Revisiting Nature (in the frontyard)

Wanted to just pay tribute to my parents efforts at maintaining the garden mostly without my help. Did a lot of work on the garden at inception but just could not find the time nor the inclination of late. I must say though that through their care the garden has really matured well. Seen here are my best shots using my new .....err...companion. Above is a bougainvillea and below is the red ginger.

P/S: The 50mm lens does a nice 'bokeh' for the shot on top. FYI, bokeh (from the japanese word boke reffering to 'blur' is a term used in photography to describe, how shall we say, the subjective aesthetic qualities of out-of-focus areas in an image or in short foreground and background blur. How well its coined...

Tiger shooting

Went on this project of shooting tigres with fellow owners of DSLR now that I have obtained the 400D (ok ok.. its a bit of a deviation from the original plan of a 350D). It was quite hazy the day we went shooting at ZOO Negara but we went on ahead without heed.
A note though that I had to borrow a friend's 28-135mm lens as my kit lens did not have the focal range that was needed. So thanks James. Much appreciated.



Click on any of the pictures to be taken to the Zoo Negara photoset.

Road Culture

What's up with the friggin' psychology of drivers in Malaysia. I mean wherever you go people keep changing lanes without freakin' using the bloody signal! I've experienced this for quite a while now but its just damn bloody annoying. Someone told me that this whole thing is a reverse psychology for those drivers whom when you do give a signal, they would step the pedal to the metal...ok ok...maybe thats a tad over-exaggerating but they do accelerate and stop you from changing lanes. Anyway, back to the first point. Whats really annoying about people not giving signals is when they change lanes suddenly and there is not much room between you and the front car which results in you having to break like crazy. Jeez, are we that much in a hurry that we forget common courtesy? Heck, didn't we even learn that (using signals when changing lanes) when we were taking our driving exams? C'mon people, I don't think its too much of an effort to flick your finger and hit the signal indicator knob. Else you would be on the receiving end of the middle finger...or worst yet, you might lose your rear bumper!

Photography resource 2

Anybody interested in taking a photography workshop with National Geographic? You can find out more here. These guys are still into film SLR and by the looks of it you probably need to be a veteran photographer to join one of these workshops, besides being costly for me ( my choice workshop to Venice would set me back by about US$4,000+ and that does not include a return airfare home). So I think I will stick with experimenting through trial and error for now (by understanding and applying the fundamentals of course).

Speaking of fundamentals, came across another site on photography by Sean McHugh. Quite a technical site and very resourceful on the fundamentals of photography. You can see his tutorials here. His gallery of images taken around Cambridge is quite spectacular too (he uses these compositions to illustrate certain techniques. You can view his gallery here. Well, now there is quite bundle of information that I have garnered, all I need now is the actual camera (and the accessories) to put all these theories to practice...........

Just in:

Another reason to wait for me is the news of Canon's 350D successor: the 400D. Slated to be released in September in Europe and America, I hope it hits our(my) shores around then too. This supposedly the first in Canon's line to introduce the EOS self cleaning system. You can check it out at Canon's site, dpreview or CNETasia. Or just google it!