After a whirlwind of workshops and conferences, I am finally back in PJ, back in the office and pulling in my usual work. Yes that means concentrating fully on my day job and taking less time to view photos online or even go on Facebook (except for the occasional checks).

This will be a quick post as I will be trying to put up more photos here as I try to shoot a little more to continue to improve on my skills and to train my eye to pay attention to the little details.



I shot this image whilst I was at Life College over the weekend. I know there was a sign that said "Do not open the windows" but hey, it was already open :P. By the way, I also have proof of who opened the window. Lets just say that you shouldn't do things like that when you are surrounded by loads of people with cameras around.



Here is a shot of a beautiful girl I shot while I was having dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Sri Hartamas. Isn't she gorgeous?



And when she wasn't looking, I quickly took this shot of her which was a little closer than the previous shot. Next time I would definitely want to take more portrait shots of her. She is just so beautiful!

Anyway, this post is meant to be a quick post. A little excited to watch Iron Man tomorrow night. Until then, tata!

I just had a fantastic day at the Charge Up Conference at Life College at Jalan Tandang. Why fantastic? Because I am learning more and more about photography. What made today even more fantastic is that I participated in my first "No chimping" contest. Basically "No Chimping" is a method where we shoot in manual mode and take photos with our Digital SLR without looking at the LCD monitor.

Yes that's right, all you film camera junkies out there would probably give me that "now you know how it feels" look and yes, it was definitely challenging. What made it even more intense was that we were given about 2 hours to shoot only 36 shots and we had to select our best 3. It wasn't easy at all but I tried to have a story behind my shots.



In the shot above I wanted to depict a red stop sign from going in to the 4D Toto shop. I have to thank Luke for helping me to look out for traffic while I stood in the middle of the road trying to nail the shot. I needed a higher angle to get the larger sign.



In the shot above I wanted to let the grey area depict that of an industrialized area or perhaps something that is urban and then show the bright contrasting colours of the flowers peeking through the railings.



I saw this interesting sign whilst exploring PJ Old Town as I walked across the pedestrian crossing.



I saw these flowers at the florist and took a quick snapshot. Really glad that although I got some weird stares from the shopkeeper, she didn't chase us away.



This is a shot of Julian outside the training room. The competition required us to take 36 shots and by the time I arrived back at Life College, I had only 20 shots! Quick shot of him using the hallway lighting to nail this shot and still get some catch light in his eyes.



The last photo was rather interesting as this was the door handle to the men's toilet at Life College. Looks like someone was a real "Heroes" fan.

As I walk away from the 1st day of the Charge Up conference, I can't help but remember about Ps. Sandra Chin's sermon. What would we be without our equipment? We need to separate ourselves from our skills and realize that we are children of God.

Its Saturday and I am completely worn out from the week. I completed my training at IBM at Bandar Utama and on Friday I was completely surprised when I received a certificate for completing the course, DB2 LUW for SAP, and on top of that, the trainer, Jeremy from the IBM Development Centre in Toronto gave me a 1Gb thumbdrive for being able to answer the most questions during the Thursday session.

So now you know that I was busy at a workshop and then needing to log online to my client's VPN and check my emails. Hence the delay in getting some of these photos out. I hope you enjoy viewing them. Here are more of the shots I took in Penang during the "From Ordinary to Extraordinary" workshop.



Here is a shot of Reynaldo indoors before we headed out to our on location shoot. He wasn't looking at me as he was looking at Louis at the time but I do like his suit. Stripe suits are slimming!



From the shot above I know that I needed to step a little more to the left to capture them with a completely blue background.



I thought that this shot was a little more on the funky side. I find it difficult to try to get the shot with my 85mm lens when everyone else was using their 70-200mm lens. It was only after this shoot that I learned the term "Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness". Next time I shall be moving my big butt in front of those with the 70-200mm and get my shot and then tell them, "Aiyah, so sorry :P".



To me at the moment in time it was just another shot with someone posing with interesting props. Now as I posted this up, it came to me as a good representation of how Malaysian drivers are. Constantly waiting in "No waiting" zones and constantly parking at "No parking" zones. How ironic.



An attempt of a glamor shot with a touch of macho-ness. Notice that the tie was caught in the wind. Thank God for the wind as it was rather hot that day. Yup, this was shot outdoors as with the other photos taken here.



Max and Vicky spending a little intimate time together with at least 15 photographers breathing down their necks. Well not literally but I really wonder how it would feel at the other end of the camera. The shot can be improved of course with a little better composition.



Managed to execute this shot with the motion blur I wanted but I was so engrossed with the effect that I totally forgot about the background. Funnily, I was reading about this in a blog post, about how an amateur and a veteran shoots and how the newbies would miss out some areas like the background and the framing and concentrate on the subject while veterans would take everything into account. Yup, I totally fall into the amateur category.

