Uploaded my photos from Phuket in record time to both Facebook and my personal gallery. I still haven't even gotten some Hong Kong and Philippines photos up to Facebook yet!

Either way, traveling is always a great opportunity to play around with taking photos.

Read more to see a few of my favourite photos... There are a lot more in the album here on this site or on Facebook.

If you have a moment, click "more" below and let me know which photos you like/dislike and why. Maybe I should one day pick some photos to post for people to give feedback on at dpreview.com. I'm just scared of being picked on for image quality issues, since I'm still shooting with a compact, while most people there would be using DSLRs or if not higher-end point and shoots like the Lumix LX3.

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First up are a pair of photos taken at a bar. I realize that these photos are rather grainy, as shooting with a compact camera under poor lighting conditions will often yield. Nevertheless, the first photo shot in black and white seems to allow the graininess to take on a sort of semi-pleasing aesthetic quality in this case? There's a circle caused by either lens flare or dust...

The second pool photo looks a bit like a cheesy Microsoft Office clip art photo... so I'm not sure how much I like it. I think a smaller depth of field surrounding the 12 ball might have helped more. But alas, the depth of field of compact cameras is always huge (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

But that's right, we're in Phuket. So why are we playing pool. We should be at the beach. Rightfully so, the next few photos were shot at the beach.

With the horizon being so long and the sky being so clear, the beach seemed to lend itself to 16:9 photos quite well.

I notice that in the next three photos, I never venture to break the rule of not having your subject smack in the middle of the photo. I wonder if that would have been beneficial in any case. While the scenery looks nice, I'm not sure if these photos are just too simple. Only the third one ventures out a bit with a different view point. The second image was post-processed with an unsharp mask.

There were a lot of boats around Phi Phi island. After all, that's really the only way to travel between the islands there. I took many photos of boats, but here are two. I actually had a third one I wanted to post, but I figured I'm already uploading too much in this post anyway...

But one composition technique I read was if shooting a moving target, frame the subject such that there is a large amount of space in front of the subject, such that it will be seen to be moving across the frame. The third photo I wanted to post (but did not) was framed as such, and to some extent, the first photo below is as well. But contrasted to the second photo below, where I did the opposite, I'm not sure which is better. Leaving space in front of the boat seems to convey the speed at which the boat is traveling forward, and also seems to give me a sense that I am also traveling at a rather quick speed.

But the second photo, on the other hand, leaves me with a feeling that I am being left behind by the boat.

At any rate, as a final favourite, this was a photo of a wind chime that was hanging outside of our hostel room. The Chinese characters, 幸福, can be translated as "happiness." The left side of the photo has some blown highlights... but I somehow like the softness of the green.

Thanks for dropping by!