From a long time ago, 21st October 2007, to be exact – KJ, Fazri and I shot KJ doing what he does best – yo-yo-ing all over the front of Pavilion.
Also thanks to Shaz who came by and held my HVL-F56AM flash to be triggered wirelessly from my (then) A700, on a setting of 17mm F13 1/13th of a second, ISO100.
Shots were taken on a cheap tripod in its shortest position.
Finally, I used Photoshop 7 to merge the layers, using layer masks and a paintbrush to quickly ‘erase’ into layers, non-destructively.
All pictures can be clicked on for bigger versions.
Optimus Prime, in Transformers (2007), I could say, “Yeah, you’ve become a lot more badass.”
Now, in Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, I don’t know what to say. It’s not the noble you, it’s not the righteous you. You say lines I never would expect you to say. In a way, you broke my heart.
Michael Bay, you ass, you did it because you could and wanted to make people cry. But we sat there and both YK and me knew very well what was coming on. Probably the most predictable part of the movie. “Hey wait a minute, this seems all too familiar…”
Before Transformers (1986) such a… “plot device” did not happen. Then filmmakers learned from the outlash from this, so they made “plot devices which turn optimistic“. So now many years later it would seem all too predictable and cliche for the “plot device which turns optimistic” to be used again. Maybe this is Michael’s way of saying, “see, I wasn’t such an ass after all!”
There’s no more need to “wipe out the old toy line for the new toy line” – Hasbro as of the 90’s discovered “recolors”, far more than the movie ever had.
Devastator wasn’t all that cool. Though it was nice to have a few brothers in the hood who didn’t get hit or taken to pieces like in the first one.
Frank Welker does Soundwave’s voice, as it was in the cartoon, but it sure doesn’t sound like him! If anything, the Decepticons who had lines in the cartoon, always had very distinctive voices and characters. Even more so for the Autobots – you could always identify an Autobot by their accent and what they said even if you weren’t looking at the screen.
So when the bigwigs stated in interviews that the cartoon movie killed off the characters to make new toys, I wonder if they realized how relatively fleshed-out each Transformer really was!
Watch this parody:
Heavy Metal Fight
Here you can see how strongly each character was defined, that they could make fun of each character. Each voice is pretty much spot on! Ironhide, Megatron, Starscream and Soundwave are supposed to sound like that! Now they are generic macho male voices. We didn’t even get to hear much of Mike Patton (my favorite metal voice ever – heard of Faith No More?)
At least, Skids and Wheelie were voiced by Tom Kenny a.k.a. Spongebob Squarepants. And interestingly, Frank Welker, the original classic Megatron voice, is the voice in Transformers: The Game (based on the live-action movie) but Hugo Weaving does Megatron in the live-action movies.
I didn’t like that they conveniently stole sci-fi capabilities from Stargate: SG-1 and X-Men – the Transformers universe as we knew it, didn’t have such things as robots made of spherical little General Grevious-es and robots that can be pimped faster than they can even transform! Some parts felt ridiculous in the way X-Men Origins: Wolverine did.
Oh, and there’s nothing at the end of the credits. I stayed so that the world would know!
Speaking of which, I am on Twitter! If you can tell what my default username is from the screenshot, you can Follow MeTM. That’s one way you’ll know when I’ve updated my blog.
Now, I really am not a fan of knowing where and what you had for lunch so I might not follow some of you back (with the exception of hot chicks.)
I am also not a fan of posting the content I produce – text, pictures and images, all over – that is why I do not really post any pictures in Flickr or Facebook. I hate having my works in a site, that could be closed down or become totally unpopular and uncool.
Remember Friendster? I used to write these awesome testimonials for friends. Then spammers and viruses infected the network and you won’t find a real testimonial on anybody’s testimonial page anymore. I still keep the testimonials I write for friends in a separate text file in my hard disk!
It’s like, you own it, but you are not guaranteed access to it, or you will eventually find it a lot harder to find what you’ve posted before.
Do you seriously think Facebook will be around forever? Some other site is going to supersede it eventually… but that site might drop some features that Facebook had. Or, Facebook reinvents itself, and you join the “I hate the new Facebook!” page.
And that, my dear friends, is why I post pictures on my blog mostly.
So, in that belief, I will re-tweet my only exclusive content Twitter tweets, here, in case Twitter gets rehauled someday into something we don’t recognize:
I’ll have the Guinness Record of having the shortest gastrointestinal tract. Yes I’m reporting live!