Thats it for today folks. As I find the time to run my other errands, I will post up more photos up here soon.

Well, not all of the photos are up yet but I did manage to export them out of Lightroom and added the border and watermark on Photoshop before uploading them to my blog. Decided to upload them straight to my blog rather than upload them to Flickr and then copy the codes over here.


First photographer I know to have his own notebooks :)

Took this shot when we were presented with notebooks to write down our notes from the lectures. I would have loved to use this notebook but I brought my trusty "Photography Notebook" along with me to Penang. This notebook contains a few other notes from my other photography workshops which I attended.

Presenter with an Apple?

I am glad that I finally gotten my Macbook Pro after waiting for a month for it to clear SIRIM and arrive at my supplier's doorstep. A huge thanks to Siva who helped me to order in the Macbook Pro and also bearing with my constant SMSes, asking when is the stock arriving. From the shot above, Louis is explaining about what the slide shown on the wall contained and what it meant. Want to know more? Sign up for his workshops here.

According to Louis, my Macbook Pro wasn't well "trained" enough and he offered to give me his well "trained" Macbook Pro and swap it with my "untrained" one. Too bad Louis, I am going to train mine in my own special way :D


Show by example!

Here we have Louis explaining to the models on what he intends to do with them. It was good that Louis and Arden hired models who were not experienced in posing. This really made us work hard to get them to pose properly!


Shooting with a D3 and a 70-200mm f/2.8 VR lens

Noticed that the white balance of both the shots above this and the previous ones were different? That is due to the light coming in from the window versus the yellow ambient room lighting. What I learned here is that you don't need a fantastic location to create wonderful shots. Look at all the equipment everywhere in the room. And yet, I managed to steal a shot with my 85mm lens.


Using my Nikon D300 and 85mm f/1.8 lens


Using my Nikon D300 and 85mm f/1.8 lens (portrait shot)

No studio lighting was used to get these shots and we relied heavily on natural lighting. A round of applause to our wonderful models for that session, Samantha and Reynaldo. Appreciate you guys tolerating a newbie like me during the workshop!

Looking at the time now, I am already late for cell group. Hope to get more photos up here soon.

More to come soon.....

to be continued...

Yup, two days have passed since I last updated my blog and although I would love to publish the photos I took over the weekend at the "From Ordinary to Extraordinary" workshop, I need to find the time to even select them. I took quite a number of photos that day and I just need to sort through them. My priority right now would be to send out the group shots to the participants and also to the models who played an important part.

At the moment, still no pictures up yet because I am at yet another workshop. Nope, it is not a photography related workshop but more towards work related. The bright side is that I don't have to travel to Cyberjaya for the next couple of days (the workshop is at IBM in Bandar Utama) but the down side is that I lose out on my travel claims. The sacrifices I make in the pursuit of knowledge :P

Anyhow, today was an interesting day as I learned a lot about DB2 and how it interacts with SAP. Keat Seong played an important part to me today as I had little experience as a Basis Engineer and that was where he came in. Of course not without his antics of trying to copy over the instance to another client. Because I was at training the entire day, I had little time to check my work email so I gave my weekly badminton session a skip and concentrate on my work instead.

See, you can't really blame me for not posting up any photos here.

Anyway, the Charge Up! 2008 conference is coming soon, next week to be precise. Really looking forward to it and I need to practice shooting this weekend as well or else I might forget what I learned. Baby steps is what I need to take.

Until the next post, unless extra work suddenly falls on my lap.

Having flown all the way from KL to Penang just to attend the “From Ordinary to Extraordinary workshop”, I was totally psyched out because I couldn't control the joy and excitement within myself. Why was I excited? I wanted to reach to newer levels of photography and having just started photography from scratch a little over a year ago, I just wanted to improve myself not just as a photographer but as a wedding photographer.

The first session started at 5.30pm, Friday evening and it was awesome! Although I wished that we had more time (of course I wanted more time to absorb), I had to make sure that I was a sponge and took plenty of notes. Hours just flew by and I didn't even noticed that the time passed so fast. I met some pretty amazing people in the workshop as well.

Initially I really thought that I might be one of the only participant to come from another state, but there were 4 others from other states! Eugene and Stevie drove up from KL on Friday (this really made me wonder why did I take a flight??) whilst Clement flew in from Sandakan, Sabah and Bernard flew in from Kuching. I was totally blown away by the level of enthusiasm the other participants showed.

