Category Archives: Travelling

PEN-MLK

Sometime 17th August 2008, I was down in Malacca with my A700! Here’s the Peleng 8mm F3.5 M42 circular fisheye shot through a Kenko 1.5x teleconverter to give a nice diagonal fisheye conversion.

Sup dawg. Friend of Cheddie’s?

Malacca is colorful!

For tea.

Dad out of frame.

Kid out of frame.

66% crop from the Minolta 70-210mm F4 beercan, a perfect travel lens.

St. Francis Xavier’s statue in front of St. Paul’s Church.

The beercan does 1:4x macro in front of Dutch Square.

66% crop.

Buzz off.

Onward to February 2009, when I got the A900 and took it down to Penang. This is where the bus stopped. Serious!

Ah, where I came from.

Templar brought me on the ferry and all the way across the island to Batu Feringgi (however the heck it is spelled – different signs had totally different ways of spelling it!)

The other way would have been the Penang bridge.

Here’s a 100% crop from the beercan!

Sunset.

Safety.

This is absolutely why you must bring a light telephoto to the beach. Not sure if Waifon took this…

…and/or this.

You must absolutely also bring suntan lotion even if you are as fair as I am. Got a nice sunburn and a good lesson from that!

You can bank on that.

I got on the RapidPenang! Not as hard as I thought as the buses seemed quite regular.

Went down to Komtar, and took this bus back since it was there and happened to service the same route. The last time I got in a bus that looked that rickety was in Klang!

Watchman. (Watchmen was an excellent movie!)

Sleeping pregnant lady, on the bus back home.

Tengah Meredang

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Thank you company (again)!

…and now, for more shots from the company trip in Redang (anywhere from the 27th February 2008 to 1st March 2008.)

Yes, it was obvious whose territory we were now in!

The ferry.

The island. No, wait, not this one.

Anyway one thing that really made the islands and greens and skies pop out was the use of my Sony Alpha 700’s Dynamic Range Optimizer set to Level 5, the maximum available. You know what it’s like if you were to shoot the same scene without such a fantastic feature – the island would be dark and the sky would be a bright white.

Ah, here at last!

Laguna Redang Beach Resort. This is the one with the More More Tea Inn (I bought the T-shirt! I thought Summer Holiday was a really nice movie even though they played it on repeat on TV, making sure I could catch both the ending and beginning…)

My colleagues ran right into the waves!

Wet benches. We came at the wrong (or right) time – the waves were coming in, and so the sea was not safe for swimming on subsequent days.

Oh well, what a waste.

And when the sign is red, NO SWIMMING!

Another sign tells you not to feed the monkey. Yes, there is one solitary monkey on this island. Poor, poor lonely monkey.

That’s why they call it Monkey Island.

Splash!

Seafood green is in fashion.

It’s quite something to watch waves crash, while the rocks resist.

Tired with the view, we crossed over to the other resort.

On the way back, we made a pit stop. Interesting prices the other states in Malaysia have!

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Mula Meredang
Habis Meredang

Where’s William’s?

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From here.

This is more fun than Facebook picture tagging! (I didn’t tag these.)

People Of The World!

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Rewind to a common path at the Sarawak Cultural Village!

Wish you were here.

…or maybe she’s interested in someone in the crowd?

This is why Rainforest World Music Festival 2008 was called a mudfest. It was not fun to walk in this gooey mess at all! Nearest to the stage your feet would sink in, and the mud would wrestle your slippers out of your toes (so leave them behind) and you’d sink calf-deep until your feet land on hard rocks and other treasures found in the mud bed.

Enough of that, here’s some clear water!

Su Ann does the “I’m not looking here!” pose.

Liyana (left) and Bianca (right), who claim to be sisters. No shiiit!

Yes, that’s Liyana the cute vocalist from Estrella.

Then I bumped into Ted Adnan and his then newly bought Nikon D3 and his ol’ Nikkor AF-S 300mm F2.8 VR.

This was the first time I’d touched a D3 and a Nikkor AF-S 300mm F2.8 VR. I bumped up ISO, expecting an epiphany – I didn’t get it. It’s not exactly clean but it’s cleaner and has a different noise look. And I swung the 300mm around, sniped some people and got their ears in focus instead despite having approximately aimed at their faces. Operator error, apparently. And I still prefer all my relevant controls to be easily accessible by the right hand alone especially when wielding such an unwieldly lens with my left hand.

David Beckham lookalike spotted!

Obligatory slow-shutter-flash with Kenny Sia and Ing Hui!

This was a much faster way to wash sandals than to line up at the washroom. Yes we sat at a pier and swished our feet in the water.

I thought he was asleep. He was actually taking a picture.

I am beginning to like this house already!

Kid was not posed. Street!

Yummy! Fresh from the uh… furnace.

Yep, they still make them handmade.

Kids love balloons, even ones they can’t reach.

Yep, they dumped more sand into the mud pit. Supposedly, this helped…

And that concludes the series of pictures from Rainforest World Music Festival 2008 that has people in it.

Rain For Us

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Time to rewind, to the 13th of July 2008, in sunny Kuching…

…taking the bus down to Sarawak Cultural Village in Santubong…

…for the Rainforest World Music Festival 2008!

