the reason I chose that lens was it can shoot at wide angles, which is suitable for prize giving ceremonies.
In conclusion, I feel that it's a good practice to shoot with a 50mm prime lens to me as it challenges my composition skills and you really need to put in all the composition rules you've learnt when using a prime lens. Why? Simply because it can't zoom! I can see some of Media Club's members have really weak composition skills so why not try out a prime lens instead of a zoom one?