Back From LalaLand

Hi all i've finally managed to clumber back to sunny Singapore. Though in my very humble and honest opinion, Sungai Besar is a much more sunny place. BUT, it was a good rest nonetheless and i've rejuvenated myself, albeit gaining a few spots on my body and well, starting to feel like a fish being scaled off daily. 

When i first thought of going back, there at the back of my mind i wanted to take nice pictures by the not-so-nice seaside (consists of mud and sand and... more mud and sand) i also wanted to take my mum's little piece of land called the garden, which in a few years time, has blossomed to become a tiny tropical rainforest. ALAS! i forgot to bring the charger for the camera's battery o.O 

Well, not to fret, since there are of course photo shops in Sungai Besar, to help the local develop photos of course. Upon checking, they have NEVER seen a canon DSLR battery before. well... o.O 

which ultimately leaves me with only a few pictures that i manage to salvage with about half the battery life. In fact there is a second battery, which i left here in sunny Singapore. THAT is how smart ppl can get when they are infected with chicken pox. enjoy the pics though =)

This is none other than one of my mum's multitude of plants. i dunno what is its name. just like we all dunno what's the names of those trees in the tropical rainforest. it just looks nice.

Another fruit and AH HA! it's called 'LIM KIM' in hakka i dunno wad it's called in other languages. someone enlighten me.

Being a fishing village, of course Sungai Besar will have a seaside. it's just how nice the seaside can be. Well, not very nice. i've taken this shot to purposely make the silhoutte stood out.

One of my favorite pics from salvaging the remaining juice of the battery. it's the stilts that some of the chalets are on.

Also one of my favorite pics. a crane was resting on top of the log. but too bad the lens is really not far enough even at 200mm it still appears to be so small.

P/S btw i really didnt expect Sungai Besar to turn up on wiki. wiki rawks =D

Holiday Ending Soon

Finally, after a tortuous 1-1/2 weeks i'm finally going back soon. to be honest, it was only tortuous at the beginning of the ordeal. 

CANNOT SCRATCH! ITCHY! FEVER! 

after that, they slowly dry up to be scales on your body and on top of that, you get to eat good food (fishes everyday), get to sleep for 12 hours daily, get to take photos at the beach, get to use the computer to read manga and watch gundam, and best of all, even get paid... and now i'm going back soon. God is good =)

well, even going back wont be so bad coz there appeared to be cheap air tix from KL to SING so decided to get it since it's once in a lifetime it can get so cheap.. so i'll be back soon peeps. !! 

MUAHAHAHAHA! 

Poxy Update!

i'm currently recovering well in a small town eating rice with steam fishes and vege everyday. yes i know it seems like i've retreated into a reclusive villa of some sort but please do not think that having chicken pox is having fun at my age T_T apparently a lot of ppl does not know that you will be hospitalised if you get chicken pox at the age of 30. and it is fatal. 

hopefully i will be back to my computer to update soon...  

GREAT NEWS!

i'm down with chicken pox (not confirm but i have small, watery red dots over my body, mild fever for about 2 days or so AND I HAVE NOT HAD CHICKEN POX IN MY LIFE). Confirming with doctor tomorrow... horrible nite tonite... i can so predict. 

now should i be happy or should i be anxious? -.-

I'm SICK!

Quote: "i'm surprised our body dont fall sick from it.." (2009, Moses on his previous post!)

zZz

Caleb One Month Old

Last week i had the opportunity to attend a baby shower (not really shower larh but probably means the same thing) of Deacon Lim's little son named Caleb. He is such an adorable boy he covered his ears while sleeping because we all uncle aunties are making too much of a noise.. SOO cute!!! 

as time went on sooo many ppl brought their little toddlers along to the baby shower and it was very happening indeed. Only posted some picture because as enthusiastic as i am about taking pics, i'm still as lazy as ever to go wait for it to upload *since i've already uploaded it in one million other websites*. 

But overall it was a very busy day last Sunday. And as i'm posting this, just out of a sudden random rant, i think Singapore is experiencing equatorial style winter today. it may not be winter tomorrow but today sure is super cold. island wide raining for the whole morning + afternoon + evening. weather's gone wonky. 

anyways, here are some pics. 

