"Like many Singaporeans, I have a Buddhist altar in my home and always found the silhouette of the Buddha very interesting to photograph. As it is such an iconic image of Asia, I decided to use it as my main subject in the PhotoQuest competition. I simply turned off all the lights in my house leaving only the tungsten back light of the altar. This created a perfect silhouette of the 1 foot high Buddha statue that sits there. I held in place a small piece of stick with a drop of water about 1 meter from the statue. I used a 60mm macro lens with a 2x teleconverter so I can get the water droplet large enough. The camera was mounted on a tripod of course and because of the low light condition, I had to do a long exposure of 3 seconds at f/57, ISO 500. The aperture was set to the highest to make sure I got it as sharp as possible. This still proves to be difficult as the reflection is generally not perfect, but the tripod and the high f/stop helped for sure."
- Cyndy Ong