{"id":884,"date":"2007-06-01T04:57:25","date_gmt":"2007-06-01T04:57:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/?p=884"},"modified":"2015-02-18T07:52:28","modified_gmt":"2015-02-18T07:52:28","slug":"click-outside-the-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/?p=884","title":{"rendered":"Click! Outside The Box"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you ever woke up to a nightmare?<\/p>\n

No, not wake up from a nightmare. Wake up to a nightmare.<\/p>\n

I was supposed to be at KL Performing Arts Centre for the Sony Click! Ron Yue photography workshop at 10am, 19th May 2007. I set a few alarms on my Nokia N70 from 7:20am onwards.<\/p>\n

That morning, I woke up without the help of an alarm, and looked at my phone. 7:23am, it said. Not bad, I thought to myself. I pressed the Stop button to disable the alarm that showed on screen. (It had stopped ringing.)<\/p>\n

It didn’t stop.<\/p>\n

I pressed every other button; it was not working.<\/p>\n

I pressed the Power button. It would not turn off.<\/p>\n

I opened the back, removed the battery, put it back in, turned it on and entered my PIN number.<\/p>\n

It said 10:34am!<\/p>\n

My phone had never froze on me before. I could drop it from waist level and it would be intact. It would only ever hang if I tried to play certain Symbian games. I would have to do<\/b> something to get it to hang.<\/p>\n

I rushed, grabbed a cab, and got there by 11:10am. I was too late to register for the Click! outdoor session (which was also a photo contest) and missed a big chunk of Ron Yue’s talk. He is one of the National Geographic freelance photographers.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, some participants in the outdoor session went missing so I could enter. If not, I’d probably idle my time away in Ted Adnan’s flash workshop<\/a> (which I had already gone for and won a prize<\/a> while at it.)<\/p>\n


\nWe were to go around and shoot KLPAC, and submit 5 pictures of each category. All unedited, unlike this picture, of course.<\/p>\n


\nI stuck my Peleng 8mm F3.5 fisheye<\/a> inside an exhaust fan.<\/p>\n


\nHmmm, which wide-angle lens should I use?<\/p>\n


\nBelieve it or not, the fisheye did nothing to the curviness of the lake.<\/p>\n


\nWhat The Duck?<\/a><\/p>\n


\nThe further away the object, the less distorted. Pointing it into a pond would give more distance and make it seem normal. Now, if only there was a netting on it, to show the combination of distorted and barely-distorted objects.<\/p>\n


\nSee the forest for the trees.<\/p>\n


\nOh, and of course, some mandatory geeking. I met a guy with the Minolta 85mm F1.4!<\/p>\n

It didn’t have the same 3D pop and near-out-of-focus sharp rendition the Carl Zeiss 85mm F1.4 had. I would prefer the Carl Zeiss look, though this is good too.<\/p>\n


\nI also saw the DiCain vertical grip. It looks a lot better in real life! A lot of people bemoan the fact that the Sony A100 does not have a vertical grip as an accessory. This is a third-party one. It does not come with the standard right-hand interface (knobs, buttons) but has a shutter button.<\/p>\n

I wasn’t used to the shape though. Maybe I was holding it wrongly, but I felt it was mildly nudging into my hand. I put my Tamron 1.4x teleconverter, Minolta 70-210mm F4 beercan and Sony HVL-F56AM on for maximum load. It felt comfortable.<\/p>\n

But really, a vertical grip is only used to:<\/p>\n

– impress others with how big your camera looks
\n– add extra batteries
\n– support the weight of lenses more than 1 kilogram (the beercan and all Sony Carl Zeiss lenses are light in comparison)<\/p>\n

I always carry two batteries with me so I don’t need a vertical grip.<\/p>\n

The Sony A100 does feel heavy whenever the HVL-F56AM flash is attached, so I usually disconnect it and hold it up with my left hand like the Statue Of Liberty. This makes it very convenient<\/b> to go from landscape to portrait orientation. Plus I can turn leftwards or rightwards without worrying about realigning the flash head to point up.<\/p>\n

As for using the left hand, well… I zoom using my right-hand pinky finger. Fortunately, all Minolta and Sony lenses have the zoom ring nearer to the body. My kit lens is particularly light and easy to pinky-zoom.<\/p>\n

In the rare occasion that I need to use my left hand, I just slide the flash back on its mount on the camera. The quick-release system Minolta invented works wonders!<\/p>\n


\nIt was probably the biggest gathering of Sony Alpha users! (And some Konica Minolta 5D users, too.) We quickly tried to flood Pentas 2 of KLPAC with our Sony HVL-F56AM wireless flashes! At one point I think there were six out.<\/p>\n

I saw the same guy who bought the Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 A-mount at Pudu Plaza (that’s Alpha mount) at the workshop. He won something.<\/p>\n

There was a dude with a huge bag with wheels, and in it, the old-school Minolta 28-135mm F3.5-4.5, with manual focus macro switch on the 28mm end of it. I saw 2 beercans. I saw the Minolta 50mm F1.7.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you ever woke up to a nightmare? No, not wake up from a nightmare. Wake up to a nightmare. I was supposed to be at KL Performing Arts Centre for the Sony Click! Ron Yue photography workshop at 10am, 19th May 2007. I set a few alarms on my Nokia N70 from 7:20am onwards. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-pictures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884","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=884"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8781,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions\/8781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}