What I Did Today

I grabbed an old guy's penis, cleaned the glans ("turtle head" in Chinese), chucked a whole lot of gels up the urethra, then inserted a foot-long rubber tube into it.

After that, I injected a bit of water to fill up the bladder. And when I pulled out the syringe, some fluids sprayed onto my arm.

I hope that it's the water.

Melbourne - A Snapshot

Three things about Melbourne.

• The green tram (and its failing ticketing system).
• A multicultural society (you can see a white man, a Malay lady, a young Asian lady etc, all sharing a tram peacefully)
• The beer belly.

Ying En - My Niece

As you might have noticed, I have been doing lots of portraitures and not much of other genres since I got my new camera. Will try to venture into other genres when I have some free time.

Featuring in this post is Ying En (my eldest sis' daughter):

See a camera there? That's your uncle.


So you wanted to walk?


Should we let her walk on the road?


Don't be afraid, it's not too hard...


That's it!


A closer look (one of my most favourite pic so far)


Okay, now you want mummy to carry you. What caught your glance there?


Ahh it's dad gesturing to you.


But, but... You don't like to be carried by dad, do you?


Oh come come my dear, stop crying, we shall just take this family photo and go home okay? :)

Technical note: All taken with Canon 50mm f/1.8 II.

General Election 2008

I have been a bit busier than usual, so I haven't been writing much in this blog apart from the occasional photography ramblings. However, I guess my work amount is peanuts compared to that of the 1000+ politicians and their helpers campaigning for the Malaysian General Election to be held on 8 March. They ARE the real busy people and are doing the REAL business.

At the moment, I don't really have time to write a lengthy comment about this coming election, and when I do write about it (if at all), I expect the length to be rather unsavoury for most people.

If you are interested to find out more about this election, please visit this fantastic Election 2008 Resource prepared by tvsmith. This web page links to all the information you need about this election, and it gives equal coverage for both the incumbent government and the opposition. Do pay attention to the blogs section, there are a few blogs which I read regularly.

Pei Yun - My Niece

From:
Flickr - Pei Yun Portraits

It's quite challenging to take pictures of my niece running about and not stopping at any second. While it seems that she posed for all the pictures, she didn't. It's all spontaneous.

For the technically inclined, among others, there are a few things that make indoor kid shots possible:

1. AI-Servo mode, which is just the fancy name of "continuous focus". It's one of the good things about DSLR - this mode makes the camera focus all the time on the moving object, and thus ensures an in-focus and sharp picture.

2. The relatively faster autofocus. It's "relatively faster" because my current lens isn't the best performer in terms of focus speed. But it's still leaps and bounds faster than a compact camera. With my niece running about, it still manages to get the focus right 70 to 80 percent of the time.

3. External flash. It's a must-get for indoor shots, especially those that involve moving subjects like kids. If you don't have an external flash, either rely on built-in flash (with unsatisfactory result), or forget about taking photos of kids at play.

Comments and criticism are welcome. :)

Of Photos and Photoshop

Have you ever looked at a good picture, and upon knowing that it's been photoshopped, said that "Chehh like that hor"?

I had. In particular, I have more than once been disappointed that in real life, travel destinations look blander and less interesting compared to pictures in travel websites. I have always blamed photoshop for that. However, as I learn more about photography, I am starting to see the other side of the coin.

I learnt that every single photo, no matter how original and pure, must have been photoshopped by the time it appears in front of you.

When we took film photographs in the past, we thought that our pictures all turned out bright and colourful. But that doesn't mean that the colour and exposure of our pics must have been right in the first place - the people in photo shops have been "photoshopping" colours, brightness and levels for decades before Adobe Photoshop came along. That's precisely where the software's name came from. All your pictures in the good ol' albums, regardless of its quality and age, had been photoshopped.

How about digital pictures, one might ask. In most digital cameras, the pixels of a picture are recorded with digital sensors, processed by a processor and converted into a jpg file. The quality of the picture coming from the process is largely dependent on the quality of the lens as well as the processor. When I visited St. Kilda beach with my friends last time, when I compared the same picture (e.g. group picture) taken with different cameras, I noticed that my Canon A70 produced much more vibrant colour out of the camera. Colour, contrast, saturation, sharpness etc, they have everything to do with the lens and the processing of the camera.

So my point is, every picture (apart from professional unprocessed RAW files, but that's another story) has already been through some level of processing, sharpening, colour-changing, white balance tuning etc. Some photo-purists take pride with not photoshopping pictures to the extent that they have this holier-than-thou attitude towards the whole practice of photoshopping. I feel that it's a bit ignorant for them to do that. Yes it's a good thing that your pictures are already beautiful straight out of the camera, but that doesn't mean that you are naturally better than people who do more post-processing. Probably unbeknownst to them is the fact that their cameras have already done a fair amount of "photoshopping" in the 'original" version. Unless you are talking about composition (which can't be changed with photoshop except simple cropping), or you are comparing two photographers using the same camera system, it's hard to make any meaningful comparison based on the usage of photoshop alone.

Also, with regards to the "cheating" travel photos - I came to term with it with the realisation that they were never meant to paint the actual picture for us anyway. Photos are now more a form of art than an item of realism.

To finish off, I will show you one of my recent efforts in improving a photo with photoshop. The techniques and results are nothing to rave about, but it's just a concept I am trying to get across.

This is my mum and dad. We were happily shooting some random portrait pictures in Ampang recreational park, Alor Star. We saw this stone structure which is perfect to sit on, and I snapped away with 3 shot-per-second continuous bursts to capture their expressions. This is the original picture that I got (actually already modified a bit of exposure, but not much different from the real original). The colour is not too great, but my dad's glance at my mum is priceless. It's not staged at all, it's one of the pictures chosen from the 20+ shots taken in 10 seconds.

In my attempt to make this picture stand out more, I changed this picture to sepia at a click of a button. Not too special but looks more nostalgic now.

I tried black and white instead. Black and white pictures are good at capturing contrast and is occasionally used to remove unnecessary distraction from colours in the picture. I preserved the original composition, but cropped a little bit and performed channel mixing. Channel mixing is a slightly more complicated way of turning colour pictures into black-and-white, and it's able to manipulate contrast to our desired effect. With the right setting, channel mixer produces better looking picture than the ones you get with one-click change-to-black-and-white function. Learn more here, or google "channel mixer".

This is my third, and final attempt at the picture. I cut out the legs and the background trees, leaving the limelight to the two of them. For those who are technically inclined, I also did some extra colour-burning, sharpening and level adjustment. This picture will not win me any award, but I like this picture so much that I am setting it as my wallpaper and planning to get a large printout for them. The full size gives you an even greater impact. Also, do compare this with the original pic above - it's definitely an improvement.

Ahh the joy of photoshop.

[frank2c] Why? Why? Why?

It gives me warmth inside but frustrates me at the same time.

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