2:31 PM Jun 16th from mobile web
Shah Alamak!
4:33 PM Apr 29th from web
It’s always the right cheek. The left cheek just means that I wanted to, uh, adjust myself.
4:12 PM Apr 24th from web
Ever seen those awards on Flickr? There are a load of very easily impressed people.
10:41 AM Apr 21st from web
I hate that my digestive system has the capacity of a 850cc Kancil.
10:55 PM Apr 19th from web
I joined Twitter today for the sole purpose of coding so websites will have updates automatically shown on Twitter.
4:55 PM Mar 24th from web
Yes, my original Twitter posts are 50% about my tummy. I have six-pack abs but a small capacity stomach. I have a chiselled Greek nose but a sinus-prone nasal tract. You win some, you lose some.
The Sony is fatter but somewhat lighter. It comes with the standard black lens cap (not the cheap plastic cap that comes with the Alpha 330 with kit lens package!)
Note that the Minolta has a built-in retractable lens hood which is so short that it’s quite useless. The Sony however has no built-in retractable lens hood; what you see, is two tubes when extending out to focus closer. It seems that the lens simply does not have any provision for a bayonet-mount lens hood; however you can buy a third-party screw-on hood.
Bokeh is nice at F1.8, and the lens is rather contrasty even at F1.8! Note that the depth of field is shallow with a F1.8 lens, and so her nose is already out-of-focus in the picture.
The lens can focus to 34cm close (measured from the sensor plane.) This makes for an impressive maximum magnification of 1:5x!
Another close-up shot at F1.8!
Again, at F1.8 – the collar is in focus but his shirt is not.
So how does it look like on the A900, on full-frame? Normally, the A900 would automatically enable APS-C crop mode and not allow you to disable it. Unless, of course, you press the lens release button to trick the camera, and shoot in M mode to let the A900 shoot despite it not detecting a lens.
Vignetting really isn’t that bad, amazingly… many suspect that this is a full-frame lens made into APS-C format.
Vignetting only shows when you focus at further distances – here, the lens is focused at infinity. The corners get dark real quick.
The 50mm F1.8 (again, on full-frame hack mode) exhibits very good out-of-focus disc rendition; no harsh bright-line bokeh. It is also contrasty wide open, in fact a bit more than I’d have liked!
This is my Minolta 50mm F1.4 Original. Pardon the person blocking my view. Depending on the background lights I could get a lot of bright-line bokeh from this lens. (The Minolta 50mm F1.7 also has this.) Also note the classic lower contrast at F1.4.
Note that I have edited my previous blog entry about the A330, after another round of trying it with the SAM lenses.
White twins! The Sony 70-200mm F2.8G SSM on the Sony Alpha 700 with a VG-C70AM battery grip and HVL-F58AM flash attached… times two!
Not so twins – left, the Konica Minolta 17-35mm F2.8-4, right, the Konica Minolta 11-18mm F4.5-5.6 DT. Both are Tamron rebadges with Minolta’s secret sauce marinated in.
I used the KM 17-35mm at F2.8 and its closest focusing distance of 30cm, to get this!
You know what they say about big hands… (the Sony Carl Zeiss 135mm F1.8 is dwarfed!)
The cheapest G, the Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6G SSM.
FOCUS!
(This idea was taken from a shot that Siddiq took.)
I used the Sony 70-200mm F2.8G SSM for this, shot at 70mm F2.8.
The Sony 70-200mm excels at bokeh – this is a shot at 200mm F2.8, cropped a bit.
The KM 17-35mm at 35mm does a respectable close-up – here’s the Konica Minolta Dynax 7 Digital, a great body of its time. On it is a classic Minolta 20mm F2.8 Original!
More than a year ago, May 19th 2008 to be exact, I went with Lex, Chong Wai Kong and AhMike for a photo outing to capture… architecture. I don’t remember the exact theme, though I think it had to do with light and shadow, and boy was there plenty of light and shadow!
Chong strikes a pose.
150mm F4 with the Minolta 70-210mm F4 beercan. Delicious bokeh! The green lateral chromatic aberration actually accentuates out-of-focus greens pleasantly.
Thirst!
70mm F16 on the Sony 18-70mm F3.5-5.6 DT kit lens. I like this film-ish color.
120mm F8 on the beercan. Wish I noticed I’d tilted it to the right slightly!
