Photos from Singapore- The Singapore Flyer (Part I)

The Singapore Flyer is the world's biggest Ferris wheel--rote ping--larger than the London Eye by quite a bit. The Singaporean governments wants to popularise this and a series of new hotels, and make them the official 'symbol' for Singapore, instead of the current Singapore skyline.

For me, the experience of riding the Flyer the it was surreal.


At first, I expected an amusement park type of Ferris wheel--like the one in Bhrikutimandap. I was not very impressed when I found out that we would take only one round. When I actually got in there, the scenery made me think better, and I stopped caring how many rounds we made.




The photo on the right puts in context how massive the Flyer actually is. Even though the skyscrapers in the background are quite far behind, the wheel is in itself as tall as a 17storeyed(19?) skyscraper. When you are at the topmost car, you forget that you are actually inside one of those machines, and get the feeling that it's actually a skyscraper in itself.

The area is quite far from the bus routes, so you have to walk a lot if you plan to get there from bus. We took taxi, and we got out right at the entrance. Since we reached there late in the afternoon, we strolled around a bit and waited for night.


The Flyer is right in the bank of the Singapore River, which made for a wonderful photography opportunity. We spent almost an hour an a half on the bank, walking, playing with the water, and talking.

It was really wise of us to have gone in the evening. The city absolutely lights up in the evenings. Of course, that is true for almost every modern metropolis today-- from Bombay to Rio-- but this was not the usual bright city. It is a city that thrives on its vibrancy and its colourfulness, so it is even brighter than one would expect.

The fun thing is, the lighting on the buildings there is not only blue-red-white but of every colour imaginable. It's like Singapore celebrates an eternal Tihar of green, yellow, pink, blue, white, reds. 

The cars in themselves are quite big in themselves. Each car carries about 20 passengers.We were somewhat unfortunate to have a large group of really noisy and rowdy teenagers with us. They were relishing the experience as much as we were, and were too stunned too talk for the most part.

It was irritating that they were using flash of their cameras to take the pictures, though. Since the glass walls would reflect most of the light from the flash, they would get a grossly overexposed picture, and instead of switching the flash off, they'd try changing the angle.


Also in our compartment was this guy with really big DSLR, who was trying to take real pictures. He told them to switch their flashes off--he was getting disturbed too, and that mostly took care of them.

The other interesting thing about the flyer was that it changed colours. It meant that even though we were moving very slowly, and the scenery hardly changed for several minutes, you could still get several interesting pictures, thanks to the changing colours. The change was gradual, so there were even greater possible combinations of foreground and background colours.

The only problem I encountered was with exposure. With such beautiful surroundings, I had to increase the exposure to take in as much of the rainbow of nightlights I could. That also meant that I would have a hard time taking good pictures of the road, all it would come to was trails of red and yellow lights.

After some trial and error, I did find an acceptable compromise between exposure and aperture priority...

This whole experience was made even better because we were at a river bank, and all the lights we saw were reflected in the river. You can see that in the last two pictures, where most of the 'Singapore Skyline' is reflected upon the Singapore River.

At one point, we could see the reflection of the Flyer on the river. It was surprising because under normal circumstances, the flyer would not be close enough to the river to have a reflection. It was probably because of the lights