Recap: Travelling At Port Dickson

It was about a 10 days ago that I spent 2 1/2 days in Port Dickson being the political tourist here and there. Although I have documented whatever I've saw on polling day in my previous day.


The Markas PAS is about less than a kilometer away from the 'blog base' where I wrote most of my postings there. So going there, it's just taking a walk there. And it's opposite Avillon.


Lunch time at the Port Dickson golf club. Thanks to the two kindly ladies that I know, including one who came all the way from Ipoh, I managed to feed my stomach. Didn't take breakfast though except a cup of coffee. Even the club shows 'allegiance' and support to the Gerombolan Barisan Nasional.


Ceramah time at 9th Mile. Eventually, it is known that most who enjoyed it are outsiders.


Good god. This is how the traffic is after the ceramah is over and after midnight. No more campaigning already. Look at that traffic. Boom is waving the flag BTW.


On polling day, look at how bad the traffic is at the 8th Mile. 5 trucks are heading there, with 68 FRUs from 5 trucks deployed to do crowd control. Alan was helping out in counting sheep - errr..FRU personnel BTW.


And here's the bonus shot for that day. PAS people were cheering of this little chimp, so before the man gets shooed off by the FRU, I managed to take a grab..viola.!

Behold...Low Light Photography!

I was in Singapore for the last 4 days and during dinner on the first night at Singapore, my friend took a picture of me. When she saw the picture after taking it, she got shocked.


She told me that the picture was able to capture natural colors and interestingly, I did not use any flash for the picture. Unconvinced, I showed her another picture by taking another picture of her, with the same settings.

I basically used ISO 800, with lighting set as florescent high levels. The most important thing about the picture is that there is sufficient amount of back lights in order for me to take the picture. But then, while I examined some of the pictures which I took during the nighttime dinner at the Lake House, I noticed there is evidence of grain. Someone told me that higher ISOs may result in picking up of grain.


Maybe I might have to try shooting it at 400 ISO.

The Bangsa Malaysia Report

Over a hundred of bloggers and ordinary Malaysians attended the Bangsa Malaysia gathering last night at the Blog House in Damansara Heights. Initiated by Haris Ibrahim - the intention of the gathering is to put an affirmation that Malaysia is consisted of people of various races known as Bangsa Malaysia.

Upon registration, the form, which every attendee has to fill up has something very interesting - on your discretion, you have the right to say no, irrelevant or something else on certain fields that you usually see in signing a form - that is race, religion and sex. Which was why everyone was warned earlier to read the instructions before proceeding on.

The get together started at 8.30 p.m., but I thought that there could only be light refreshments like tidbits and drinks so I had dinner before coming over. I could have accepted Edmund's invitation to join him for dinner with his family but I couldn't accept it over this meet.

The rest of the photos can be seen at my Flickr photo page.

Of course the usual lot is there, with Jeff, Bernard, Tony Yew - there are three Tony's there BTW, Rocky, Nathaniel, YL, Marina and Tony Pua there. But the ones I met there are new faces including Chris (Mob) who was working under Patrick Teoh - mum's friend, Clifford Tan (Ghost line), the organizer, Harris and a few more including Eric Woon and Stephen Francis.

An interesting fact, according to Bernard, Clifford actually caught a cybertrooper red-handed attempting to plant a seditious comment over his blog. He managed to trace the identity of the person involved and through some common sense.


Howsy (The Sensintrovert) showed me a trick to pull more attention - by pinging the portal called the Petaling Street project. Something worth to try out but it seems that I need to wait for a few more days before my blog is added to the directory. TV Smith, the famous satirist was also there, and it was a big chance for me to meet the man in person as one of my favorite parodies written by him would be the MOB Blog.

Of course, the show starts and ends with the National Anthem. There's food and drinks and dedications to the nation by singing and poetry recital. Jeff did the rectal and Azmi and a few more youngsters sang some songs dedicating to the nation.

We're facing a lot of problems in society and they have launched a initiative called PELITAR -Penyayang Legasi dan Inspirasi Tunku Abdul Rahman, which aims to achieve what the Tunku idealizes for the nation. Overall, it is a very enlightening experience of being there to celebrate the spirit of Merdeka among the bloggers who aimed to achieve a better Malaysia.

Test Photos

In my previous post about DSLR, I have done some testing by taking landscape photos at the nearby lakeside yesterday evening. I've testing in terms of lighting and colors.

I did some tweaking to the tones and the RGB levels to achieve some picture effects. Although the tool accompanied with the package is not as great as Adobe Photoshop, none the less, it has the essential features that includes crop as I like to compose my images in the 2.35:1 style images and improving the shots from the raw image.


I had these settings used when capturing the raw images - see the sample above.

