Yesterday afternoon, Jeremy, Ibah and I drove out to Putrajaya in hopes of catching a few good landscape shots. Unfortunately there was a barrage of torrential rain that made that impossible, and when the rain died down, the remaining storm clouds blotted out the sun. But that’s when a more brilliant Plan B arose. We found a perfect spot to loosen up, stretch out, and jump around with flying kicks and such! And I felt like a happy little kid again.
Everybody loves Kung Fu fighting! And they were as fast as lightning! - That song is officially stuck in my head now. And I’ve got the full version of this photo up on my Flickr account.
Setting up the shot
Setting this up was actually quite easy if you know the fair basics of light. We waited until the storm clouds covered up the sky enough so that we could get a decent exposure of the sky without blown out highlights using a fast shutter speed, and I used my speedlight to illuminate Ibah. I had the camera shutter set to 1/500 and the aperture set to f/8. We positioned Ibah in front of the brightest part of the sky to get that nice dramatic effect, and the rest was all just timing!
Meljean first posted a link to Margaret Cho’s thoughts on the Virginia Tech shootings, and the issues she touched upon really hit close to home for many of us from “other” countries.
It’s been ages since I’ve last went to a real concert, but when I got a free invitation from FYI to watch NOFX live, I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. So off I went with my friend Helen into the middle of KL yesterday evening. We took the monorail and arrived at the scene just a bit before their performance began. I didn’t have my real camera with me unfortunately, so all I had was the crappy phone camera in the pocket of my cargo pants. Note to self: need to buy a decent compact digital camera sometime.
Watching a concert in Malaysia is so much different than watching one back in the states mostly due to one big reason: in Asia, the majority of people are short, so even from the back I was able to see the stage clearly! The band members make an appearance, the crowd cheers, the music starts pounding relentlessly right off the bat and the crowd energy thickens.
Helen and I swam through the crowd and got closer to the front where things were much wilder and more colorful. It actually was a real punk rock scene complete with crowd surfing and a frenzy of energy and movement at the mosh pit. Some of the jokes and satire were not completely understood by the crowd, but of course that is to be expected as this place isn’t quite America. Overall, it was an intense hour of fun but my one main regret was that I didn’t pit myself completely in the moshing crowd. There will always be a next time though!
Lately I’ve had a mad rush of ideas going through my head with only a limited amount of time to try them out. Last night, I managed to squeeze in enough time to play around with one of my ideas and combined elements of illustration with photography to create something stylized. I’ve called it Release and I have the full version of it posted at my Flickr account.
Aside from adding in the light swirls and a bit of toning, there was very minimal photoshop usage. The photograph you see is exactly the way it was right out of the camera. I’ll now talk a little bit about the overall process.
Taking The Photograph
As usual, I had my 50mm lens attached to the camera, and I used a single external flash for the main light source. The flash strobe was positioned a foot away, slightly below waist level and pointed upwards at an angle towards the guitar. I used a fast shutter speed that could sync with the flash, and in this case the shutter was set at 1/250. My aperture was set at f/11 so that there would only be enough light to illuminate the foreground elements (the guitar and me) and keep everything else black. And that was it (with a bit of experimental adjustment of course)!
Adding The Illustration
The swirly bits of illustration were created separately using Illustrator. There are a number of good tutorials out there explaining the process of creating the swirl patterns, and I’ve found that Veerle has a very simple and cool swirl illustration method that she documents on her blog. Once the illustration is finished, I then import it into Photoshop and position it to my liking. I punch it up a bit by giving it some lighting details for the glow effect through different layers, blend modes and gaussian blurs.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little experiment of mine, and I guarantee that there will be more in the near future whenever time permits!
A couple of days ago, I received an e-mail from Miemo Penttinen who cordially invited me to join a design competition for the new Nokia N76 phone. He’s one of the organizers for the design contest.
The Official Word
Here’s the deal: You create your own unique design for the Nokia N76 multimedia computer, and if the contest site’s viewers rate your design to one of the top 10, you win a Nokia N76 with your design on it. The design-phase of the contests starts now, you can see the designs on the campaign site starting from 3rd of May - and the designs can be entered until the end of the contest in August.
It’s been awhile since I’ve entered a design competition, so this looks like a wonderful opportunity for me to flex my skills again. For anyone who’s interested in joining, check out the official website.
And yes, you can submit more than one design. Best of luck to all those competing!