The mums/mums-2-b taking pics with the star of the day. He just keeps on sleeping and sleeping and sleeping... like me! 

not to forget, we also have another little boy who turned 16 months? normally when he's in church in the cry room, he's not as active as he was that day so seizing this golden opportunity i snapped some shots of him :) btw he just learned the cute 'O-ohhh'! haha

and here's my favourite picture of the day, which was taken earlier that day when we sat down to have a sip in the hot weather. Hot?! yar.. it was summer on sunday, winter on monday. i'm surprised our body dont fall sick from it.. 

High Dynamic Range Imaging

To be honest, when i first heard HDR it has nothing to do with photography. or digital imaging. it had to do with games. Yes and until today, the most realistic games like Crysis and Far Cry 2 uses HDRI in their graphics engine to create that kind of surreal environment that you see in games.

And after reading some chunks of material on the net (i thought i was damn difficult to do), i decided to try it out myself. yes i know i look like i'm damn free but it's all well planned ok. i'm preparing myself for the aussie trip so i can shoot nice pics over there, IF i get to borrow the SLR over... 

Anyways, during my orchard trip as some of you might have seen on facebook, i managed to take some pictures of the supreme court and some skyline using the auto exposure bracketing feature of the camera to get 3 pictures with 3 different exposures together. Merge them in photoshop and walla! here are some pics.. click to enlarge it is damn sharp. 

This is the old supreme court of Singapore.. which in my honest opinion, looks much nicer than the stupid new disc structure. That's why i didnt even bother taking its picture tho it's just next door.. 

The skyline of Singapore as seen from clarke quay. the HDR makes it almost surreal, emphasizing the dramatic sky and saturating the color so vivid it looks like a painting. i hope to catch the opera house in action during my trip.. HAHA.. !!

there you go. HDR makes up wonderful images tho i think that i still have loads to learn as an amateur.. 

New Template!!!

Yeap, i'm officially satisfied with my new template.. it is nice, chio and just fabulous. Credits goes to the following:

Bloggerbuster.com

repeatxy.com

deviantart.com

for providing tips, tricks and images so that this template can be custom made :) 

The Power of RAW!

Since bitten by that bug, i've been taking some pics here and there. As we all know, digital imaging software is also progressing by the light years together with the cameras that are produced. To be honest, even with all that geekiness in me, i dont really play with photoshop or paintshop pro or wadsoeva. Yes i did play with them quite some time ago (proof of my geekiness) but i never really liked them because

1) Their program is laggy and huge AND COMPLICATED. 

2) I'm too lazy. 

3) My picture look worse than when it is unedited. Which is usually the case for me and it has been sceptical for me since i touched those program. 

So since i was bitten by that bug now, i figured i shall just check out what they do normally to make pictures look nicer.. they say that curiosity kills the cat.. BUT i'm not a cat... at the very max, i can only be a mosquito due to my name but not a cat.. so curiosity crept in. And lo and behold, i discovered something called the RAW format. how noob of me. 

Here is a picture of a pretty girl in a nicely diffused background with nice colours and all. Normally i would just look at it and go, wow! quite a nice picture.. but then if it is blown up to quite a bigger size, things would be different. and from my crappy experience with digital imaging, this would probably be the best image that the camera can produce and any altering will lead to grains, noise and those ugly stuff that makes your picture worse. 

So after reading a bunch of material regarding histograms, tonal range and blah blah blah, i decided to try it out myself by shooting RAW formats on the SLR. They always say that RAW can preserve this larh, that larh and result in lossless color correction etc etc. i always take them with a pinch of salt because my eyes tell me that JPEG looks as good as the RAW that i shoot when i look into the LCD. And if i do anything to the image on processing, things will go wrong.. 

Initially when i blow up the picture in my screen it really does look a tad uninspiring. When it is still small like above it can look quite alrite and acceptable but when blown to about 5R size there's a distinct warmish color cast and the whole picture just look flat. So after tweaking with the white balance, tonal range and the exposure, together with some curves adjustments, i got the shock of my life...

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I couldnt believe my eyes actually until i click another button to compare them both... well in my honest (even though noob) opinion i really think the latter picture looks more striking in colors, and with better contrast and exposure. so THAT is how RAW format can do. and there you have it.. even a noob photographer like me can do something like that without using photoshop.. just some basic color correction and exposure adjustments... how cool is that.. 

