Nothing much to add but this is the wonderful place I will bunking in for the next couple of nights!!







Apologies for the poor photo quality, I took them with my trusty Dopod 838 pro. Anyway its late and I got more work to finish!

Yes I have been missing in action on my blog for a while and that is because I have been held up at work for the past week and this week, I am here at the Marriott hotel enjoying 5 nights stay here. Well I will hardly be in my room because I will be at training the entire week so I do hope that I have the time to blog. I totally forgot my camera so I need to swing by home to collect it sometime this week.

I still have 3 sets of photos to post process so I need to find the time but things have been delayed because of work and this training as well as my recent comeback to my old group of musicians. Yes, I attended a 3 hour practice session just now only to find myself totally rusty but still can do a little bit of winging and of course, assist out the vocal areas. Playing the guitar really did bring back some memories, who knows, I might be interested in pursuing an old Fender Strat. Awesome stuff again!

Till the next post, I got to finish up my CBT's before I turn in for the day.

Lastly, here is a video for all you would be Nikon D700 users. More poison for you all :D

The Nikon D700 Unboxed from Jon Read on Vimeo.

Personally, I find the comments rather witty but the last bits were the interesting parts for me as he showed the new CF card slot functionality. Its blatantly obvious that the viewfinder seems a little out of proportion to me.

Last weekend I was at The Curve and I decided to drop by Borders to check out a couple of books. Mr. Shaolintiger mentioned to me that Borders told him that they might have stock for this particular book I was looking for. Also, Kee Sitt did mention to me about Vincent Versace's book on post processing called "Welcome to Oz: A Cinematic Approach to Digital Still Photography with Photoshop". Initiatlly I tried searching for these two books at MPH and Times but there weren't available and a special order or request needed to be completed.





Upon entering Borders, I headed straight to the "Arts" section and began searching for these two books. After a quick scan through two shelves, I just gave up and went to the information counter to ask for some assistance. A very friendly salesgirl was there, ready to serve customers, and she gave a warm smile asking me if she could assist me in anything. I gave her the name of the books which she was rather confused (I don't blame her as the name of the books are long!).

Instead I decided to ask her search by Authors. Vincent Versace was not found in their database of Authors but they had one hit for Joe McNally. It was the book I was looking for, "The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world's top shooters". Happily, I went back to the shelves and found the only copy in the entire store and lo and behold, there was a huge tear at the back cover of the book. The tear was rather significant, one that if continued, would have taken the entire back cover off!The price of the book, RM200+.

I took the book and brought it back to the Information counter asking if there was a newer one as I showed the salesgirl the large torn section. She took the book, headed over to her manager and returned saying that since the book is new, there wasn't any other stock and that the price would not change.  I was of course surprised and also not that entire shocked as it was a new book. I then politely declined saying that I wouldn't want to buy a book that is already torn at a price which is way more than that you can find at Amazon.

After 10 minutes of browsing other books, the helpful salesgirl ran up to me saying that she had negotiated with her manager again and the manager had agreed to a whopping 5% discount. Yes, 5% discount! Wow, I must be rather stupid to pass an offer like that. Not! 5% for a book which is already overpriced and not in good condition? No way am I that stupid. This time I politely declined saying that I would rather ship the book from the US than to pay so much and get a torn version. End of story.

On Wednesday, I was at KLCC for lunch and decided to head over to Kinokuniya to try my luck on these two books. In less than 10 minutes, I found two whole piles of these two books in the Art section. Not only did they have ample stock, "The Moment It Clicks" was priced at RM186+ (compared to Borders' RM200+) which was way cheaper. And to my other surprise, if I purchased Vincent Versace's book (RM131+) at the same time, I get a 20% discount off "The Moment It Clicks". Yes, that means I paid only RM150+ for "The Moment It Clicks" which is RM50 cheaper compared to what Borders was charging and it was in pristine condition.

Final score: Kinokuniya 1- Borders 0

Note: This has nothing to do with the staff or the service any of these bookstores offered but just a good comparison of their prices and their pricing policy for damaged books.

What was supposed to be two attempts to head to my office early was foiled thanks to our wonderful and thoughtful police who decided to create roadblocks along major arteries heading into KL. Because KL is such a wonderful and brilliant city with 2 million odd people going in and out, the traffic jam stemmed all the way up till the surrounding subburbs.

To make matters worse, I was actually driving away from KL but because of the slow moving traffic, I was stuck outside my house for almost an hour before I could actually hit the NKVE and ELITE highways. What usually takes about 5-10minutes to get from my house to the highway took almost an hour for both Monday and today. So much for using the highway to avoid traffic jams but I guess the police had only this to say.

I have to head in to KL later today for a meeting at 7pm. I really do hope that there isn't much traffic.

Grrrrrr.....