As I’ve perused over the collection of photos that I have taken in the past year, the most notable ones have always been portraits and abstracts. And in both cases, the 50mm lens has always been the jewel of a companion. It’s small, it’s light, it’s fast, and it let’s me really concentrate on my composition first and foremost. I’m quite happy with what I have, and in terms of gear, I really don’t need anything else. I’ve realized that my art through photography is how I see the world through the 50mm focal length.
My Sunday started out quite nicely in the morning and I enjoyed the misty landscape and the fresh morning dew smell (although there were moments of doo-doo smells along the highway, probably from cows). I met up with Helen and together we headed off to Ikea to browse and shop. We had a nice lunch after that and another friend of mine managed to join us as well. I took out my camera for practice and took a few shots of Jing Ying as the sunlight streaming through the window cast a very lovely glow. I love catching the casual glimpses of someone while they are in a mode of conversation, or thought, or even day dreaming. It’s those little moments that happen in between pauses, when that little glow within a person shows itself just long enough for you to notice. There is something to be said and admired about the professional studio setups to give portraiture an extra edge, but in my opinion, nothing beats the candid intimacy of simplicity.
It’s been awhile since I’ve touched the camera or made any illustrations. For quite sometime now, there has been a lull in my creativity and there were very few moments of inspiration. Perhaps it is due to work. Or perhaps it is due to the fact that I have not had the chance to go anywhere or the chance to charge up my creativity. But recently, I’ve began to feel a subtle flow of creativity coming from somewhere and it is now a matter of building up the momentum continuously. I’ve been collecting pieces of the puzzle and finding ways to put them back together again. Small things have been falling into place and once more I am feeling that there is room to let my art grow to another level.
Semi random musings aside, I had a good evening with my friend Ibah earlier this evening after work. After a harrowing journey through traffic and suffering through moments of indecision, we finally landed upon a pizza place not too far away from my office. Conversation was of course always interesting, and the delicious pepperoni pizza sated our stomachs completely, topped off with some iced lemon tea.
I picked up my camera after what seemed to be ages and just started shooting things at random. It was a nice familiar feel, to have the shutter release button rest underneath my fingertip and to feel the camera body grip in my hands. My most favorite optical companion, the 50mm lens was ever present and I started shooting portraits of Ibah for practice. And just for fun, I decided to put two images side by side to illustrate the hopeless levels of vanity certain photographers have. The left is of course my friend Ibah at the dinner table, and the right is… well, no explanations are really needed for that one. 
Spontaneity is a wonderful thing. And I feel a personal art project coming.
Batman, beware! A simple integration formula could very well spell demise for your disguise!
Out of all the random things that I’ve spotted on the net, I think the following pretty much describes our livelihood with such succinct clarity.
I need to find a way out of this metaphoric traffic jam. And to cap it off, a quote from the comedian Chris Rock:
“You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn’t want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named Bush, Dick, and Colon.”
This past week has had quite a fair share of interesting and entertaining moments, and since I haven’t shared too much of it, I’ll take the chance this time to share the more memorable moments that I’ve managed to photograph.
Last Saturday was the 1st anniversary of the Kuala Lumpur Flickr group, and about thirty of us managed to get together to socialize and share our photographic experiments, adventures and bits of raunchy humor as usual. Towards the latter end of the evening, a small group of us strolled around the city to take some night time shots and annoy each other.
We found ourselves in a reflective hallway filled with thousands of lights and felt like little children again with our lightbox toys. Here’s my lovely friend Janice having a fun moment of her own.
I took a few abstract shots of the room as well and played around with long shutter speeds. And after a few attempts Janice sums it up succinctly by saying, “They look like electro sperm!” Indeed they do!
The next few days were quite busy with work, but I did manage to catch up with my dear friend and neighbor Fatini over tea. She also wanted me to demonstrate a few photography techniques, particularly about using the flash gun to do controlled single source lighting with a black background. So I took a test shot of her and this was the result.
And as for today, I spent the first half of the day helping my homegirl Helen with her flash presentation on fashion. I haven’t done any actionscript programming in awhile, so it was nice to refresh my memory and I also managed to create a cool thumbnail scrolling module from scratch! And yes, that pretty much makes me an all out interactive media geek. Of course, she was also kind enough to prepare an awesome meal of extremely flavorful beef burritos!
Later that day, I went over to the home of my grandparents where a birthday celebration was hosted for my little cousin Farhan. The little handsome fellow turned four today, and this was my favorite photograph of him, getting a little sweet kiss from our little baby cousin Lisa. And as usual for any big family event, my stomach is completely stuffed and sated with all sorts of edible goodies.
Life is good.