Wild Flowers and Milky Way in Singapore

Singapore isn't known for wild flowers or Milky Way photography, but in this video I stumble upon a bed of wild flowers, shoot the sunset across Gardens by the Bay East, and stay tuned till the end of this video where I make my first attempt to shoot the Milky Way in Singapore.

Hei guys, I'm here at the Marina Barrage and I'm gonna be shooting the sunset today over at Gardens by the Bay East. Hopefully we got a good sunset.

So while walking towards my spot for sunset I noticed something very special. Check out all these flowers and it's quite rare to see fields like these, fields of flowers in Singapore. So I'm gonna try and see if I can get some good shots of this.

Patches of wild flowers are a rare sight in Singapore, probably a product of reduced grooming due to COVID19.

Not my usual style, but interesting to experiment nonetheless.

So the sun has gone down and the wonderful golden light that I was shooting with the flowers in the grass over here is gone but there's still a bit sunset left and there is still the blue hour so I'm gonna set up at my original shoot location. I'm here at a very popular spot at Gardens by the Bay East for sunset, and lots of people shoot here, but I'm gonna let you in on secret, as far as I'm concerned there's only one proper spot to shoot this place and it is right where I'm standing because when you see over here, the Singapore flyer does not overlap with any of the buildings on the left or on the right side.

A 10 minutes exposure sometimes results in very interesting effect in the skies.

So if you're shooting here, you gotta find this spot. You got to come to where the Singapore flyer doesn't overlap with any of the other buildings because as far as I'm concerned, it is a compositional mistake to have the Singapore flyer overlapping with other buildings especially when the lights come on and you can see that it just doesn't look that good. When you have the Flyer in this position you can actually get a long exposure get a complete rotation of the lights on the Flyer so it looks like one beautiful ring of light.

So I'm set up here, right in front of the water, I really love the sunset, the colour is amazing just look at that. But unfortunately the water is very choppy so what I did is that I put a 6 stop ND filter in front of the lens and I have it set for a 30 seconds exposure. Hopefully that smoothens out the water enough so that it looks good.

2 image blend of sunset and city lights.

On separate day, I'm at the East Coast Park at around 10pm and I’m trying something that I've never tried in Singapore before and that is to shoot the Milky Way. Milky Way photography is something that I've never really tried but I think it's something that's really interesting and definitely something I'll be looking into next. Hopefully I'll have some more content that features shooting the Milky Way in Singapore so I’m really looking forward to that! I’ll be posting more shoots on the Milky Way as soon as I have them!

14mm, f4, 8s, ISO 640, heavily edited. Taken at East Coast Park.