Its not uncommon for many companies to backup their data and nowadays it is the norm to do that especially since there are always many risks that can occur to wipe out all of your important data. Normally in larger type systems, having a backup and then having a DR (disaster recovery) backup of that backup seems to be a way to ensure that important data is never lost.

At the meantime, I don't have the budget of what most larger companies have hence I just went ahead with my own backup strategy. Previously I had always procastinated on getting extra external hard disks as I was always wonder what size I would get. Yesterday I took the bullet and bought two external 500Gb hard disks.



As you can see above, its the Western Digital Mybook Essential Edition. Both of these hard drives will be identical in terms of data meaning that one will store my photos and the other one will be a backup. Unfortunately I haven't devised a true DR backup strategy yet where I should have another backup somewhere at least 100km away from the original.

Previously I used Acronis True Image to backup my work but at the moment I wanted the files to be available even from the backup side so I decided to try this software called Allway Sync which allows me to synchronize both my drives with a click of a button. Best of all, it is free :)

Getting these two additional external hard disks allows me to free up more space on my desktop as well as use my other external hard disk to be a backup for my personal laptop.

Other than that, I decided to beef up my desktop at home with more RAM.



Yup that is two sticks of 2Gb of DDR2 RAM for my desktop. Yes I also do know that my 32-bit Vista machine can only take in 3.5Gb but its cheaper to just get two sticks of 2Gb RAM. Cheaper than that I paid for my MacBook Pro.

And finally, I managed to sell of my older MB-D200 to fund for a MB-D10. In case you were wondering what these are, they are actually battery grips which fits to the bottom of my two cameras, the Nikon D200 and the Nikon D300 respectively. And yes, the D200 and D300 are actually cameras and not some secret government code which is meant to be kept a secret (mind the pun as I just watched the Bourne Identity recently).



With this I have actually switched my shooting strategy, which is to have the D200 use the wide angle lens I bought the other day and the D300 to use either the 50mm f/1.4 or the 85mm f/1.8 lens.

As I mentioned in one of my previous post, I attended Louis' "Take Back Your Life" workshop last weekend and it was totally awesome. Why was it awesome, one might ask. Well my dear Watson, its because that I learned so much about certain aspects that it not only gives me more time now but it helps me to think in such a way to make more moolah!



Again, I am not kidding when I said those things above. Its true, you can ask the rest of the participants who attended the course and all of them can vouch for me. But then as my title says, I have taken back my life. A very good example would have been this week. I was already pulling in 12-14 hour days at work leaving me hardly any time to rest but I still managed to post process almost 2000 photos.



And what does it take to make a good workshop, good materials or perhaps even more paticipation from the class? Since it is also part of my job at work to give trainings and talks, I realise that in order to get a good feel of the group would be to encourage more group participation. And that was exactly what Louis did.



Added bonusses to the workshop was a talk by Alex from Integricity Corporation which touched on areas such as web marketing and making ourselves known in the online world amidst the million of other photographers, people, business out there. I learned lots of good tips and after all of those SEO stuff that I have been reading up online suddenly just makes sense.



The other parts of the workshop which was great was the networking and meeting up with other photographers who are so passionate about this field that they are willing to fly in all the way from Sabah, Sarawak and also Hong Kong, their passion just amazes me as well.



One of the other lessons I learned was to never put your coffee next to your laptop because someone might just hit it over. Poor Clement had to do without his laptop on Saturday because he accidentally spilled coffee all over it but thanks to his super-duper-ultra-quick-reflexes that can actually put superman to shame, saved his laptop. Yup, he pulled the power out in time. :)



As you can see from the image above, the class wasn't that big but because of the size, we had more time to post our personal questions and learn from each other a lot. Each and every one of us had something to share and that was just so great! Yes, I love it when people share, whether it may be their skills or thoughts, it just shows a little bit more of that person.



You know, they say that behind every successful photographer is a Mac. I have to agree with it since I also own one myself :P

Then again, how successful I am is another story lah. I like to say that I am still in the process of learning and finding more and more ways I can to improve.



Another part of the workshop which got me really really excited was the part about printing. I have fallen in love with prints ever since I attended the Charge Up conference in April. It was just peachy that Epson had a Stylus Pro R3850 available for us to use and print our photos. So much so that I went around The Curve earlier just now looking about for an Epson printer only to find out that they had limited models available. Looks like I will just have to experiment with my older Canon i850 printer at home first before I venture into another printer.



As you can see that I am not the only person who is excited about prints. Overall everyone had a great time at the workshop and I must confess that my expectations of this workshop was totally different.



Of course I would like to also thank CLICK for their wonderful hospitality and warm friendship. They took every effort to make us feel comfortable by providing us with plenty of food, snacks and most importantly, coffee (which kept me sane and awake).



