One of the many questions people ask me is what do I use my iPad for? Well I would love to say I use it to wow my clients and also showcase not just my presentation skills but also some of my photography work as well. And I managed to do just that using a very nifty software called Dropbox.

You see, I have a number of laptops and PCs and a Mac about, each of them having a specific purpose individually. So when I want to share files and work with some files, it is rather cumbersome to keep on using a thumbdrive to transfer the files and after a while I ended up overwriting the wrong versions of documents and this caused a huge nightmare for me.

So when I started looking around for a cloud storage software, I found out about Dropbox. First of all, why I chose Dropbox was because it was free! Yes, absolutely free for 2Gb worth of space. Now if you are thinking of using it for large files then I would suggest another alternative but if it is to sync some of your important documents, 2Gb is more than enough. Of course, if you want more than 2Gb of files then you have to pay for the service.

So how does it work?

Dropbox functions as a specific folder that resides on your PC/Mac which syncs directly with the cloud. It looks exactly like a folder in your PC and you need to do is just treat it as your folder! So you can copy and paste files into it, create sub-folders according to your own liking and drop files into that folder.



Another cool feature about it which I learned about it recently is that Dropbox allows users to share their folders with other people! How cool is that? When I was submitting my photos to be included into The Nut Graph's article (I blogged about it here and view the article here), I worked with Jo-Ann by sharing my photos via Dropbox. This also included me making some changes to the photos as well as include in captions explaining what the photos meant. Now this was extremely helpful for us both as I am sitting here in Cyberjaya while she is all the way in KL.

Now earlier I mentioned that I had a more elaborate setup, well it isn't too complicated as Dropbox makes it so much easier now. So I decided to create this diagram to show you all what I really mean when I use it extensively.



In my work environment, I would also assume that most of our work laptops have certain limitations as to what we can install on our laptops and one of them is iTunes. So thanks to that, I can't really sync my iPad with it and hence I can't really sync files with it. Thanks to Dropbox, that is all in the past. Note that with the iPad, I can't edit files in my Dropbox folder but I can view them. Tip, for best viewing pleasure such as presentations, I would save my presentations as PDF files so that the formatting doesn't run.

Anyway, if you are really interested with Dropbox, you can head over here and sign up for a free 2Gb account now!

After a long day shooting a pre-wedding session at Putrajaya, I headed over to Souled Out at Sri Hartamas to join my mates to watch the 2010 World Cup Finals in South Africa. It was a little more special as there was a Street Party going on at that time and the place was completely packed. Parking was scarce and so were the vuvuzelas.

Frankly the crowd was going wild and everyone seemed to have brought their own vuvuzelas which they happily blew throughout the night which made me sort of deaf. The place was completely packed to the point where there were a bunch of people standing up throughout the night (not counting those on the street of course) that they were blocking the big screens for those who were sitting down. Thank goodness that Souled Out had a number of large LCD TVs broadcasting the match as well.

Anyhow, back to the match.

Paul the Octopus predicted that Spain will win the world cup so I ended up supporting Netherlands as my client is from Netherlands and most of the colleagues were Dutch but most of all, they were the underdogs of the match.

Apparently, everyone else at Souled Out, including my friends, supported Spain.



The match started off quite nicely with Spain dominating most of the possession until the man of the match decided to show his true colours.



And that man was no other than, Howard Webb. The referee of the match and his favourite colour was yellow. By the 28th minute, 5 yellow cards were shown to both sides. At the end of the match, 14 yellow cards were awarded which also resulted in John Heitinga being sent off.

I think that really killed the game, players were a little more cautious and what made me furious were the number of dives from the players of both sides. But nearing the end you can see a little sort of biasness when the dutch side seemed to be on the shorter end.



The players tried to show their frustration and yet, nothing was done or given. But you can't also blame the referees, both teams had incredible chances only to waste it away. The game was then forced to go into extra time where Iniesta managed to score the goal which led Spain to their very first World Cup.



