In about 2 hours time I will be attending a talk by Zung from The Photoz in Damansara Utama. More information about the talk can be found here.

I will blog about this event pretty soon. Currently am extremely busy with work and after last night's or rather, this morning's 1am teleconference with folks over in Houston, I am just extremely tired and worn out.

As mentioned in my other post, I attended a workshop last weekend thinking that this would be another session whereby the participants would have a chance to shoot models and practice their portrait shots using studio lighting equipment and have the guidance from a world reknowned "si-fu". Unfornately that was not the case and the event turned out that there were over a hundred participants.

Urs Recher standing on the right

Crammed into a small seminar room at the PJ Hilton in State, having a workshop like this is fine in a workshop but when it comes to the actual setup of lights, I really pity half of the crowd sitting behind because everyone at the front were standing up and busy taking photos of the setup. Although there were two models there, not many of us got a chance to take any shots.

To be frank, this was rather refreshing because this was the first time I actually met a reknowned photographer from Europe and it is obvious on their styles of shooting and setup. Urs' work was very tedious and yet he was patient throughout the setup and he can easily spend half the day setting up several studio lighting until he gets the right lighting he wants.


Group photo of the participants

Honestly, after watching him in action, I sort of wished that I participated in his other session instead which focused on product photography. Definitely that would have been more worthwhile unless I start bringing studio lighting to some on-location wedding shoots.

Sometime back in September, I managed to get my two friends to agree that I could be one of their "unofficial" photographer. Being very new towards the whole area of photography and having never shot a wedding before, the feeling of stress and worry kept on creeping to me wondering whether if this is what I want to do. At the end of the day, I thought I was satisfied with my shots and I am looking forward to shooting more weddings in the future.























































Well that is the end of the photos which I am posting here for the moment. You can view the entire photos at my Flickr account here or view it as a slideshow here.

I could say that this weekend was an exhausting weekend, namely from spending most of Friday night awake at the KL Hilton suite (which I will talk about later) to having spent most of Saturday trying to stay awake at PJ Hilton (I just realised that I was in both Hiltons this weekend) and finally a rush through to Ascott KL on Sunday.

Wow, three different hotels. One must be wondering that I am a jet-set executive living the life but unfortunately that isn't entirely true. So let me begin to unfold to you a rather exhausting but interesting weekend.

Friday night began with me rushing downtown towards KL Sentral to join a group of us celebrating my career counsellor's stag night. What turned out to be a bunch of guys hanging out in a small room turned out to a bunch of guys hanging out in a grand suite. Apparently all of the suites they had were overbooked and the gave us a double upgrade. So when I said that the room was huge and luxurious, it was a double story room which was easily 2000+ sq feet.

The living room was grand with double story tall windows and remote controlled curtains. There were two large 46" LCD tvs, one in the living room and one facing the bed. The bedroom took up the entire top floor which means it was the size of the living room, dining room and mini office combined. I really wonder if anyone could really afford to live in that suite.

Anyhow the party started out with most of the guys crunching down on chips and cheezels while the booze began to flow. Most interestingly, the groom to be showed us a new sort of drink which was a mixture of Sambuca and coffee beans. Firstly, pour the Sambuca into a shot glass. Make sure it is at the brim. Next drop in a couple of coffee beans into the drink. Finally, light up the drink and let the fire roast the cofffee bean. Caution, do make sure that before you gulp it down, the shot glass isn't too hot as well. You will get an amazing taste with the mixture.

By the end of the party, some of us got in to our manager's new sports car in which he gave us a whiz through the nearby highways and all I can say is that, "man, I got to get me one of those". It was a Mazda RX8 automatic version producing about 190bhp. Considering that some of you may not think of it as much, there were 4 people in the car and yet he could accelerate with such speed that I could never dream my Vios can do. Anyhow, by the time I got home, I was pretty worn out.

I signed up for Eng Tong's Masterclass Portraiture workshop about 2 months back and after 2 months, it finally arrived. Held at the PJ Hilton, the workshop boasted Urs Recher who gave us a detailed inside with lighting and how to use it in photography. A little information about Urs.

Urs Recher started his career in an advertising studio in Basel, Switzerland, before setting up his own studio in 1995. In 1998 Urs Recher joined Broncolor as head of the company's internal studio and technical adviser. Mr. Recher is responsible for all of Bron's internal advertising photography, product testing and development, as well as the company's worldwide workshop and seminar program.

Urs was featured in the September/October 2006 edition of Digital Photo Pro magazine in an article entitled Perfect Light.

The workshop was different from most of the workshop I attended, it was technical in the sense of light setup and how to properly setup studio lighting to get the effect you want. It was a tedious process and most of the time, none of the participants got to shoot while me being extremely worn out from the night before, all I could do was chug down on coffee and tried my best to pay attention.

During the workshop I met with several pro photographers such as Teng from lunch and Andy during the workshop. Ok, to be honest, I can't remember Teng's actual name so I decided to call him Teng. Teng was a fashion photographer as well as a architecture photographer, he showed me some of his sample photos and were they excellent!

Andy was an extremely friendly guy who I actually met on my trip to Kuching, Sarawak. Well I didn't really meet him but I recognize him as I saw him on my Air Asia flight and noticed that he was a wedding photographer. After chatting with him, his portfolio included more than just weddings but much more. Definitely an interesting dude and friendly!