And finally I would like to thank the other participants of this workshop, your presence there made all the difference. A big thanks to Olivia, Michele, Kah Yee, Chun Hoo, Martina, Sathia, Alex, Grace, Bernard, Clement and of course, Louis. You guys rock! (I wonder if that sounded lame...)

Update: I finally remembered their names, the first picture is a picture of Carace while the second picture is a picture of Velva. Doh! I must be darn shallow :(

While I am waiting for my trusty MacBook Pro to render some 1200 odd photos, I spent some time revisiting some old portraiture shots I took last year sometime in September. These shots were taken at the Orchid Garden opposite the Bird Park at Taman Tasik Perdana. Just some post processing done on these shots, still I know much can be improved in terms of the framing, composition and pose.



The shots below is a shot of Velva, and the shot above is of Carace :)





Alright, I admit, I really can't remember her name. As much as I would love to remember as many names as I can, this was taken a long time ago and I was swarmed by 40 over odd photographers. Do let me know if you know who this model is, thanks!

Anyway, the rendering is almost complete. I know I have shots lying about waiting for me to post process them.

Ok, I sold off my Sigma 10-20mm lens to get this lens instead. Why did I swap lens? Only for the f/2.8 performance in low light situations. Did a quick test just now in my room and the first thing I noticed is that the minimal focusing distance is quite far compared to the Sigma 10-20mm.

More sample pictures to come.

Yes that is right, blog.markleo.net just hit 12,000 unique hits over the past year!! Now, to me that is awesome as I always wanted a website that had visibility around and I do hope that more visitors will drop by and leave comments as well as enjoy the articles that I have to share as well as some of my photos.

In the mean time, I just returned from a long workshop over the weekend.



I am sure the image above says it all. I will definitely blog a little more about it when I get some sleep. After this weekend, I am truly confident that I can deliver my photos faster to my clients already. Watch out for some of my emails.

Until then, I need some sleep.

I got loads to learn about the photography industry. I really do. I need to find all the experience I can get and then learn from them. Usually I take to heart quite a fair bit of comments that I get. Only recently have I had to deal with more of them but slowly I am beginning to learn from them.

Learning slowly from experience photographers as well as going out to shoot and spending more time is something I try to do. Of course that takes away a fair bit of my own personal time but it is just so worth it when clients are happy with your products. My main goal would be that my clients and future clients will feel comfortable working with me as well as love the products I produce.

With that, I have to apply the same professional skills that I use at work as with my photography. Working in a consulting firm, the firm treats their employees are assets. Its very different from my previous job when I worked in a factory where the company treat their machines, design documents and factory as their assets and their workers as just employees. It is just so different when it comes to a consulting firm.

Every year I am given a training budget to apply for either internal or external training. Of course I can't just simply take any sort of training but usually those that helps my career and guides me in the right direction. On top of that, the firm would then spend millions of dollars to provide all the staff with thousands of online training sessions. Mind you, these are not the simple online trainings but ones that provide plenty of test cases as well as videos to further enhance our learning experience.

Yes, training is deemed very important and hence the same approach I shall take towards my passion in photography. Hence I have deemed it 200% worth it to spend my hard earned money to attend workshops and training courses so I can improve further in the field of photography. A lot of people I know always said that some courses or workshops are expensive but its not! You can never ever put a price on education.

If you must know, if I didn't spent a single ringgit on workshops I probably would have pre-ordered my Nikon D700 or perhaps be shooting crappy shots with my Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR lens instead. Like many photographers will eventually tell you, its not the gears that make your pictures, its the photographer.



Anyway I will be pretty packed this weekend attending Louis' workshop entitled "Take Back Your Life" at CLICK. The workshop starts tonight and I can't wait to really take back my life and get away from the rut of sleeping 5-6 hours a day. Of course, I also can't wait to here what Alex has to talk about on the topic of “Out of the Tempurung”. (Note: Alex Lam is a special guest who will make a guest appearance for the workshop)

Out of the Tempurung

A light-hearted session with internet guru Alex Lam from Integricity Corporation on how to remove the barriers that prevent your photographic art from being showcased to the masses. He believes that many of the best photographers are camping beneath their tempurungs, but need to come out and harness modern-day technology to assist in marketing themselves. Set yourself apart and move from being “just-another-ordinary-photographer” to one who “has-a-kickass-website-and-extraordinary-tools”.

Alex will touch on topics such as using Facebook for business, enhancing your website, search engines and various other tools that can be used to impress and dazzle your prospects and clients.

Until then, I hope to post up some pictures of the workshop.

Update:

According to the News Straight Times, Malaysia-Today.net should be back up and running but I still can't seem to access the site. I guess I am fighting with the millions of other people trying to gain access to the website.

