{"id":811,"date":"2007-02-12T05:45:29","date_gmt":"2007-02-12T05:45:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/?p=811"},"modified":"2014-06-09T16:28:22","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T16:28:22","slug":"clearing-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/?p=811","title":{"rendered":"Clearing Time!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ferns Album Launch<\/b>, 2nd of February 2007, at KL Jamasia<\/a>. Finally, I’m updating within the same month!<\/p>\n


\nKeng of Furniture<\/a>, shredding the blues for folk-rocker Azmyl Yunor<\/b>. Shanon Shah was on keyboards!<\/p>\n


\nAzmyl, ganas wei.<\/p>\n


\nOne half of Couple<\/b>, lo-fi indie pop darlings. Quite a massive following.<\/p>\n


\n…even if Hana wasn’t playing with them. Eh?<\/p>\n


\nHappy music!<\/p>\n


\nWarren Chan of Ferns<\/b>, dreamy indie pop of the softer, frail variety.<\/p>\n


\nAbigail blows the… uh… keyboard.<\/p>\n


\nAdlin gets a KLue (speaking of which, where the heck is this month’s issue?) and sits down.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to 8th February 2007, Moonshine, A Homemade Music Show<\/b>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The first thing people would notice about Laundry Bar is how the stage had shifted.<\/p>\n

The second is that the comfy Laundry Bar plushies have disappeared.<\/p>\n

The third would be the carpets, left to hang dry on the walls.<\/p>\n

The first and third help to make the sound better, by reducing sound reflections. Okay, maybe it was for Chinese New Year too. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n


\nThe sound engineer gets a more glamorous deck.<\/p>\n


\nMelina (who I shall no longer identify by her main band because she has become a band slut) performing with…<\/p>\n


\nReza Salleh<\/a>, sexy alternative\/modern\/grunge\/R&B rocker.<\/p>\n


\nGuess which band Rahul (only of One Buck Short<\/a>, heh) is playing for!<\/p>\n


\nI let my friends play with my camera, and they set the white balance for me. I went up and took this shot with flash. Gee, thanks! (Your standard uninnovative photographer-wannabe would say, “Next time, shoot in RAW, stupid!<\/i>“)<\/p>\n

Aye, but he\/she is forgetting the days of point-and-shoot and intensive Photoshop post-processing (and how proud he\/she was of it.)<\/p>\n


\nDon’t be lazy, even Levels can fix it. I went further and made it look like a cheap digicam. Anyway, that’s Alex Ang, yet another band slut. Guessed which band this is yet? (There’s also Zaim of Curtis Blues Review on bass.)<\/p>\n


\nAsh Nair<\/b>! Best known for his stint in Malaysian Idol and as one of those CLEO Bachelors.<\/p>\n

I might’ve just discovered an interesting effect; using the wrong<\/i> white balance with controlled flash power to isolate subjects.<\/p>\n


\nI’m not sure if I’ve seen him before.<\/p>\n

And now, for a rant.<\/p>\n


\nAn out-of-focus picture of Kimberly<\/a> and Tan Yee Hou<\/a>‘s friend, shot at 50mm F2.0. Shot by a friend who I won’t identify.<\/p>\n

And this is why the Nikon D40 sucks. (No, this was taken with my Sony A100 with Minolta 50mm F1.4 lens… in manual focus<\/b>.)<\/p>\n

The D40 cannot use auto-focus on Nikkor lenses that do not have motors inside them. Thus, you’d need to get an AF-S or AF-I lens. However, Nikon does not make AF-S versions of their bright primes (at least F1.8), like the popular Nikkor 50mm F1.8D lens! (And when they do announce it, it takes ages to arrive and goes out of stock.)<\/p>\n

Ironically, a bright prime which has narrow depth of field needs<\/b> auto-focus the most.<\/p>\n


\nTan Yee Hou. Shot at 50mm F2.0, which is enough for someone sitting at the same table to be reasonably in focus. Identity of shooter withheld.<\/p>\n

I’ve discovered is that most people can’t do manual focus, even in restaurant lighting! (Or haven’t a clue how to see if something is critically in focus.)<\/p>\n

Yes, I’ve been asking people to try to manual focus, doing random samplings. (I didn’t ask them to half-press and spot the focus-assist dot, though… that would tell them if it’s in focus, which defeats the purpose of the experiment.)<\/p>\n

There was once I met Fazri<\/a> and his friend, Brian<\/a>, and I asked him to manual focus and he got a sharp, in-focus shot.<\/p>\n

Later in conversation, I found out that his father had an Olympus OM-2. Yep, one of those legendary, very quiet fabric-shutter manual exposure manual focus<\/b> film SLRs. Manual focusing must be in his blood!<\/p>\n

(Okay, so later he whipped out a digital SLR, so he already knew what in focus looked like.)<\/p>\n

Imagine, there could be a generation of budget-strapped people getting D40 units with the cheapest first-hand Nikkor lens, the 50mm F1.8D, and taking loads of out-of-focus shots… and not knowing it.<\/p>\n

A D40 could be retrofitted with a manual focusing screen, but because of the matte area, metering would be screwed, overexposing out-of-focus areas. Teehee.<\/p>\n


\nXian Jin<\/a> nails<\/b> the focus on this shot of Matthew. This was on the 50mm at F1.4! F1.4 is much more challenging, but done correctly, the right parts of the picture are in focus, with the bonus of soft focus in the other areas.<\/p>\n

In general, with a small depth-of-field, one should focus one-thirds into the subject. For a face, the eyes are most critical; focus that and the nose and ears will be reasonably in focus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ferns Album Launch, 2nd of February 2007, at KL Jamasia. Finally, I’m updating within the same month! Keng of Furniture, shredding the blues for folk-rocker Azmyl Yunor. Shanon Shah was on keyboards! Azmyl, ganas wei. One half of Couple, lo-fi indie pop darlings. Quite a massive following. …even if Hana wasn’t playing with them. Eh? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,18,19,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-music","category-pictures","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=811"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6273,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions\/6273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}