Don't Panik – Eugene's little blog
Food, travel and Photography
The Christmas to New Year’s week has always been a busy one packed with family and friends and a lot of food in between. This year was a bit different since we both had lots of things to get done such as house painting and buying all the needed stuff before February. I had to get some work done in between as well but the week long break was much needed and it was great to be busy doing stuff. I would have hoped for more rest but I guess that’s life.
Wow. 2010 is ending. That was quick. Whatever happened to the three hundred odd days that just went by?
Anyways, it’s Christmas time again and due to some minor issues, we had to postpone the moving in of our Christmas tree. Before we knew it, it’s Christmas eve!!! Since moving a 10-foot tree that weighs over forty kilos is not going to be easy, we decided against having the tree in the house this year… So here’s a re-run of last year’s Christmas tree time-lapse.
In the meantime, there’s plenty to be thankful for and I must say that 2010 is an unbelievably blessed year thanks to so many of you friends and family. Well, time to get the cameras ready and to pick-up the turkey.
Merry Christmas Everyone!
(video trivia : Shot on a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with a 24mm f/2.8 lens. The little bit of video at the end was with my makeshift glidetrack, EOS-5D Mark II and 50mm f/1.8 lens. The assembled video was Graded with MagicBullet Looks and Colorista.)
Sometimes, it’s nice to have a little BBQ party at home versus going out to a fancy (or even not so fancy) place to dine. There’s a feel and sense of casual-ness and perhaps, more relaxed atmosphere. Parking is a lot easier of course and there’s not opening time or closing time. You’re free to dress-up as much as you want or dress-down. The only downside is probably for the hosts who has to cleanup. I guess I don’t mind that so much as the amount of time we spend with each other. Relationships need time and if you don’t invest time, you can watch them shrivel up and break.
Anyways, here are some photos.
On a lovely Sunday morning, Elyana and family got together, dressed up and spent some quality time with each other. In addition, they brought us in to have a portraiture session with them. I must also say that Elyana’s mom really cooks well and we had a boxful of yummy dumplings to take home with us! Oh, congrats to Elyana and Roslan on their tenth anniversary! Many happy returns!
Anyways, we started in their cozy home in Bandar Mahkota Cheras with their family and relatives and then took a short drive out towards Putrajaya where we had great fun near the Putrajaya mosque and main boulevard. Great time for the kids to go out, parents, relatives, and grandparents had great fun too!
I’m actually quite impressed with the way this outing was organized and we wish more people would actually spend the time to take photos of their family. You may not appreciate the photos right now but years later, when you look back at old photos, the memories are priceless. A lovely outing with the family, quality time with the kids and get family photos to boot! Excellent combination if you ask me!
And here I am caught by my lovely wife shooting on the move 🙂
First off, apologies for the lack of entries for quite a while now. I’ve been busy with way too many things. Of course the last two weeks also bring a lot of changes for me personally.
One big event this week is Kodak’s retirement of Kodachrome. The thing about this is it tells everyone how old I am. It does show also when I got into photography… I didn’t use Kodachrome much due to limited labs processing them here in Malaysia but I tend to use it’s newer siblings, the Ektachrome series. There are some nice links here.
The other product I’m playing with right now and yes, it does have promise is DSLR Remote from OnOne software. Yes, I do think it needs to do AF but besides that, it’s pretty cool and I think I’ve got quite a few new uses for it once my Manfrotto camera clamps arrive! Canon really needs to drop the price of their Wi-Fi transceivers (more later)! And of course I’ll say it here again: OnOne software really needs to move their plugin suite to 64-bit. Like yesterday. 32-bit is so Windows XP 🙂
Anyways, back to topic:
Over last weekend’s Focus on the Family event, I found out for the first time that the Direct Print button on my 5D Mark II actually had a use. Of course finally Canon’s listening and the Direct print button doubles up to use as a toggle to get into HD Movie mode but prior Canon cameras don’t have luxury. I still think it should be fully programmable though. Anyways, printing direct from Camera is cool for once and it does streamline the workflow… Shoot, connect camera, select image, hit print, swap camera, shoot, repeat the process. Easy!
However, the problem now is that in public events, that’s not as sexy as a big widescreen monitor. I’ll probably try this approach with the orang asli trip next… instant prints. Everyone loves that! So the next day, I lugged my laptop with a 22″ wide-screen monitor along. Using the EOS Utility software, I ended up shooting tethered. The Capture Preview window was maximized on monitor 2 (external display) but the main display (laptop) was showing Adobe Bridge. Of course with Bridge CS4, you can have a second synchronized window so that can be toggled if the family wanted to preview the shots taken and select the best one for printing. Otherwise, the Capture preview was nice to show people what was the camera shooting at that time. So, short of having wireless USB, I think Canon ought to halve the price of the WFT-E4 transceiver! When I’ve more time this weekend, I’ll post a more detailed description of the work flow and software used.
