Hello and welcome to YH’s TIBUT, standing for “Yong Hong’s Things I’ve been up to”! This is a post that I will commonly write whenever its been about a month or a few months to recap what I’ve been up to and show you some pictures I’ve taken. I will still right independent posts when required but usually, these will be the posts you will see. I didn’t want every post like this to be named “Photo Collages”, so I created a name for it. Let’s get into it then.
For your information, “benthic” means an organism that lives on the sea floor, because it would be unbelievably boring if I couldn’t get another word that starts with “b”
Finally getting around to some of the first blog posts on the page, in this edition of YHsTIBUT, we’re visiting Mandai Wildlife Reserve’s “Bird Paradise” and Resort World Sentosa’s “S.E.A Aquarium”. Initial impressions heading into this trip were that there wouldn’t be much to photograph. Envision a cloudy, dirty piece of glass imprinted with the hands of many children… Envision birds behind black nets… what good is a photo which you can barely make out the subject of?
Turns out, Singapore proved me wrong. Seems like photographers aren’t forgotten and thrown to the byline after all. In all seriousness, both “parks” are very, very big and do take up a chunk if not your entire day. Tiring, yet very fun, no regrets here. Straight into business
S.E.A Aquarium – Fishy fishy~~
Ah~ The sea… so fascinating… so wonderful
The famous Resorts World Sentosa and the less famous S.E.A Aquarium. Home to a reported 100 thousand marine animals of over 1000 species, S.E.A Aquarium is our very own home for the fish, away from the land animals located in Mandai. Under the assumption that people would be far busier at Marina Bay Sands (It was National Day) rather than the Aquarium, we visited on the 9th of August.
Proved dead wrong, there was quite the crowd at the Aquarium, which in hindsight was only to be expected… but that’s besides the point. The aforementioned problems I thought I would be having turned out to be unfounded after all. Surprisingly, the glass was quite clean, even with irresponsible parents letting their children place their grimy hands on it. I would assume its due to the amazing management of Singapore’s best aquarium, y’know, since Singapore is so great
In any case, I talk too much. It would be quite a hassle explaining each and every exhibit, partly because I barely remember anything anyway, so I’ll just show you the photos.
(There are an odd 200-300 of them due to my happy hands, so I’ll just grab the best ones)
Cliche? Definitely.
Love the Aquarium. It was actually quite big and took up about 3 hours of our time, we were strolling around, and I was snapping pictures of every fish that bothered granting me the privilege of seeing their eyes. I definitely would recommend it, it can be crowded at times, but if you’re in Singapore, everything is crowded! To my anger, even the trains š
(No longer Jurong) Bird Paradise – Birds and a stark lack of bees
Cant stop making jokes about birds and bees~ we’ll call it… BAB Syndrome
Once known as Jurong Bird Park, now rebranded to Bird Paradise and located no longer in Jurong but Mandai, Bird Paradise is home to a reported 3500 animals, 400 species, and a lot of people. Not to blame them. It was a weekend after all, the day after we went to the Aquarium. Seems like people have no intentions of cooling off after National Day, cause if there was a lot of people at the Aquarium, there was more at Bird Paradise.
It feels so weird, calling it Bird Paradise… I don’t feel… Singaporean
Again, that’s beside the point. The point is that Bird Paradise (ugh) is very cool. It’s not even just birds; there are fowls and penguins… hell, some of these birds look more like stuff you’d find 195 Million years ago with that kinda of wingspan. One thing we underestimated that you should note is the size of the place… it’sĀ massive, especially if you have an intention of visiting every exhibit/aviary as we did.
Similar to the Aquarium, there’s an ~10 or so exhibits/aviarys, so it would be a hassle and also near impossible to match each photo to the aviary we found them in.
(An odd 500-600 this time, mostly cause, yknow, the birds fly.)
(All of these photos are landscape šš Do I have no interest in helping future me??)
Intervention for this dude specifically. Brother flew right up to where the crowd was and just starting yelling. Literally yelling, just starts screeching.
As I mentioned before, the Bird Paradise is massive. Took us a good 5-6 hours to finish it, going through every aviary and snapping an adequate number of photos. Absolutely loved it though, the improvement from Jurong Bird Park to this is very obvious, especially since it feels much more spacious. That and the fact that its in Mandai now along with the Zoo, River and Night Safari.
Highly recommended, especially if you have a camera like some of the people we saw did. I personally made do with an 18-55 on a EOS250D, but I’d venture I saw a few 500-800mm lens there. Cant imagine the photos you’d catch with those
Conclusion – Peeking into the future
Am I going to revisit the Zoo, River Safari and Night Safari too? Yeah, probably. I remember very vividly going to these 3 places and taking photos there too, but they were terrible. I loved these 2 spots speicifcally because it shows the sheer amount of improvement in photography I’ve made.
Another point, unrelated to the previous one, I’ve actually grown quite confused. There are a lot of standalone posts on this blog, at least before I adopted this TIBUT format. I quite like the format, since its special to me and me only, but… what constitutes a standalone post now? After some deliberation, I think I’ll narrow it down to Holidays or something really big. If we go overseas or a big event happens, I’ll make sure to make it a standalone post. This is mostly because of SEO, usually Im too lazy to do it, but I work very hard on my holiday posts and I want them to be viewed.
That, and the observation that my half-baked, terrible Genting post is somehow the most viewed on this blog, indicating that I should probably realise by now that people love holidays and will go searching for them
Final (two) things, of relation to this blog and my photography. As you may have realised, this post comes not long after my previous one. My motivation for this kind of stuff is on the up-and-up, meaning more posts are gonna keep coming.
The other thing was improvement in equipment. Not to say anything, but I have earmarked a 18-135mm, which when obtained (I hope) is going to be a massive and observable improvement to my photography. I probably wont change my EOS250D for a long long time, its trusty and wont need improvement to anything more high-end for at least a while. Photography is a long term thing, mostly because any other hobby or thing I enjoy wears off a minimum of a year after I start it. So, what Im trying to say is… stick around. I’ll have a lot more in store in the coming months/years
Make sure to drink your food and eat your water. Have a good day!