I start work quite early recently (start exactly when the sun rises)  and I am able to see the warm colour and the beautifully patterned cloud shone by the sunrise.  It happens almost every morning except thick-clouded days.

I take the photos whenever I see beautiful clouds, and as I mentioned earlier, I will post it on the last day of the month.

I feel great when a day is started with the beautiful cloud outside my window.  :D

After taking care of the plant and waited for 2 months, finally we can start harvesting the mung beans in our garden.

Same as other types of beans and peas, mung bean is also come from inside its pod.  Some are shorter, and some are longer.  Most well grown bean pods have 10 mung bean seeds inside, whereas the poor developed pods have only 2.  The bean pod turns light brown  (or black sometimes) from green to tell that it is ready to be harvested.

This is not the first time I planted mung bean, but it was at least 15 years back when I last planted it.  At that time, I was in high school when we always used mung beans as our experiments in Biology class.

We harvested these mung beans on a Saturday evening but it is not enough to make even a small bowl of mung bean soup, but there are many more waiting for us to harvest next week, I expected that in 2 weeks time, all of them on the plants should be ripen.

We planted mung beans on a small piece of land (about 0.5 meter square), how much mung beans should we expect?  I have heard that in order to remove mung bean pods, it is not necessary to remove it pod by pod.  Just dry it under the sun and the mung beans will be separated with the pods.  In the factory, I guess a machine with fan is used to blow off the dried pod from the beans.

Next, I will show you the entire process of planting mung bean.

Finally, I am able to attach this polarizing filter to my semi-pro camera, with an adapter.

[With Polarizer]

[Without Polarizer]

Can you see the difference?  The filter helps me to reduce reflection very well.

This filter can be adjusted.  It’s not for focusing, but to increase or decrease the polarized light angle.  There is a pointer on the outer ring.

There are 2 types of polarizers:- Circular and Linear.  The one I have here is circular, which is usually used on an auto-focus DSLR , where as the linear polarizer us usually used on a video camera.

[With Polarizer - maximun 90 degrees]

[With Polarizer - minimun 0 degree]

Besides reducing reflection, it also makes the colour of sky more saturated, because it filters out the reflection of tiny water droplet in the atmosphere.

However, there is a drawback, where it takes at least 1.5 stops of light, which has the effect as ND filter.

I wish to have an ND filter, and I will blog about it after I have got it.

It was one of those ordinary weekends, a sunny day, a good day to be out and interact with nature.  So, we were in the garden.  Colin was looking out for something to shoot and I was trying to clear out some weeds from the garden.

Suddenly, I found something in the weeds.  It was a snail.  Fortunately, it was unharmed by the sharp blades of the scissors which I was using to clear the weeds.  It was not a very big snail.  We have seen bigger ones.  There was nothing special about it as well.  But I thought that since Colin was doing some photo shootings, so I decided to show him the snail.  From now on, I will call it, Mr Snail.

I led Mr Snail on my finger.  He was cold despite the hot weather that day.  I think it was because he was protected from the sun by the weeds.  And that might be one of the reasons why he was there in the first place.  And did I mention that he was slimy too?  Well, it felt gross at the beginning but after a while, I was quite alright with it.

I went near Colin and showed him Mr Snail.  Mr Snail was quite cooperative.  He seemed to know that his photographs were being taken.  He did quite a lot of posts and I had to twist and turn my hand and fingers to suit him so that Colin could get some good pictures of him.  At that moment, he was a super star!

Sometimes, we try very hard to be known.  We put in all our effort just to prove that we can do something.  However, things don’t always happen the way we want them to be.  When others do not appreciate our effort, we feel that we have been put down.  We feel helpless and we begin to give up.  But, never forget that everything happens for a reason.

If giving up is as hard as starting all over again, why don’t we choose the latter.  Give yourself another chance.  Everything that happens is motivation.  We do not hold any grudge but we start all over again by setting new goals so that we learn to be stronger and bolder each step of the way.  At the end of the day, I think it is important for us to know that we have tried our best and we did not lose our good values along the journey of life.  It is not an easy challenge but it is a worthy one.  And finally, believe in yourself.

P.S.Colin asked if he sounded like a film director when he was telling me to adjust my hand and fingers to suit Mr Snail, I said yes.  Maybe someday, he will be.  Who knows?

0.  Although it was cloudy on and off during the moon eclipse, I managed to take some eclipse photos.

1.  I only slept for 2 hours from about 11:45pm to 1:45pm.

2.  I took these photo from about 2am until 5:45am when the cloud completely covered the moon.  Then, I started to select and process these photos.

3.  I woke SiewPeng up twice.

4.  Yes, I almost forgot I slept for 30 minutes in between because I knew that this is a long full eclipse (100 minutes total moonless).

5.  Although it was tiring, but I felt great.

6.  The stars did appear next to the moon, but they were covered quickly by the cloud.

7.  My brain is blank now…  I can only think about keywords:- stars, mosquito,  battery, lens cap, manual focus, ISO, … …