Sunday, July 15, 2007

Interesting: Buddha's Ship



Buddha's Ship

f/11, 1/100s, 135mm, Nikon D80

Sometimes, you see the most unexpected thing at the most unexpected place.

While having dinner over the water at Pasir Penambang, I was suddenly alerted about this interesting floating object

The Chinese words "佛船" written on the side literally means "Buddha's Ship". Chinese is traditionally read from right to left, unlike English, where scripts read from left to right.

With fast currents, I had time to just take 1 photo, so it's with a lot of good fortune that I managed to frame the picture properly, and took the picture in RAW, which allowed me to tweak the exposure later.

Digital SLR cameras can take pictures in RAW format. This means the picture captured is literally in the raw data captured by the camera. When you save the picture as JPG, it gets compressed, and as a result, a number of important data is also lost. But JPG is great for many because it is a much smaller file - making it possible to capture more pictures.

Shooting in RAW means you get a chance to later make some changes to the picture - such as exposure setting - and those changes would take place as if you are taking the picture a second time - you're literally retaking the photo. Because RAW is a capture of all the raw data the camera snapped in that moment you took the picture, you are able to tweak how the camera processes the data.

If you have a DSLR, always take pictures in RAW format - because you have a second chance to make some changes long after you've left the scene !

I can't conclusively explain what it means - this Buddha's Ship. Perhaps someone with some knowledge on this can comment and explain it to me? Why would someone put out a Buddha's Ship? I know there is a temple just upstream from the restaurant that is in the shape of a ship- perhaps it's from there?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's interesting indeed.
I've never seen anything like that before. :)

Anonymous said...

Me too never seen something like this before.

So what is picture size taken in RAW format?

moz monster said...

jems: We all discover something new all the time, don't we ?

che-cheh: When the camera takes a picture, at first, it collects all the raw data from every pixel in the sensor. When you take a picture in RAW format, you are telling the camera to store the picture unchanged, just in the RAW data form.

In most simpler cameras, like the normal digital point and shoot cameras, the raw data is converted into a JPEG file - because it saves storage space.

RAW data takes up a lot of space, but because it is the unchanged data the camera collected during the time the photo was taken, using tools like Gimp or Photoshop, you can make some changes to the data, such as how much light should turn up, which means you effectively get a second chance at taking your photo all over again !