Singapore Student Kills Self After Stabbing Professor

Suddenly, it seems like there's a lot of interesting news in sunny Singapore. More relevantly, the student involved is an Indo in NTU who, i presume, got fedup with his prof and decided to pull a stunt on him.. 

Btw the picture above is from a series of bunny suicide comics by Andy Riley which is morbidly hilarious.. 

How Ridiculous Can It Be?!

To be struck by lightning in the midst of all those tall buildings?! The Merlion sure is suay... 

Photography Bug

They call it the photography bug..  when i was young, there was something called the film camera. the SLR for film is smaller, lighter and less complicated BUT the films costs a hell lot. And you cant see what you've taken..

so for that simple reason, i cant afford to buy any camera. or any film for that matter. until one day this thing call digital camera popped out. so i promptly *actually i got it much later* got myself a small little camera the size of my wallet. at first it was quite fun pointing and shooting here and there. but then, when i got to travel a bit more it kinda disappointed me coz the pics doesnt turn out the way i want it to.. and i was too lazy to find out how to make it turn out i want it to.. 

well, up until last year when i got to try something bigger. it was scepticism at first coz 1) i've never used one before. 2) it probably will just produce that sort of dull flat pictures even with the perfect angle and so on.. 

ah ha! that's when i was quite a bit surprised because of how nice the pics turn out when photographed in indoor lighting. that sparked off something so after a few months later, i figured that i'd go online and read a bit about aperture and shutter speed. which is not a good idea because this bug is now bugging me like mad. 

Just nice that my dear fren has his SLR on the free, because of busy FYP (ah ha!) and stuff so i got to borrow it for a while to take some pics.. which is also not a good idea because now the bug's growing bigger. 

oh well, i shall just take some nice pics *in my opinion* from now and post some if i've got the time... haha! 

p/s: btw if you havent noticed, the blog skin has changed... with the help of some tips and tricks online... i will tune it a bit more on the days to come so stay posted =D and go download this if you havent to see the nice fonts!! 

Mummy & Papa Here!!

Yeap just a short post here.. my parents came over to sunny singapore to visit me!!! and asked us to come for dinner so here are some pics which i've collated...

quite interestingly, they were looking for some kinda sweets.. yes i know that my dad has diabetes but still, mummy was lookin for that sweet which she ate when she was young... Sooooo.. turns out that Grace knows the sweet well too and too bad my parents are just here for 1 nite or else we could have went somewhere else to buy it..

it was a nice little dinner somewhere near paya lebar mrt with the *nicest* to date lamb rib soup that i've tasted sooo far.. even ah pa say it's good so it must be good.. den headed off to chill out at coffee bean coz can sit down comfortably...

oh well, it's just a short trip down here so i hope they enjoyed themselves.. coz i do!! and Grace does too!! haha!

More Work?? Off i go then...

Alrite.. as some might have noticed, it's so hard to maintain a blog.. coz i m just pure plain lazy and sometimes typing out everything seems like a chore to me as well...

but just some updates if you're still reading my blog!! haha.. i'm working now, doing my attachment at this company call BD. no it doesnt stand for backdoor but u can just google it and u'll find it for sure.

anyways, since i'm working, i've involved myself in something rather interesting lately... since last december when i went to the mission trip.. oh ya, i never update about the mission trip.. but yar just briefly, the mission trip to Senai was last Dec and i got to play with some cool SLRs so i kinda condemned those little pin hole cameras to eternal damnation.. that is why i also stopped taking pictures actively with my cam coz it turns out.. well.. not that nice.. 

anyways, the whole point is.. i've built myself some gundams, and i've taken some pics of it with an SLR.. marriage of 2 hobby if u'd say so... and thus i'm here to post some pics again.. haha

mind you, it looks like quite simple actually it took me more than 1 week just to trim the nip marks of the gundam, sand it down, remove lines, paint, assemble, go over with top coat and finally taking the pics... 

still looks amateur.. oh well.. i'm still learning.. 

Dear Blog,

Yes i know i havent update in ages, and today, because my heart and blood is in high tide, i shall come out from my hermit shell and do some ranting on this old space in the internet, so as to entertain or to humor some who still visits the blog.

