A Dead Bird

This few weeks, Penang's weather are damn horrible until having an outdoor shooting practice seems totally impossible. Furthermore, my car was almost flooded in the water! I was in fright but and made a call to my dearest daddy, just to get calmed. But I got scolded terribly by him, saying that i shouldn't use that road to go back home, and he wondered why i "purposely" went into the "sea". I was totally speechless. It didn't help me calm down at all, daddy, but in fact you just made me worried:(
My dearest daddy, that is the only road i take for my daily life to get back home. And the traffic jam didn't allow me to go out from car and have a check on what was happening 100m in front.

Well, that is not the story of today's entry. I actually a fan of rainy season!
I like the melanchony dim lighting produced by the raining days. Since i didn't have to work after evening yesterday, so i took out my D300 and a 50mm f/1.4 lens to have some practice in my garden. Just right after the first shot of the leaves, something dropped from the sky to my left hand ground. I was shocked actually, though it was not a heavy nor a loud one. I turned my body and found that it was actually a small bird. After the drop, it didn't seem that the bird was going to stand up and fly again. But it remained in that position and was dying.
I quickly adjust the settings of my camera and had a few snapshots of her. And she's gone just within one minute!
It was raining actually, and my camera got wet at some spots. This time, i dare not touch the body of the dead bird. So i asked my brother to do the job. He used a few layers of the tissue papers to pick up the bird, and then put it into a plastic bag and threw it into the hige MPSP dustbin close to our house.

I actually felt sad because it happened in just less than one minute. And the bird looked so kind and not harmful at all. Maybe she was gone due to hunger, or the cold temperature this few days. I didn't know the reason. But i did read sutra and forwarded the blessing to her. Amitofo!

For the shot, i set the camera to manual mode, spot metering, ISO 800, aperture of f/3.5, shutter speed 1/60s. I set up my own picture control from the original "vivid" mode, but reduced the contrast by 2 steps, reduced the saturation by 2 steps, and increased the sharpness to 5, and it's done. I think D300 is really a fantastic equipment for me to take better pictures. What i need to do is just to have more practice, and find uncommon angles which can make the pictures look more interesting.
Btw, I highly recommend Adobe Lightroom version 2.0 software for those who use raw format to snap pictures. It's very different from the older version, and it's more flexible. I love the adjustment brush and luminance fewtures of Lightroom v2, and also the soft skin feature, which allows us to make the skin tone of our portraiture shots softer in natural ways, without affecting the other areas. The only complaint is that, the reading of the color and tone of lightroom v2 is quite different from the original raw files, but there is some corrections and also convertion we can do by downloading something from adobe website.
The release of Adobe Lightroom 2.0 obviously attracts photographers spend more time in lightroom, rather than the more expensive photoshop. Many photographers claim that, other than the color and tone production, Lightroom is much more stronger than Photoshop, and more flexible, but yet simple to use. I don't know, but i love it very much!

My company is having some management problems this month. Hopefully the voting will side to our company, so that i can remain in this company as a casual dj for every weekends, because the stable income allows me to purchase better lenses in the future. But on the other side, It's not that good for my photography hobby and business, as most of the wedding shootings will happen on weekends. Not to say the stable income:(

I hope the weather will become better and better each day, so that i can find a day to take landscape images as soon as possible!