This is the biggest music fest we get down in South East Asia. So I finally got to see what the big hooha was about on this 11th year running. Big props to Waifon for getting the plane tickets (and other unmentionable, or perhaps too many to be remembered) settled!

First act – Kan’id from Sarawak. Holy shit that’s Emir of Throne Away, shredding away! I never knew!

I didn’t notice it was him until I bumped into him at the beach the next day.

Emir: Hey man, did you get any pictures of me performing?
Me: Uh, when?
Emir: We were the first band.
Me: Uhhh… no? I don’t remember seeing you.

Later I went through the pictures and realized it was him up there!

Sape kata tak boleh rock?

Hiroshi Motofuji in a quieter session in one of the big houses.

We plonked ourselves in the longhouses listening to world music.

New Rope String Quartet, a visceral music/comedy act.

Baby’s got a glow stick!

It gets hot in here sometimes.

Oikyataan from India.

Ross Daly Quartet from Greece.

They alternated between two stages – the big one and small one, plus more small performances in the different houses.

Kasai Masai tore the house down (well, not literally…)

Sheldon Blackman & The Love Circle from Trinidad and Tobago.

Probably due to my metal inclinations and short attention span for percussion-based music, world music really does not speak to me. (Of course, it might’ve helped if tuak, a popular local alcoholic drink, was more easily available in the venue as I heard it was in previous years…) So, Beltaine from Poland, with their Celtic progressive sounds, really wiped my feet. (Ironically, feet-wiping was what everybody needed in the crazy mudfest that was the venue.)

Honestly though, would I pay how much I did to go to another Rainforest World Music Festival? Not really… I could get a similiar eclectic feeling out of hearing international bands at the good ol’ Sunrise Mont Kiara Jazz Fest. Plus we wouldn’t all have to huddle and queue for hours for a bus to take us out on the only route out of the Sarawak Cultural Village to Kuching town. With the Sunrise Mont Kiara Jazz Fest I could just cross the road and head to Burger King or the various mamaks in Desa Sri Hartamas!

Of course, the experience of sunny Kuching and the Sarawak Cultural Village is another thing altogether. And that’s a story for another blog entry!

Midnight Cowboy

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This is what happens when you wake up past the stop you’re supposed to get off at, on the last bus of the night.

No entry sir, but that does not stop a creature of the night.

Interesting device.

Still there is space for truckin’.

All with the Sony A700 and Minolta 50mm F1.4.

Mula Meredang

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And now for some shots from the company trip in Redang (anywhere from the 27th February 2008 to 1st March 2008.)

“How long more will this ferry take?”

At last! (Okay this was from the resort next door…)

We went straight for the beach…

…where some got sand-based enhancements.

Victory!

Some of us found love.

Some of us found our way onto the rocks.

Some of us would rather camwhore on the rocks.

Some of us become camera ads.

Rames contemplating a shot.

Me taking a jump shot with 2 wireless Sony HVL-F56AM flashes. Picture taken by my product manager. Spot me in the corner, and spot an unsynchronized colleague!

Spot me in the middle bottom, a little inch of my head. Yes I took that Heroes picture that you see on smashpOp‘s blog.

They can jump, but this can fly!

100% crop using my Minolta 70-210mm F4 beercan. It was very far away!

A squirrel and what he thinks is a wooden acorn.

A squirrel outside my window in a more natural position.

A camwhore in a natural position.

Yes, that’s natural light and the light fall-off is from the roof so it was already there!

A tinge of green in the Alpha’s Kelvin WB setting did the trick. (Yes, even the Alpha 200 has Kelvin WB with Color Compensation Filter, real nifty.)

Elsewhere, the camwhoring continued.

…all the way into the night.

Technology brings light to darkness.

A bunch of them disappeared, and we found them in the next resort watching a Chinese band.

Mmm hmm.

I spy a longing.

Charades, with the theme being movies.

It’s getting late so I’m going…

Alright then it’s time to head into the chalet!

More here:
Habis Meredang

Walking Around Work

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And now for some random crops from around TPM!

I love penumbra – the part where a shadow fades away. It’s quite like the bokeh of shadows!

Birding with the Minolta 70-210mm F4 beercan. I think this was a crop, 25% of the image width.

Same here!

This should be a 50% crop.

And this is not a crop – it’s the Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon 35mm F2.4. Bokeh is pretty good. Sometimes.

But what I love, is how it makes a perfect normal angle to an APS-C camera like my A700!

It gets real tight and close…

This close.

Feelin’ lucky?

Color Trip

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This morning as I left the house, I noticed my neighbor’s shirts hanging outside. They were all bright, colorful and they almost seem to have been arranged in a contrasting manner! Like in the order of pink, yellow, blue, white and black (as opposed to pink, blue, yellow which wouldn’t be as nice.)

Then, on the way to the bus stop, I noticed a patch of grass on the divider that was just really green compared to the greens on the left.

At the bus stop itself, two ladies crossed paths, and they were in yellow and blue green!

I wonder what other strong flat colors I will come across today. I felt like I had a slight brush with the set of Across The Universe. And Evan Rachel Wood is hot; I just saw her in Running With Scissors. Which isn’t so funny when you realize that everyone around you may just have a psychological problem of their own and yet are legitimately sane.

This almost makes me want to paint in color. Canvas is free from the setup requirements of a photograph.