Frankly, I was kinda sad that Holland had to lose this way when Iniesta dove deliberately. This allowed them a free kick which eventually led to the goal. And to rub salt into the wounds, Iniesta scored the winning goal. The match overall was very uneventful mainly due to the lack of goals from both sides.



Technically, Spain deserves the win. I felt they dominated the game a lot more and their passing was very entertaining and executed brilliantly. Their set pieces were just amazing short of Puyol missing a couple of open headers in front of the goal but tactically, it was executed brilliantly!

In the end, as I would always tell my friends who says that football should start copying the Americans and start using instant replays to make decisions, referee error is always part of the match. But now, if instant replays would help reduce the number of dives a player take, I would gladly opt for the use of instant camera replays for the referees. This would at least make the game a lot "cleaner".

When I got back home at 5ish am, I caught my mum dancing away to victory because she had supported Spain all this time. Heh, I wonder if she liked the players more or not.

Yes, Wednesday Clicks has finally made a come-back after absolutely no requests for it over the past 6 months. Nevertheless, I would like to stick to it again and bring up some new links and news from about as well.

Here are some of the latest happenings about!

• If you aren't following me on Twitter, do follow me :)


• There is an upcoming photography conference coming up called Creative Asia. Check it out here. The conference feature big names such as Dane Sanders, Joe McNally, and Manny Librodo so don't miss out on it!


• Wedding and Portrait Photographers Malaysia is up and running with their conference coming in August! Check them out here.


• Images of daily life in Pakistan is featured here. The images are just mind blowing!


• Check out the Nutgraph's latest article on Refugees in Malaysia here.


• In case you want to get your hand on the latest iPhone 4, you can get them here locally! (warning not cheap!)


• If you are a fan of Futurama (check out the new release of Season 6!!), check this out. This guy built the entire city from Futurama using Lego bricks in his free time. Talk about being passionate!

When Grace posted an event "Photographer's Gathering" a couple of weeks ago on Facebook, I was totally not expecting the crowd last night. There was a huge group of photographers, mainly wedding but nonetheless new faces as well as old friends. The mood and the event was totally awesome, we packed out the The Olive Branch to the max, running out of seats.

Here are some of the photos I captured with my iPhone, I had no choice as I had just sent in my gears to the service center for focus calibration. Surprisingly, for a photographer's event, there were only a couple of cameras there and whole load of iPhones in the midst.


The event started with Grace introducing herself and thanking everyone for joining in on the event. It was mainly a way for photographers to meet each other, catch up, mingle around, meet new faces as well as listen to some of Grace's, Patrick's and Zung's experience with WPPI (Wedding and Portrait Photographers International) when they were there last March in Las Vegas.



Grace also brought quite a number of brochures and magazines she collected from the WPPI tradeshows.



Patrick and Zung also joined Grace at the front to share their WPPI experiences with everyone, ranging from the total cost of the trip, the cost of the conference, travel methods, 25 cents chicken wings, Hooters, airlines and definitely lots of funny jokes as well. They were really frank about the trip, what they have learned about the trip and what they brought back from WPPI.

After that, Peter who was the current president of WPPM (Wedding and Portrait Photographers Malaysia) came up to talk about WPPM and explain what WPPM is all about. If you don't know what it is, check out their website and watch out for the upcoming WPPM conference in August.

Patrick later on shared with the group on his experiences with the print competition as well as what he had learned when participating in the competition.



Whilst Patrick was speaking away, me and Jon quietly slipped away to the kitchen to bring out a birthday cake to celebrate both Patrick's and Alex's birthday. Alex at that time hadn't arrived yet but we managed to sing happy birthday and eat some good old cake which surprisingly again, for a room full of photographers, there was plenty of cake left. I think everyone must have been on a diet.

There were plenty of new faces and new people I met and the mamak session after the event was also funny as we heard proposal stories and weird photography poses which gave us all a huge laugh about.

Definitely can't wait for the next one!