We went to the Ahmadi Festival on Friday. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to see as it was the last day. There were still a lot of people and it seemed they had brought over some performers who were sitting around the different stages basically looking very bored.
Nevertheless, it gave me a good opportunity to test out the stuff I’ve been learning from my new photography book. First of all, the garden at my wife’s sister’s house in Ahmadi is still in full bloom and gave me a chance to try out some macro shots – I’ve put up quite a few on my Flickr album. I really like how the colors came out and the one of the fly above, is my favorite (image is cropped). I also noticed a significant difference in image quality when I took similar shots both in auto mode and manual mode. The difference would be especially noticeable when there was some shade around and the manual mode always managed to get better exposures.
It seems that an air show of sorts was also arranged for the festival. We couldn’t catch much of that, though it was hard to ignore when this heliopter started hovering right above our garden. I quickly snapped up a dozen shots of this in different settings and am pleased with the results. It seems the helicopter was there for three fighter jets which soon zoomed by spraying the Kuwait flag’s colors in their wake. To see more pics of the helicopter, click here.
For now, the manual mode has become my friend and I’m having a lot of fun. To improve my skills, next time I will have to take notes of what settings I made for each shot so it will be easier to compare and judge later on. One disappointment for now is that I have learnt that taking isolation shots (e.g. flower in focus while background flowers appear blurred) with non-SLR cameras is extremely difficult. Will have to do some research on that.