75mm F4 on the beercan.
Obviously, too wide to be the beercan.
So this was the Sigma 17-35mm F2.8-4 EX at 18mm. Not too wide due to the crop factor of my (then) Sony Alpha 700.
130mm F4 on the beercan. A smidgen of DRO applied.
On the way back from Wangsa Maju LRT.
It actually is “WIPE LEFT” and “RANDOM ON” in transition.
Can you use the Sony 18-70mm F3.5-5.6 DT kit lens to freeze rain? Perhaps. I don’t have a kit lens, but the 50mm F1.4 will do for this experiment. I manually focused to 5 meters.
The following are about 39% crops off an A900 at 24 megapixels. That means I cropped an image 1540 pixels wide (making a 100% crop) and shrunk it to 600 pixels wide (thus becoming 39%).
At F3.5, Aperture Priority selects a shutter speed of 1/250s. Flash was not used.
Yes, this was at 50mm, where the kit lens would already say F5.6. However let’s presume you were shooting at 18mm wiiide.
So what if we used a brighter aperture of say F1.7? (not available on the kit lens.)
At F1.7, Aperture Priority selects a shutter speed of 1/1000s. Flash was not used.
As you can see, there is a big difference in the length of the raindrops, due to the shutter speeds used.
So what if we used flash?
At F4.5, 1/200s (well within the flash sync of the A900) and using pre-flash TTL. You can see two elements to a raindrop – the slow shutter (1/200s) giving the long raindrop, and the flash giving the short, brightly lit part of a raindrop.
I should’ve used rear sync flash for this.
Now what if we used a darker aperture?
At F9.0 and using pre-flash TTL. The raindrop streaks from the flashes are longer! Why?
At F9.0, which is 2 stops from F4.5, the flash power needs to increase by 2 stops. However, when you change from say 1/1 to 1/4 power, the flash is not changing the amount of power that comes out… it changes the duration of the flash. Let me say it again:
A flash always fires at full power, it’s just the duration of that full power blast that changes. Confusing? Yeah. That’s why I still call it flash power even though I know it’s not technically true.
So for a 1/1 blast, your flash is actually on for a longer time than if you use a 1/4 blast.
So, at a brighter aperture, your flash will use a smaller power say 1/32 and its duration will be shorter also. This will ultimately make it easier to freeze motion.
So can the kit lens freeze rain? Well, you’d have to hope for a lot more sunlight than this afternoon rain situation, if you want any ambient light at all (or else you’d get the long rain streaks in addition to the short flash streaks.)
Something I just got, the Octopus DM-6, from Studio Zaloon, lets me do this pointless exercise in removing TTL.
Or, the off-camera wired flash for the A900.
I am just waiting for the HVL-F20AM.
Now, for a way to make this into a proper bracket… (I’ve always been able to use this setup before the Octopus DM-6.)
The Octopus DM-6 in action, attached to my Sony HVL-F58AM.
Top left: Octopus DM-6 bottom, ISO hotshoe
Top right: Seagull SC-5 top, ISO hotshoe
Bottom left: Octopus DM-6 top, iISO hotshoe
Bottom right: Seagull SC-5 bottom, iISO hotshoe
Note that both the Octopus DM-6 and Seagull SC-5 have PC Sync ports; as such, you can use the Seagull SC-5 on an Alpha, to trigger other flashes via PC Sync, and you can use the Octopus DM-6 on an Alpha flash, to be triggered via PC Sync.
A rare find, only at Studio Zaloon, Pudu Plaza; who’d have seen this in person? The Sony FA-HS1AM hotshoe adapter. Same thing as the Seagull SC-5, but with a battery, and an internal voltage protection circuit, for old flashes that were over 6 volts and tended to fry unsuspecting camera hotshoes!
This gadget makes it safe.
Also found there, an iISO flash extender! AMAZING! The right side also comes with a tripod mount and ISO hotshoe foot so you can put it on your classic Type A umbrella clamps.
I found this trio of Stofen imitation caps at DigitalsMania, Pudu Plaza. The white one is slightly warming; the orange one does 3600K; the green one is 4500K M9 (a bit more green, and not terribly consistent.)
I’d say the orange one is more commonly used in ballrooms, though I prefer the look of 2500-3200K myself. 3600K I’d guess is a half CTO (Color Temperature Orange). The full CTO flash gels I have are rated 3200K.
