Singapore’s Marina Bay area is a great place for shooting landscapes, especially with the tall skyscrapers and iconic structures that become lit with brilliant colors at night.

In this issue’s Feature of the Month, Alafista takes an evening stroll along the Marina Bay area with his Canon IXUS 220 HS to capture some of the lovely sights.

Have you ever faced a situation where there are so many interesting subjects, you wished you could capture them all within a single shot? Well, if you happen to be in a similar situation like me when I was in the Marina Bay area, you might want to try your hands at taking a panoramic photo of the landscape.

To get a good panoramic shot, you need to ensure that your camera is level with the ground and not tilted at an angle. Of course the best way to do this would be to use a sturdy tripod. If you didn’t manage to bring one along, you could always depend on the built-in grid lines and stitch assist functions to achieve a similarly good panoramic shot.

Here’s what you need to do: Access the menu functions and turn on the on-screen grid lines. They are very useful in helping to ensure the photo that the landscape you want to capture is level. I would use the grid as a guide and align it against the horizon of the landscape that I’m shooting, hence ensuring that my camera is level with the ground.

Next would be the stitch assist function. It is important to use this function when taking panoramic shots because it not only helps to indicate where the overlapping point between each shot is, it also helps to set the exposure and white balance based on the first shot, reducing the possibility where the shots become inconsistently exposed (A situation in which a few of your shots are either much brighter or darker than the others).

As I have shared in the previous feature on shooting with the monochrome function, I enjoy the aesthetics of Black and White photography. However, when shooting at night, there are not as many tones captured, causing the photos to turn out rather bland. Hence, I would usually make use of my other favourite “creative filter” included in the IXUS 220 HS – the color accent feature.

This feature allows me to retain just a single colour of my choice and then changes everything else to black and white.

If you were to take a photo and edit it using Photoshop to achieve the same effect, it would require some effort and time. The colour accent feature on the other hand, takes up less time and is easy to use. All you need to do is to position the frame in the center with the colour that you want to retain and press the button so that the specified colour can be recorded.

The colour accent filter is very useful when you want to highlight a particular subject. One of my favourite shots that evening was of an art sculpture that had an intricate hole in the center. By using the hole as a frame for the Raffles City building in the background and choosing to highlight only the red portions of the art piece, I succeeded in bringing out a much stronger effect for the "frame".

Of course, as the name suggests, a creative filter is very handy to help you shoot interesting photos that look different from the usual ones that you would take in auto mode.

For this photo, I decided to accentuate the yellow lights along the street, while desaturating the buildings into black and white. I really liked how the end result of the photo had a futuristic feel, much like something out of "The Matrix" movies.

Another one of my favourites would be this shot of Marina Bay Sands where I chose to accentuate the roof of The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands that was lit with blue lights.

There are many other ways to make use of the colour accent feature but what is most important is to exercise a little imagination. Experiment with this feature and soon you will be able to produce interesting photos that would not only look totally different but would also wow your friends.

Another IXUS Experience brought to you by the Canon IXUS Style Council