And now, for something far more abstract – Genesis!
And then it rained.
Sparks spawn and wander the skies.
Light of a ever moving, rapidly dying nature.
Wokeh.
Abstruck
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Author Archives: 2konbla
My First Engagement Ceremony, Part Three
Guests!
I absolutely loved that everywhere I pointed had bright, strong colors!
I was tempted to ask them to gather around and take another picture, arranged in color! (I’ll make a mental note to do so.)
Funny aunty. At 24mm F5.0 on the Minolta 24-105mm F3.5-4.5(D) it had a very pleasant vignetting, enhanced by wide-angle and close focus.
I also brought my Minolta 70-210mm F4.0 beercan, and used it to shoot the hantaran at an orthogonal-like projection.
Liyana and cousin.
“Ah finally, we can sit!”
Bila muda lagi mesti gian bergambar!
More cousins! I should’ve removed the flash gel for this. I tried exporting 2 JPEGs from the RAW, one corrected for tungsten the other daylight and merging it, but it did not look as catchy as this tungsten-WB version.
Family, shot at 26mm. Note the distance was over 1.5 meters and nobody was near the edges of the photo, to prevent distortion.
Aunties. Well that is a nice baju where did you get it from?
The 24.6 megapixels of the Sony Alpha 900 resolve an amazing amount of detail – this is a 100% crop which shows you where she got it from!
My First Engagement Ceremony, Part Two
Pantun time!
On a side note, remember Ah-Ha? This is a classic skit about meminang!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6EABBVImJ8
An important shot.
The ring.
His turn.
I should’ve stood back just a bit to reduce perspective distortion. This was at 24mm (angle of view like 16mm for APS-C.)
Likewise, here – hantaran, beb!
A good way to secure your hantaran is to use pins and double-sided tape. Well you don’t see it in the picture heh!
Doa selamat. (In retrospect, there is a wee bit of large-radius HDR processing in this picture.)
Gifts, for the visitors. (Is this tepak sirih?)
Food, for the visitors. Darn, didn’t notice the lamb!
My First Engagement Ceremony, Part One
Last year, I had the pleasure of being at Liyana the makeup artist’s house to shoot… her engagement ceremony!
So who else to make her up, but herself? (Must show before and after maaa… promote makeup artist sikit hehe.)
Go on, pick a color.
While waiting I snooped around the house. Gotta love the colors!
Went downstairs for a bit…
I love it when they match! You don’t know it, but I erased a standing fan on the left hehe. This was shot at 60mm (40mm for those on APS-C) so a very nice, distortion-free shot was made.
Hantaran kek bercawan. You know, kek bercawan? Cupcakes?
I went back upstairs, and found this very photogenic uncle. I think he KNEW how cool he looked at this angle. Maintain!
This is one heck of a photogenic spot!
(The after, with her mom.) All made up and ready to go!
This is part one of three. Wowwee a trilogy!
How To Clean Your Sony Alpha Digital SLR Sensor!
Here’s how you do it with a blower:
I would not recommend using any cleaner that touches the sensor unless you are very sure of what you are doing, and you are sure that you are using the right chemicals specific to the sensor.
Shooting A Skipping Flirt!
Wingz invited me for a photo shoot with the skirt flipper and here we go!
All pictures can be clicked on, for larger versions, unless otherwise specified.
135mm F2.2. Jess insists that she is not your typical flower-sniffing model!
I really like that she has all the poses up her sleeve; in a way, I felt kind of spoiled because I didn’t have to tell her how to pose, and she always seems to know which camera to look at! Well trained, Jess! *pat*
Bukit Jalil Park is very photogenic, with lots of interesting backgrounds and themes to choose from. I used a +2 EV exposure from RAW to get her exposed properly while overlaying it on the 0 EV shot.
Also 135mm F2.2 for you bokeh lovers out there.
This is the Malaysia house. For some reason, I really really like the wooden overhanging motif.