As usual I would try to read my daily dosage of news online and one of the many news sites that I visit was unavailable. I guess the reason why it was unavailable was because the bookmark which I saved on my browser linked straight to the index.shtml file. So I thought, why not just try with the main address at http://www.malaysia-today.net/ and was shocked to find this instead of the usual news site.



I guess the admin team over there must be working hard trying to restore control to the website. Its a pity that this should happen during the time when everyone is awaiting for some piece of news. I wish the admin team all the best in trying to get the site up and running as usual as well as get it properly secured.

As contreversial the site may be, it is definitely a target for many.

Updated: 17:06

Thanks Eugene for the heads up on this bit of news. I was out at lunch earlier only to find this very interesting bit of news sitting in my comments column in my last post.

Good to know that Nikon has finally launched the Nikon D700 and its as good as the rumours claimed it to be. Awesome stuff this new FX camera which sports the Nikon D3's CMOS full frame sensor. To top it off, Dpreview mentioned that it sports a sensor cleaner, something which Nikon's flagship D3 did not have.


Image source: DPreview.com

As I previously posted, the Nikon D700 is indeed a camera to behold, fits nicely within the price ranges of the previous D300 and the high-end D3. At USD$2999, I would expect the camera to be priced at RM9k and any lower than that would be a good bonus.

I think it might just be the right time to retire my D200 and head towards greener pastures or perhaps, larger pastures. With this already available, I would say that all of my remaining lens purchases should revolve around FX type lenses and no longer should I look at DX lenses unless to be used with the D300.

Available at the end of July, we should expect the camera to hit our Malaysian shores in September and hopefully by then we can see samples of the D700 in action at ISO6400. Very curious to see if this baby can keep images clean at ISO6400.


D700 next to a D300 - Image Source: Rob Galbraith

Update:

Pre-orders for both the Nikon D700 and SB-900 is already available at Shashinki. Check them out here.

	Nikon D700 Digital SLR Camera Body Only (FX Full Frame 12MP CMOS, Live View, Image Sensor Cleaning) (Japan Import) Date Added: Tuesday 01 July, 2008 Manufacturer: Nikon Price: RM10,300.00
	Nikon SB-900 Speedlight i-TTL Shoe Mount Flash (Guide No. 34/111.5 (ISO 100, m/ft)) Date Added: Tuesday 01 July, 2008 Manufacturer: Nikon Price: RM1,995.00

Sources:

• DPreview.com - Hands On Review
  


• Rob Galbraith - Nikon unveils D700 full-frame digital SLR


• Nikon D700 24 page brochure


• Nikon USA - D700 page


• Nikon USA - SB-900 page
  

Late last night after my meeting, I managed to catch Eugene's site on this bit of news. Today I found the site that reportedly published the Nikon D700 and the new SB-900 (new flash unit) will be out at the end of July.



Mind you, its in a different language (German if you can understand it) but its Google translation to the rescue!

Translated bits:

After Nikon with the full-format camera D3 in August 2007 is the first Nikon model with full small image sensor-Formar 24x36 mm that was now follows is not entirely unexpected, the D700. Derselbe 12-Megapixel-Sensor, augenscheinlich dasselbe 51-Punkt-Autofokussystem, etwas geringere Serienbildgeschwindigkeit (5 B/s statt 9 B/s - allerdings kann das mit Batterieteil auf 8 B/s gesteigert werden), Sucherbildfeld 95 statt 100 Prozent, dafür aber ein eingebauter Blitz (auch zur Drahtlos-Blitzsteuerung), ein Sensor-Reinigungssystem (dazu morgen mehr) und ein interessantes Preisschild: knapp 2600 Euro soll die Neue kosten und ab Ende Juli 2008 erhältlich sein. The same 12-megapixel sensor, apparently the same 51-point autofocus system, slightly lower image speed serial (5 B / s instead of 9 B / - however, the battery part to 8 B / s increase), the viewfinder field of 95 instead of 100 percent, but but a built-in flash (also for wireless flash control), a sensor-cleaning system (more about this tomorrow) and an interesting price tag: just under 2,600 euro, the new costs and from the end of July 2008 will be available.

Next is a flash Nikon SB-900 as a successor model of the SB-800, whose zoom reflector should be directed to focal lengths from 17-200 mm and in DX and FX sensors recruits, and in which the user firmware updates for the first time in a Nikon Lightning can even aufspielen.

Now, the first thing in people's mind would be, "Is this another rumour?". Well rumours tend to be true most of the time but upon closer inspect of the image on the magazine, you can see that one of the newer characteristics of the D700 is the viewfinder. Seems different from all of the other DX range of cameras.

So this is the best piece of news since they even mentioned that it will be out late July, perhaps a pre-empt strike against the upcoming Canon 5D MkII? Who knows but for one thing, everyone is waiting for the release of this baby.