convocation

i went to my baby sister's convocation yesterday. my mission was to take pictures, and to be there for the family. rarely for me :)

despite the blessing to be with family, occasion and the fun, somehow i could say it ended with tragedy. blame on the landscape, i fashionably, recklessly jumped and tripped myself by heavy landing on my both knees, to save my camera from breaking. what's with Malaysia's universities and hilly terrain landscapes!?

i hurt myself quite badly, torn pants on both knees, my shades dented, my camera scratched, nasty cuts everywhere, bleeding like hell, and list went on and on.

i guess, that's the price for being lazy to follow along the provided walkway. i could have done better. seriously. but lesson learnt.

anyway here are some of the picture i took.

my dad. with artificial noise (grainy effect) added to give more drama of a proud father in his smile :)

my mom. first class kiss from first class graduate.

and another blow on my aunt's cheek! she's a kisser, didn't she?! :)

singing birds

look at how far rozio's angry birds have come. from a 2D games to merchandise to a complete irresistible thing in the society now. it's like everybody is playing angry birds via mobile phones nowadays.

so i've decided to come out with my own version of angry birds. sort of. i thought why not start a new vector project in illustrator. but for me being angry is not good. so i decided to name them singing birds instead. i think they are not angry anymore, right? hihi.

so here are the artworks completed for the time being via my newly installed adobe illustrator and photoshop cs5. enjoy! :) maybe one day i'll commercialize my singing birds into merchandises like t-shirts and mugs of myself :P

self portraits

i couldn't sleep. so i thought why not try to photograph myself. i used RAW format for ease of editing with maximum exif data retained by the camera processor.

again, using white cardboard, my tripod, in my bedroom's total darkness, so dark that the lens couldn't find anything to focus on so i used my guitar pick as proxy focus point, my speedlite flash and an ikea stand lamp as artificial illuminations, tapes and now, me. after minor tweaks in adobe lightroom, here are the results. i know it's not much and those probably mediocre shots for some of you or perhaps all of you but, it's a good start. i think. and boy, i had fun, at least :)

room for improvements? of course, always will be. i need more gadgets. i need (want actually is the right word) soft box(s) and studio lamp(s)! greedy mode on! hahaha!

mini studio

i have been playing with different settings and lighting set up with kenny in my room. so i decided to set up sort of like a budget mini studio in my own bedroom using two stand lamps, white cardboard, black cardboard, tapes and my side table.

here are some samples of picture that i took after pre processing in adobe lightroom and then exported them into adobe photoshop for few tweaks before getting published. all in all, the shots were okay in my standard but i found it difficult to get pure white background and i struggled to adjust the white balance in lightroom. the backgrounds are all greyish sort of color. and it's killing me! haha.

next project is going to be human potraits with really white background. lego trucks and playstation joystick are relatively easy to photograph as they lack emotion hence scarce of moments. i need to capture more moments, of living things. first, i need a model and few light sources in order to illuminate the background. wish me luck then.