Tuesday, June 29, 2010

To Do List

  • go to Japan
  • go to Turkey *21-8-10*
  • backpack to Central Europe
  • go to Greece
  • visit New Zealand!
  • I heard Alaska is beautiful.. so why not? =D
  • go somewhere and see herds of sheep.. (yes, that's right.. sheep!)
  • enjoying New Zealand's view and laid-back lifestyle :)
  • learn Seven Stars Sword style
  • buy a better camera (affordable ones hopefully =p), eyeing Nikon D90/D700 *Aug 10*
  • iPad! Do I need to say more ? xD *done 9-10-10
  • Go to Bali (for the fourth time..)

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Twitter is the new FaceBook..

... almost. One thing I don't like about FB is that nowadays people are using it for commercial purposes. They tag their friends or acquaintances in their products photos. Its a social network, not network marketing site!!!
Now I've been using Twitter for some time. Its relatively free of junk. Most of the messages are genuinely sincere, and there are just few nonsensical messages (unless y'know.. people problem). So why almost ? Twitter stability problem thats why. It often overloaded, even though they are using Amazon cloud services, it just doesn't scale.

Anyway.. I'm waiting for D90 replacement as expected by a lot of people. But then again that means I have to pay early adopter's tax. -_-!

Thursday, June 24, 2010

iPad

I guess it'll take quite some time to get an iPad here. *sigh*

Ok.. now more digital darkroom awesomeness.. by LightRoom 3
Unadjusted RAW image (left) - Processed image (right)

HUGE difference!

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Model, lens and Lightroom.

Had my first outdoor model shoot last Saturday, the model was beautiful and friendly, to say the least ;)
I learn a lot of thing from the session. Having brought three lenses, two of which are native micro four thirds lenses and one manual focus lens, in the end I only use one lens. Tried the 20mm pancake first. Hmm... nope.. too far. Next was 14-45 kit lens. The problem is this kit lens produced blurry images!! What?!?!? It suppose to auto focus, right? Right?!? Honestly I don't know what the cause of the problem, but I don't have time to waste. So I switched quickly to Nokton VC 35mm/f1.4.


My Panasonic GF-1 with VC Nokton Classic 35mm

I got about one thirds of good pictures out of my camera. By good I mean well focused image with good lighting and composition. I found out that at f1.4 the lens will produce slightly soft results, which is the problem for the rest of the images. I don't have the exact information because being a mechanical lens, it doesn't feed any data to the camera to be saved as EXIF data. But the lens produce beautiful images nonetheless.

I personally prefer to shoot raw because there are much more dynamic range available for adjustment.
And that is where Adobe LightRoom 3 come into play. I'm impressed with this software, and its the first expensive software I will buy, other than the OS itself three years ago.
See the difference ?

RAW (left) and processed image (right)

What really helps me is the ease of use and workflow process. I took about 300+ shots that morning. All I have to do is import all the RAW files into the catalog and tweak them with a few clicks of  buttons or some slider adjustment. In the above picture, I corrected the white balance and few light adjustment. I haven't been able to get significant noise reduction though.

She picked this picture for her tweet.

Update: I took the plunge and bought LR3 this morning.. yeaay!

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Activist Photographer - Save the ocean life

A presentation from a photographer on TED. It makes me so sad to watch it.
Good thing I don't like seafood. Perhaps I should start learning how to dive..

Thursday, June 03, 2010

Urge...

I have this urge to buy a printer and do my own photo printing... hmmm...
Lets see.. more expenses.. OK maybe in 1-2 months from now..