I have been working. Hard. in a forsaken land call Tuas because i have to wake up 6 am everyday. YES. it is 6 am because my work starts at 745 am, which is blardy early if you ask me but then, there's no jam and i end at 445 pm. :D which is a plus. 

so far i've been into about 2 weeks of my attachment and everything is still quite smooth, with minimal hiccups. due to some coincidences and some accidences, i've managed to get 2 evening modules as well, which means that this semester isnt going to be as sweet as i'd imagined.  which is a good thing, considering i'd have to take 6 CORE MODULES AGAIN !@#%!$% if i dun take the evening mods this sem. 

sometimes i really wonder what on earth am i studying for because when i'm at attachment, i realise i'm not studying a single thing of what those engineers are doing there. :S not good eh, considering i'm working my ass off in school and coming out having to start all over again. but oh well, that's life sometimes... like a box of chocolates. you never know what you'll get. 

understandbly, i havent got time to do anything else other than coming back from work and sleep early and strangely, blog now. \^o.o^/ hmm weird. 

but anyways, i'm ending at 19th June. (see, have to begin with an end in mind) which means, that i will be just in time for an aussie trip from 24th June to somewhere in July. YAY! sooooo, tata ppl, have a nice sem mugging! 

MY BLOG IS DYING

Because i'm just pure plain lazy to update even though i've finished exam since MONDAY. YES PEOPLE I HAVE SUCCESSFULLY CLEARED A SIX CORE MODULE SEM! 

it is, up until now, the most worrying and traumatising sem i ever had and boy am i glad that i'm going for attachment next sem. Alrite, attachment is not a holiday... maybe i might even miss studying. YEAH RITE. not for now i wont!

i'm just ranting because i've been out since morning 8 o clock until about 11pm and i've just cleared a big business by the loo. yeap when exam's over, you have all the time in the world to rant. 

Gundam 00 End Song

It's very nice.. and here's the lyrics lol:

Friends by Stephanie

You had on the same smile

Even though the years have piled upon us

Impatient, we ignore the scenery passing by

Throw away your useless pride

Show kindness to the world

I gotta say

Even if we put on a courageous facade

We cannot live alone

The promise you made that day

Remains deep within my heart Even now

Partings and meetings

Finding light walking down new roads

Since the day we were born

This repetition has linked us together

When did you and I

Acquire such differing futures?

I gotta say

Even if we're far apart and never meet again

There is a strong bond between us

"Let my dreams come true"

I pray from the bottom of my heart

We're friends forever

Let's pledge to meet again

Swear on it

We're going to walk forward

Toward an unseen destination

Even if we're lost

We'll continue

No matter what

Amid the changing seasons

And the flow of time

Familiar melodies

Even when we grow old

They won't fade away

Our precious memories

I gotta say

Even if we put on a courageous facade

We cannot live alone

The promise you made that day

Remains deep within my heart

As life goes on...

Because we mustn't forget Yeah

Don't let it go...

This wide world or the people you hold dear

Possibly The Best Street Fighter Scene. Ever.

the best street fighter moment of all time.

YES WE CAN!

Well, it's a 'great journey ahead' for Mr Obama as he takes on the top job as the leader of the 'free world'. I must say, he did surmont quite a challenging task, outvoting the first female presidential candidate from his own party, then outlasting a seemingly more experienced candidate from the opposing party. 

Seriously, am i guy so interested in politics? actually no. maybe i'm just groomed that way since young - look at my own country's politics and you'd know why. so here's the latest parody, which out of all that i've watched concerning Mr Obama, is the funniest of all time.

About Last Night. only on south park. 

Gundam 00

Alrite. i have to admit that i'm not much of a gundam fan really. dont worry if you are not because i understand why. It is just pure plain boring if you watch them like halfway or something. Unlike those cool-like-shit robot cartoons u get when u were around 6-7 years old, there's a lot of talking and less fighting in the gundam animes. 

Until now. or maybe coz i've grown up coz Gundam 00 really does look like they kick ass. Alrite, another short history lesson. Gundam, where they might look similar in all the cartoons, are discontinuous - meaning each series is independent and not connected, much like final fantasy games where all of them have similar features but each of them are immersed in a totally different world altogether (japanese have a fetish for this kinda thing). 

So Gundam 00 is another series by itself and surprisingly, it has got a very matured theme unlike the rest of the anime that i'm catching. Political issues, racial and religion wars etc something which are happening in our world now. That's why it's very interesting. the first few episodes are quite standardly boring with more talks than fights but after a while, it really gets going and yeap, one of the more interesting shows i've catched this year :)