By the time the first session ended, the local guys brought us to New Lane to eat some delicious local cuisine. I did as what every other tourist would have done, I ordered “char koay teow”, ate some oysters fried in egg and feasted on some awesome “satay”. Not only was the food delicious, but Sehu voluntarily paid for our dinner. Sehu, thank you so much for the treat. If you ever drop by in PJ/KL area, I will gladly return the favour.

George, who is another participant of the workshop also did me a kind favour and gave me a lift back to the apartments I am staying in. I knew he really went out of his way to give me a lift home and it wasn't a quick drive but a 20 minute drive. George, thank you so much for the lift and I really appreciate it. Whenever you are down in PJ/KL, give me a buzz and I will buy you a meal!

Frankly, I wondered if I did shoot some photos of the session and of what conspired throughout my day, it would tell a better story, no? As what I learned in this session about photography, I also want to bring my writing to a higher level. No, I will not become a fantastic writer overnight as well but if I take baby steps, the same baby steps which I want to achieve in my next shoot, I would be overjoyed.

So yes, no photos will be posted up with this post as I try to paint a picture of what happened throughout the day using just words. Also you might notice that I am not mentioning much of the contents of the workshop. If you really want to know more about it, I strongly suggest that you sign up for the workshop. It is truly worth all the money it costs and on top of that, I am paying even more by flying to Penang, travelling around by taxi and incurring more and more costs (also taking into account that I am getting poisoned by the rest to get a Nikon 70-200mm lens).

I fully agree with what Louis told me, I will not put a price tag on education because learning is lifelong and I cherish every little bit of knowledge and experience I can absorb.

Until the next post, I need to get some rest. Ok, I am sitting at the local Starbucks here in Penang sipping on some apple juice while churning this post up. I promise that my next post will have more pictures in it.

Ah the 11th of April has finally arrived. It didn't really help since I was stuck in the office last night with some catching up to do (I will be away the whole of next week attending another workshop). Yesterdat was the day that I began my hectic schedule.

Well its not like this week has been a walk in the park. With many deadlines to meet and constantly being at meetings in work, I have been leaving the office late at night that I didn't have the time to make it for cell and even my Thursday night golf lessons which sucked. Last weekend was a dream as I had my company's annual dinner and dance last Friday night and guess what? I won a Nintendo Wii during the lucky draw. This was my first ever lucky draw win in my life

The following bits were actually written yesterday so try not to mind the present tense grammar from this point onwards.

Recap....

9.00am and I am already sipping on my coffee looking through the various emails in my work inbox and as I slowly watch the time before starting my teleconference with my senior manager in Singapore, I decided to make sure that everything is going fine.

Well for one thing which has me smiling at work today (it looked like I had slept with a clothes hanger in my mouth) was that my new baby arrived. I am typing this bit of post on it right now and I am really trying to get used to the new keyboard shortcuts.

By 11.40am I was ready to head to the airport and thanks to my good buddy Vincent who agreed to send me to the LCC Terminal, I was all set and ready to go. Of course like all good planning, things go wrong. Nothing wrong occurred of course but we got held up a little bit but I still managed to reach the LCC terminal on time and checked in with plenty of time to spare.

Lunch was at McDonalds and yes, I lost the best. I was supposed to stay away from fast food for two months and after a week, I gave in. Well, it wasn't entirely my fault, there isn't any place to eat in the LCC Terminal! Everywhere was packed with people and I had no choice to eat at McDonalds because I was short of time and the customer turnaround there was way quicker than the other place.

The wonders of AirAsia and the relatively cheap flights, recently they have been checking every passenger's hand luggage to check if they exceed the weight limit and it seems that they were charging the passengers additional costs for each additional kg over the weight limit. A bold move indeed by Mr. Tony Fernandes.

I reached Penang on time and with no problems, the airport was relatively full with passengers waiting to board the plane and the duty free shops looked tempting. To me, the first thing I wanted to do was check into the apartments I am staying in and taking a nice cool shower.

The taxi cost was about RM47.00 which was a little steep if you ask me considering Penang is a small island but the worst has yet to come. Not only did the taxi booth charged me RM47, they really shouldn't put the sign “LIMO” on it because the taxi I sat in was far from what one would even call a decent car. But hey, who am I to complain? I flew all the way to Penang just to learn and absorb from one of the reknowned wedding photographers in Malaysia and soon to be Asia.

After 10 minutes of sitting in the taxi whilst trying not to concentrate on how run down the taxi was (it was the old stretched proton saga where the rear seat passengers have a little more leg room), I started to smell something weird. Turned out that the taxi's air condition failed and there was some electrical short. Being the usual me, I just told the taxi driver who was a nice old malay man that we can just wind down the window and get some nice fresh air.