Earlier this month I was asked to shoot this event held at the Dream Centre. It was a concert and the expected attendance would be in the range of about a 1000+ attendees. To me the first few things that came into my mind was that whether I could cover the event from the beginning all the way to the end (games and food first).

Secondly, how would I fare is such low light conditions considering that I do not have any fast lenses (yes the 70-200mm f/2.8 VR Nikkor lens is in my wishlist) and I would say that direct flash would then spoil most of the lighting ambience in a concert.

Here are the results.


Free gifts that were given to the attendees?


The huge crowd waiting to get into the main hall

Of course before the event started, I started sneaking into the hall before the crowd was let in a caught the performers running through the agenda. It was definitely going to be a fun filled event!


The dancers rehearsing their opening dance

When the doors openeng, everyone literrally rushed in causing a huge stampede. Ok well, they were rather orderly and I am just exagerrating most of it.


Samuel the emcee of the night welcoming the crowd

I was truly amazed at the CHC dance team, they were absolutely incredible and coordinated. Haven't seen this type of skilled dancing since I was back in universities.


First performers of the night, the City Harvest Church Malaysia dance team

Of course it is a concert and what is a concert without the main star of the night? Well, you can't just get a 1000 people to attend a concert if you don't have a star such as Juwita Suwito to perform!



Her singing was awesome as usual and listening to her perform was an amazing experience. This is not the first time I have seen her perform but each and every time I do see her perform, she still manages to amaze me. What talent and she is Malaysian!





The night ended with a great bang! I only selected a few photos to publish here but once I am done with my post processing, I will upload it to my Flickr gallery.

Till then!

I would never have been able to view all of this with my busy schedule or perhaps I just didn't have the time to actually sit down in front of a tele and then watch what is going on. Then again most of the time it would have to be CNN instead of Al-Jazeera. But now, this piece of news gave me a very insightful view of what happened last weekend.



After watching this video, my cheeks definitely turned red from the embarrassment because someone has been caught red handed on live television. Suddenly vision 2020 seems to be not too realistic to me.

And also, apparently, there seem to be some sort of going on in our Dewan Rakyat as usual. No holds are barred there and everyone loves to scream at each other without giving up and without trying to keep a cool head.



I think we have a serious problem, there are so called "pondans" around. Now who is the one who should be declared a "pondan"? The people who dared to make a difference or the person who sits back and criticize every other thing someone elses does.

After two long weekends I have an extreme backlog of photos to post process. Which means I need to be a bit more disciplined with my team and set aside time to post process them which is something I don't really look forward to as I suck horribly at the post processing part. I haven't completed my books yet so I definitely need to split my time between that and the post processing. And by backlog, I have about 2000+ photos to sort out, choose and then process them.

The only good side I can see from this is that it is making me more cautious about my on-camera shots as I try to shoot now in JPEG meaning I would have to make sure that I get all the settings right on-camera rather than tweak them in Lightroom. I have been shooting in JPEG over the weekend and I noticed that there were many challenges especially shooting indoor shots with my current equipment.

Anyway, just to poison you all with a little bit of news, there are some reviews of the new Nikon D300 and Nikon D3 over here as well as high ISO shots from the Nikon D3 here. Finally, some good noise performance at high ISO as compared to some of the ISO 1600 shots I took last night. Oh, I am going to dread all of the noise in my shots!

I finally managed to get around and started working on some post processing the photos I took from the Terry Fox Run. It is definitely hard work since I do have a huge backlog of post processing to do. I even got the help by attending the Adobe Photoshopworld 2007 conference on Tuesday and busy reading through the two books I bought recently.











For more photos, you can check out LensaMalaysia for the official photos. I haven't completed all of my post processing yet so give me some time :)

Two more events coming up this weekend, the follow-up from the LOUD concert last weekend and Juara Cerdik's Concert on Sunday night. This event is going to be so fun as I can't wait to see the kids performing. Hope I manage to cover the event well in my photos.

I don't really think I got sunburned as I was standing under the shaded area shooting the runners at the intersection between the family route and the extended route. There was a booth there set up by Talisman Energy providing water for the runners and being the photographer at the scene, I noticed that people actually ran a couple of laps. One being this old man who could easily be my grandad who did 3 laps barefoot.

Here are some shots of the official photographers for the event. Can you see where I am? (I nicked these photos from the LensaMalaysia forum). All rights reserved to the owner of these photographs.






For more photos do check out the official thread at the LensaMalaysia forums. I have yet to post process mine yet as I had to cover the LOUD concert last night. More photos from that as well!

Alright, it starts at 9am later today and here I am trying to fall asleep. The point is that I am supposed to get ready and be there by 7am later before the briefing for the official photographers. This is going to be a huge thing for me as I do shoot events but this is my first public one. I really do hope my photos turned out right.

More photos to come after the event but of course I would need to complete all of them first for the organizers in about 3 days time. Definitely easy to post process them so fast but I got so many events to cover (one last Friday, two tomorrow at the Terry Fox Run and the LOUD concert at night).For all of those running later today at the Terry Fox Run, do smile at me at the extended route as I will be covering that section. I better bring loads of water as well, unless you are going to give me some :)