Waiting for her lover across the bridge. 2 exposures from one RAW file merged.
Again, 2 exposures from one RAW – unless otherwise specified the JPG versions were used!
I saw this angle and I knew I had to have it! Unfortunately I forgot to include the little arch in the back in later pictures…
Flash from front left, with her head tilted back enough to let some sunlight make her hair glow.
135mm F5.6, with flashes coming from left and right.
Again, left-and-right flash – thanks Kenny for being our voice-activated light stand!
Jess, you should’ve joined us for a hearty, filling lunch…
Here is the difference between a long-range shot at 135mm F7.1…
…and a shot at 35mm 7.1. You can tell where the flash is!
A merge of two pictures to show before-falsies and after-falsies! (No large version of this.)
135mm F1.8 with an APS-C sized crop.
Cloned out a tree in the top-left for this one.
The Peleng 8mm F3.5 circular fisheye makes itself convenient for group pictures. Shot at F16, with 2 exposures from one RAW.
Left to right: JasonMumbles, The Wonder, Wingz, Kenny and Jess!
Upgrading Serially
My hard disk was screaming for more space, and I knew it was time to upgrade. I wanted to upgrade to a Serial ATA hard disk (Parallel ATA IDE hard disks are no longer cool) but my MSI K7N2-L Delta motherboard didn’t support it. So, this is how I upgraded, serially:
Sunday – went to get a 32GB CF card, SATA power cable and SATA controller PCI card. I wanted to get the Maxtor 1 Terabyte SATA hard disk but Digital Mall PJ didn’t have stock.
Why do I have a bias for Maxtor? It all started in my school days when Quantum and Seagate were popular choices. Seagate was a crasher among my friends so I bought a Quantum which still works to today.
I then bought one of those infamous Western Digital 80 GB PATA IDE hard disks with 8 MB cache – mine crashed a few years later, as well as 2 of my colleagues’ exact same model. Baaad Western Digital!
Then, Maxtor bought Quantum. Maxtor was pretty untainted so I last bought a Maxtor 300GB PATA IDE hard disk.
Ironically, Seagate bought Maxtor! So was I doomed or what? I don’t know if buying a Seagate would give me the reliability of a Maxtor or the crap of a Seagate.
So I Googled:
Seagate crash – about 733
Megadaved
Feeling angry, a Dave Mustaine kind of angry.
One of my major, major pet peeves is when people do not credit me for pictures that I have taken for free (and they have taken it for free, too.) If you take it for free, please credit me.
I have to watermark my pictures, not because I’m afraid of it being stolen, but because people just keep forgetting to say where they got it from, so I take the trouble to put the watermark in so they don’t have to do it.
Heck, even if you paid me for pictures, don’t go around saying somebody else took it. (Fortunately, that has not happened.)
Somebody removed my watermark before and posted it. Then in real life he goes “Albert bro, I love your pictures maaan. I love the expressions you catch!” I don’t hate him, but if my watermark is that bothersome, you could either:
1) remove the watermark and put it in the text that accompanies the picture
2) ask me for a watermark-less picture while telling me you’d credit me
It costs me money to take your pictures. It costs me time and deprives me of sleep to process them. It costs me hard disk space to keep them. (And I had to buy a new hard disk, total expenses over RM400.) If I didn’t take pictures of people I probably would not have to get a new hard disk.
See, I care enough about you all that I don’t delete pictures of you! 😀
People are surprised when I point out that I took this or that picture. They say, “I thought you were someone who wouldn’t mind?”
Well, when I post pictures, people DO comment saying “hey I took THAT picture with your camera!” And I edit my post and apologize for forgetting to credit. I am not alone; people do care about getting properly credited!
Major credits to how Asyraf does it on his blog. On the sidebar it says “Photo credit to Stephanie Chong, for the profile photo“.
On a side note, I took my own profile picture on Facebook. Then I remembered that Jason took my blue-haired profile picture on Friendster so I logged in for the first time in years to add credits where credit was due.