Contrary to fresh air, Penang ain't a place which offers fresh air. Other than the usual busses and their wonderful exhausts, the heat was getting to me but that didn't bother me. Thank God that I remembered to bring my trusty iPod along and I was catching an episode of CSI New York. The only thing was that I kept getting distracted because the taxi driver didn't know exactly where the apartments was and I had to show him some directions.

I stayed in the same apartments a long time ago, way back in 1999 after my SPM examination where me and a group of my friends from school took a road trip up to Penang and spent a week there. We travelled by train (overnight!) and it was an awesome experience. Ever since then, Penang has changed so much with plenty of development springing about everywhere.

Anyway it might seem that I have a lot to write but that is because I have an hour to kill before I start heading out to the workshop and run a couple of errands before that. Sadly there isn't any internet connection at where I am staying and it really made me wish that I had those wireless connection thingamajigs. If I can't find a place with free wireless internet, I guess this post might only be up on Monday.

Until then, its about time to head out for my workshop. I predict that something inside of me will definitely change and it will definitely be credited to this workshop I attended.

I recently found out that I accidentally deleted some important photos that I had taken in some of my older assignments and workshops. Frankly, this sucks as now I can't get them back anymore (well I can if I try) but I definitely need to be more mindful of that already.

Even with the prices of harddisks going down, it is rather unacceptable for me to do that so my next purchase would be a 500Gb hard disk for me to store all of my work as well as an additional 500Gb hard disk to act as a storage backup. I won't be getting them anytime soon at the moment (until my current hard disks are full) but I am really running on a risk here as I do not have any backup solutions available at the moment.

Anyone heading to Lowyat anytime soon? Let me know what are the current prices for 500Gb sized hard disks and an external exclosure for the hard disk. Preferbly in the 3.5" size. I know that the PC Fair is going on this weekend but I will be in Penang attending a workshop (mentioned here) hence I will be missing the fair completely.

Feeling a little impatient lately as things are not going as fast as I would hoped for it to be as I am currently awaiting a new piece of equipment to arrive. At the mean time, I do hope to negotiate more wedding photography jobs. Praying that I do get those jobs (one in May, one in October and finally one more in December). God has been good recently and indeed, He is awesome.

How many of you out there have been using your laptops on your laps while working? Well frankly, I have been using that method often and back in my uni days, I used it to keep myself warm during winter and played championship manager with my laptop on my lap.

Little did I know that I was courting disaster! (Heres why and why)

Finally after lots and lots of procastination, I finally bought a laptop cooler. It so happened that I was in Sunway Pyramid the other day having dinner with my colleagues and planning to go bowling after that. It was then that I spied an interesting cooler which was appealing and yet versatile enough to cool my laptops. Well technically, they are not really my laptops, just the ones my company gave me to use (it crashes way too often!).


Image source: Cooler Master Notepal Infinite


Now isn't that just a thing of beauty? Now that is one way to prevent being infertile in yet such a stylish method!

For those techy people out there, here are some of the features of this notebook cooler.

• Innovative and optimized airflow structure increases cooling area by 150% and efficiently controls noise level, compared to traditional coolers


• Metal mesh surface for great cooling performance and stylish design


• Ultimate thermal solution to cool down your notebook; up to 17 degrees C


• Adjustable fan speed to accommodate your working environment


• Ergonomic design for best comfort


• Special design of the intake at rear side allows convenient usage anywhere, on sofa or in bed, without blocking airflow


• 4 strips of anti-slip rubbers prevents the notebook from sliding


• Unique design for easy cable management (hook and slot) at the rear side


• Accommodates most notebook dimensions and especially for the wide screen

Check out my online portfolio here at http://www.markleo.net. I recently updated the my portfolio with a a couple more sets of photos. I have also updated my "Contact me" section as well with the various offerings I provide as a photographer. Do check out my online portfolio!



Any updates on my portfolio will be communicated through this blog as well.

I must be a real fickle minded fool who keeps changing the look of his blog every now and then based on a whim. Perhaps I might be getting a little tired of the same old look and decided to try this new minimalistic look. I always wanted to have a fluid theme but now that I have tried it, I want to see how it will look like on widescreen monitors.

Previously I was always bugged by the fact that I couldn't fit certain image sizes on the blog but now, I can.

I wonder how long before I either revert back to the old theme or find a newer one to satisfy my cravings.

Yes as the title says, Lightroom 2 is out and there are a lot of wonderful new features. Totally excited about it and I can't wait for the full version to be released.


Image source: NAPP Learning Centre

For more information, check out the links below.

• Matt Klowskowski of Lightroom Killer Tips has released the top ten new best feature here on his site.


• Scott Kelby has also made a post about this new baby.


• NAPP Adobe Lightroom 2 Learning Centre can be found here.


• Download the beta version here.