1. ISO of 200 - usually used at outdoors day time.
2. Shutter speed of 500. I thought of 320, but I am worried that the images will not be captured nicely.
3. Aperture of 2.8 on wide angle and 3.2 in telephoto mode. I feel that the bigger the aperture, the better the images are when captured with natural light.
4. No flash at all.
5. I used the Neutral color setting to achieve actual reality images.

I went home and did some and I find it behaving nicely. The only problem I have is night time shots, something which I did by doing a test shot in the room with one small light source but it is a little too bright.


I noticed that the composition above is like the un-squeezed widescreen frame - 1.85:1. The raw image here is that there is no blue tones here. It's more or less the cloudy, greyish look unlike this. It was also slightly bigger at full frame. I added more blue tones in there with a little red so that the picture above looks like it's shot in morning magic hour.

Magic hour is somewhere between 7 to 8 in the morning and 6 to 7 in the evening.

Unfortunately, loading this picture up here on the post is a little long. Maybe about a few minutes despite having a good connection. That's because the size of the file is at 1 MB plus, given that it is shot at 8 MP.



This self-portrait was re-framed as the squeezed widescreen format. I added sharpness of about 30%, 0.25 pixels and 5 levels.

Overall, I think that the Canon ZoomBrowser did at least accomplish the basic features but isolation of the picture element is not possible. But if you don't want to get the hands dirty on, it's okay. But cool thing about this is learning to do everything yourself - without the advance guide included in the package!

Moving Into DSLR

I know that there's a PC Fair in Kuala Lumpur this weekend and I always feel that it is high time for me to change from the film-based camera to a digital based camera. I also realized that since I am taking the first step into shooting digital, I don't think I would want to skip to having a more high-end camera like Nikon as I've yet to get a feel on using digitally as well as mastering the basics of digital photography.

It's a cool thing that I can get that because my favorite one is composing wide-screen style images so that it will appear. Another photography feature which I am very interested with is shooting in natural light levels. The main reason is that you cannot replicate the realism of a scene with the use of artificial lights.

The Zeiss lens remains the only lens that has the biggest aperture feature which is about F0.7, if I am not mistaken.



Today

I had to return a trolley which I borrowed from dad's friend as I needed it to move my equipment to the new house last week. So, his subordinate, also a friend of mine came over to pick me up to have meals and then going over to Subang Jaya for a meet and returning the cart.

My dad's friend was looking for a all-in-one printer that can copy, scan and fax as well. He asked me to do some research and then I came out with a few models that can fit his criteria and budget. Then he mentioned to me about his neighbor recommending him to get Brother printer as it fit his criteria and his budget - ultimately, he decided to go for the non-fax model as faxing was deemed non-essential, at the price of $199, and it has the highest DPI of 6000 X 1200, with a PPM of up to 27. The printer beats Samsung and HP hands down.

It was after 12.30 when I let my friend finish his work before we went back to Kuala Lumpur for lunch and then going to the PC fair. Quite a bad jam as it's half day for some who are working and particularly those who wanted to go to the fair as well.

I've been to the fair many times before, scouting for computer components and bought this notebook, which I am having right now in the previous round in April. The next one will be held in December, which I would go, but do not know what to get. I might have the money to buy something else...maybe printer, a sound system...no idea really.

Getting The Camera


Canon and Olympus were the final two choices in terms of brands in which I'd be getting my camera. But I decided on Canon as I did most of my research on that brand - specs, pricing, features and etc. My selection was either the A710s, the A630 and the A640. I thought the A710 is quite cool, but it does not have the flap that I liked as it can allow me to view my shots without looking at the finder. Given of the cost vs quality balance, I finally went for the A630.

The real problem though was the transaction problem. Since I am paying half by cash and half by card, the participating bank of my card, Citibank does not allow me to have the EPP - installment payment scheme because of the condition of minimum $1000. The merchant also voiced this concern to me. But it was the only bank that has the EPP. SCB was a non-participating EPP scheme bank.

I actually consulted the bank's customer support dept. and they said okay, but this was contradicting to the bank's condition of the EPP. The merchant was right though about the problem with Citibank. I thought of converting to a EPP after a single swipe pay, but I was told that there will be a 9.8% conversion charge for that. That's it really. I told them to swipe one shot and pay the balance unevenly, depending on the amount I can afford.

Flexibility is a problem here really.

I was about to finish my round when dad's best buddy called and said he'd be coming down for the fair at the insistence of his wife, who has yet to see the fair. She has seen the Singapore fair, but not the KL fair. Fine. We waited for them to come by LRT, and took them there.

I met my friend Lydia from Siemens - whom I always meet for lunch with Alvin - while I was taking my dad's friend and his wife for the printer which he was very interested with.

So there's dinner at Old Town before I went back home. Back home, I was quite excited and I had to spend some time tinkering and understanding the camera's operation and settings. I really wanted to use widescreen and natural light in my shots. Cool dude