Garden of Light

One of my favourite installations of the i Light Marina Bay 2012 festival is the Garden of Light. Commissioned specially for the festival, it is created by Singapore’s Hexagon Solutions and uses 3D digital mapping technology to project animation onto the petals of the ArtScience Museum.

My shots of that installation all had black skies and I’ve always preferred to do night shots at the so-called magic hour when the skies are still blue, so with 2 more days to go before lights out for the i Light Marina Bay 2012 festival, I decided to reshoot it, this time at the magic hour.

Boon Hwee, YS and Kit were also with me on the Helix Bridge waiting for the sun to go down and for the projectors to turn on. When it finally did, we were glad they projected this image of a meadow instead of the one with the butterfly on a dark background. We had much preferred the meadow scene as it looked much nicer. 🙂

The Helix Bridge, Marina Bay Sands, and the Garden of Light by Hexagon Solutions projected onto the ArtScience Museum.
The Garden of Light against the backdrop of the Singapore Skyline at dusk.

With this done, I also sought to redo another shot I got accidentally from a previous shoot, with rays of light from Marina Bay Sand’s “Wonder Full” light show emanating from the back of the lotus-shaped ArtScience Museum.

When I did that shot, it was drizzling and the Garden of Light projection was turned off. I wanted one with the projection as well as the beams so I waited at the same location for the point when the beams come on, and I am happy to have caught what I wanted this time round.

A scene from the "Garden of Light" installation projected onto the "petals" of the ArtScience Museum. At the back, beams of light emanate as part of the "Wonder Full" light show at the Marina Bay Sands.

Before I end, here’s a video of the Garden of Light I shot using the iPhone 4S on my first trip to the festival. It was actually quite shaky as I was holding the iPhone with one hand and remote triggering the Nikon D7000 on a tripod with the other hand. YouTube’s image stabilisation did a pretty good job of stabilising it.

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