Alda, if you’re reading this, it pisses me off each time I read an article about Estranged and it makes it sound like Lionel and you never had anything to do with the band. If it’s just a article about the current lineup I’m cool but if it’s one of those informational historic articles…
Speaking of history, I would raise my keris in anger if I was Hang Tuah/Hang Jebat and found out that I was removed from history books! Same goes for Yap Ah Loy.
Core Leagues
MMM chicken! Another colleague series, this time at Souled Out!
Yvonne our very pleasant secretary.
Lean on me!
Abang Best! Muzzamil was supposed to be a Youtube superstar but I don’t know how that worked out.
Joshua and Pei Feng, both successful inductees into the land of the tilting-screen Sony Alpha 300 dSLR.
smashpOp/Jason shows us how to camwhore. Do note the orientation of the flash head, it is very important!
Farewell Claire!
Cheers mate!
And then on to another farewell, this time to The Apartment at The Curve.
Life gave Emilie a lemon so she decided to fly on a jetplane.
KJ is lemon-eyed!
All pictures above used a full Color Temperature Orange (CTO) gel with a slower shutter speed to bring in plenty of ambient light, and a colder color temperature (about 2700 Kelvin if I remember correctly.)
Moving on to TGI Friday’s in One Utama (nice place, never been there before). Shukri ponders.
This time farewell to Angie but not Faraa in the back (who is always generous with the snacks, too bad I don’t sit in the same office with her anymore.)
The lamps at TGI Friday’s were nice – we could actually touch them and nudge them to cast light on photographed people! Like our own hanging studio lamps!
Shot at 17mm F5.6 on the full-frame Sony Alpha 900. Ultra-wide angles should give sufficient depth of field, yes?
Apparently not, says this 50% crop. Then again, focusing somewhere deeper into the crowd would’ve helped a bit. I used F5.6 to allow some ambient light in since the flash would not evenly light the scene otherwise (unless I bothered to place a wireless flash at the back…)
Let’s get drunk on iced lemon tea!
Ross Hadi, a light (and easy) voice.
Kok Way, who sat himself in between two lights, getting very nice light. Busy dude as all system engineers are.
Having spotted this, Rames sat in the exact same spot.
Colleague Collage
Here’s something you don’t see on my blog regularly – shots of my colleagues!
Farewell Pei Feng!
Farewell Danny! (The Carl Zeiss 135mm F1.8 has an unrealistically shallow depth of field for isolating the subject.)
Farewell Danie, Nurul (but not Rames on the right.)
And as always, we have our farewells at Bumbu Bali. That’s smashpOp in the background. He will be referred to as Jason throughout this post.
Rames loves the window light.
Ee Sze does too!
Thanks Jason for taking this Rembrandt lighting shot! Come to think of it if he shot more to my right there would be more of my right face.
He almost looks like he’s going to Rick Roll me.
Apa cerita bos?
Our creative director Noor, who can be heard blasting the Guitar Hero 3 soundtrack.
We also went to Caff for Jason’s birthday. Interesting outdoor fan!
Zoey the radiant!
Each time I peek over the cubicle (she sits opposite me) I am greeted by her fantastic multi-coated glasses which reflect a very pleasing green. Perhaps it is her choice of desktop wallpaper color that complements her skin tone, I don’t know.
Jason loves the chicken soup. We do, too!
First round on an all-you-can-eat – pepperoni pizza. Light enough for a second round, which I had!
Jenifur is on the phone via 3G.
Joot the expert cake cutter.
Lemon chicken at Mines Shopping Fair, best I’ve ever had!
All thanks to Mr. Shaz.
“Take me to the bridge.”
“Okay, I did, now what?”
Take me to the hair care expert! Shaz makes an appearance at the Bukit Bintang Monorail station!
Last Hari Raya, I went to the village full of house numbers that didn’t make any sense – it looked like you could just number your house any way you like!
Left to right: Me, William, Jason, Faraa the hostess.