Ok, I totally forgot to blog about this especially since it was held way back in January but hey, I am just a couple of months late. Anyway, back in January, I took a trip over to Kota Kinabalu (which was my very first time!) to attend a photography workshop held by Louis Pang. It was a great opportunity to brush up on my photography skills as well as learn again from a wonderful and talented photographer (he is Malaysia's most awarded wedding photographer after all). Speaking of awards, I definitely need to start shooting more and sending photos in for competitions, or else how will I ever overtake the number of awards that Louis has! *wink*

Anyway here are some of the photos that I took whilst I was at the workshop. If you definitely want to know more about his workshops, I really encourage you all to participate in them.


The class was split into 3 teams where each team will be guided by coaches as well as have a model to shoot. I think to me, the one thing that stood out differently this time round is that I got a male model!



There was a time where each person would have a quick 1 to 1 shoot with the model for an exact duration of 3 minutes and it was during those times that I took these shots.









After a classroom style teaching, we moved on to outdoor shooting. Here is Louis teaching us how to shoot with what we have outdoors.



I have to admit that KK has one of the most beautiful sunsets in Malaysia, just look at how awesome it is!



Anyway its about time I get back to work and finish post processing photos! I have two shoots tomorrow so I am looking forward to that!

Contrary to what Nick says, I do not just blog my usual Wednesday Clicks. Unfortunately it is currently the peak season of my life where I am just swamped with work from the office as well as thousands of photos that I need to post process and deliver to the client before the Chinese New Year. So time is of the essence for me and I will be busy post processing photos from thousands of feet above sea level. Well truthfully, I am just post processing them on my flight towards Kota Kinabalu to attend Louis' workshop tomorrow.

This time I managed to poison munZ to attend the workshop as well with her brand new Nikon D40. I will be loaning her my flashes throughout the workshop as I have two flashes.

Right now as I am sitting here at the LCCT departure lounge, I am a little bit irritated that although they may have provided enough power points throughout the terminal, not all of them are working. Surprisingly the Wifi network here is very good and the internet speed is very fast as compared to the usual slow speeds I got at Starbucks today.

My flight is going to board soon, time to sign-off and conserve that much needed battery energy I need when I am on the plane.

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...)

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.

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.

March is soon coming to an end but I am really looking forward to an exciting month of April. Why is April so exciting for me? Well, that is because I have three upcoming workshops in April, which I anticipate that I will learn a lot from it as well as make full use of it to propel me forward in both my passion and my career (sad to say sometimes that my career may not be my passion).

First up would be the "From Ordinary to Extraordinary" workshop from the 11-13th ofApril held at the Pixel Media centre in the new DAP state of Penang. I will be flying off to Penang over the weekend via AirAsia in hope of learning from the awesome Louis Pang. I definitely have to thank my mum for being able to arrange for me my accomodation in Penang. Because of that, I feel a little more at ease about acommodation


Note: There is also another session in June held in KL. Do visit this site for more information

Right after that workshop, I will arrive in KL on the 14th of March and the next day I will be off to Bandar Utama for another workshop from the 15th till the 18th of March. This time it is an SAP workshop held at IBM. Also interesting as I will be considered rather fresh in that topic in regards to DB2 usage but I am always eager to learn more.

At the end of April, I would be attending the annual Charge Up conference which I attended last year. Really looking forward again for this year's conference where Louis Pang will be conducting the Photography stream for 4 days! This format is slightly different as compared to last year where it was held from Friday night and over the weekend where I actually missed the ending of the conference. This time, I am making sure that I am available through all 4 days.

Photography

Louis Pang
1st place winner of the Wedding & Portrait Photographers International (WPPI) 2007 8×10 print competition, Louis is a highly sought after photographer & educator in Asia. Louis travels to Australia, Hong Kong, India, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and all over Malaysia for wedding assignments. He was also appointed an Epson Stylus Pro, an elite fraternity of top professionals who are selected for their artistry excellence and technical know-how in digital imaging.

April is definitely a month that I am really looking forward to. I must polish up my skills and my knowledge to be a better photographer in both the artistic and technical sense. I wonder if I will be able to get my laptop by then, who knows?

Something is coming over the horizon. Are you prepared for it?





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