Category: Current Events

An arm-chair punter’s view on his world.

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New Macro Lens

Bougainvila, originally uploaded by CeeKay’s Pix.

Finally, I bought a Tamron AF 90mm f/2.8 Di 1:1 macro lens today! After months of deliberating, the choice was down to 2, namely the Tamron and the Nikkor AF-S 105mm f/2.8G ED IF VR.

Both are really superb lens not only for taking extreme close-ups but also as a prime fixed length lens for everyday shooting. Reading online reviews and forums didn’t help as people who bought the Tamron, swore by it and likewise for those who bought the Nikkor too.

What pushed me to the Tamron was basically the price. I paid RM 1420 for this lens in Click N’ Snap in Komtar, Penang. They were also kind enough to throw in a free UV lens protector after I told them that another shop around the corner was selling at RM 1350. When asked about the RM 12xx price tag that everyone was talking about in the forums, I was informed that Tamron had raised the price of their lenses 2 months ago.

Compare this price with the asking price of RM 26xx for the Nikkor, getting the Tamron was really a no brainer!

First impressions of the 90mm were generally very good.

It takes really sharp and well saturated photos. The bokeh is very pretty. Unlike other reviewers, I didn’t find the autofocus to be too slow but if you want it to be faster, use manual focus instead.

If I have to nitpick to find a single fault with this lens, I can only point to one: build quality of the AF/MF slider (which has a “rough” snap whenever one switches from auto focus to manual focus).

I am going to take more photos later today and I shall post the more interesting ones on Flickr.

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Babies

Chayan and Grandma, originally uploaded by CeeKay’s Pix.

Babies are designed to tug at your heart strings. They are the most manipulative (but cute), calculative (but cute) and cunning (but cute) little beings that will always get what they want.

Their inability to verbally articulate their desires are complemented by 2 powerful ways of expressions:-
1. Their seemingly effortless mastery of the ear drum crushing cries
2. Their well timed and often well executed disarmingly charming smiles

This Chinese New Year, Cheryl and I met with a lot of babies. Some were big, some were small while others were hairy and others were bald. But all in all, we had a ball will all the babies running in the halls.

Yes, officially, I love babies now…

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Hong Kong Pictures



Hong Kong Island View From Kowloon, originally uploaded by CeeKay’s Pix.

I’ve revisited Hong Kong recently when Cheryl was there for work. The island state-within-a-state was how I remembered it: vibrant and loud. This time around, I had more time to visit the place on my own, armed with a camera, visiting and snapping up photos of sights and places in and around Kowloon.

We stayed in Mong Kok, a former seedy enclave of prostitute dens and gambling joints which has been transformed recently with urban renewal projects like the Langham Place (which we stayed in). The gleaming towers of Langham Place pierced through the skyline of crowded apartments and equally crowded street markets like a beacon of 21st century urbanity in an area that hasn’t seen much new development due to its proximity to the old airport. City zoning laws then didn’t permit the building of gleaming skyscrapers until recently and the Langham Place took that new liberalization with great stride.

The Hotel was a homely luxury, filled with a smell that is more European than Asian, perhaps projecting the uniqueness of this city island state in its embrace of Western modernity in the rise of Asian, particularly the Chinese ascent, in the new global equilibrium of trade and military power. Perhaps it is a foreboding of how China will transform itself in this century as it becomes more integrated into the world economy. As China embraces economic liberalization, so too will its cities. And like Hong Kong, its buildings, people and way of life will be infused with an intoxicating mix of Westernisation while retaining its unique Asian roots. Sort of like drinking French wine with Sprite or mixing expensive XO Cognac with ice and green tea.

I enjoy this paradoxical mix. I find it refreshing perhaps of my Chinese roots. Growing up, I grapple with how my Chinese heritage would co-exist with my seemingly Western outlook and thinking. While I embraced values like individual freedom, I am often reminded by my peers about the way how Chinese empires were build to last thousands of years on draconian and often repressive means.

Maybe, this is the way forward for Asian countries.

Asian countries will just have to build modernity upon the foundations of the old. Perhaps then, can a new Asian renaissance be dawned. In what form that takes remains to be seen. But if it is anything like Langham Place, I think that we are in for a pretty good ride.

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Final Tokyo Entry



Sensoji, originally uploaded by CeeKay’s Pix.

I’ve finally uploaded photos from the final couple of days from our recent trip to Tokyo. It took a while because my PowerMac went kaput and I had to change to, urgh, a PC running Windows Vista.

It has been a while since I had used a PC for my hobby (I use a Windows notebook everyday for work, but that’s different). However, the applications that I used heavily for photo workflow management are the same across platforms (Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop). But I do miss the iLife suite of applications, especially iPhoto. In place, I had installed the free Google Picasa.

As much as Microsoft is positioning Vista as the advance leap for Windows, I’m really disappointed with the overall compatibility of the OS. Until today, I am still facing intermittent wireless networking problems caused by device drivers. My Belkin PCI Wireless G card had never worked properly since the first day it was installed. Ironically, to get the drivers for the card to work, one has to install the new driver and then (this is sooo funny) roll back the driver. This will work as long as you do not switch off your PC. If you do, you have to repeat the whole thing over again.

Anyway, back to the photos.

For this batch, I’ve decided to try a different look and to play up the mood and emotions of the photos. I’ve experimented with sepia and color isolation and I’m pretty happy with the results. Some of them were taken from the inside of the bus so the color is not really great in the first place.

A lot of work went in to prepare this photo introducing this post, Sensoji. I had to digitally remove some hanging power cables and tweak the clouds to be darker so that they complement the umbrella carrying people of the photos.

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Japan Holiday Photos

Mt. Fuji from Mt. Komagatake, originally uploaded by CeeKay’s Pix.

I posted more pictures from our recent trip to Tokyo. It took a while to upload them because I had to clean them up in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

When I first downloaded the photos into my notebook, I was very disappointed because all of them were tainted with dust and lint, especially shots against a single color backdrop like skyscape.

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Tokyo Trip

Japan Tourism Office, originally uploaded by компютри втора употребаCeeKay’s Pix.

Last month, Cheryl and I visited Tokyo for a quick break. I found Tokyo to be what I expected it to be: culturally vibrant, predictably orderly and possessing a never dissipating buzz about the city.

This buzz is nothing more than the gigahertztic pulses of information that course through both the wired and wireless veins of the city. While this information travels quietly as digital bits, zipping across the city, hopping from senders to recipients, Tokyo is generally a city where its people do not casually hangout in public places to chatter or share a laugh.

Perhaps technology is the underlying thing that makes Tokyo sane. It probably has been a force of liberation to its people after thousands of years of introverted self restraint on public displays of emotions. Ultimately, it may have fulfilled the need for the Japanese people to connect to one another meaningfully while maintaining stoic normalcy in their perception of the real world.

This can be seen everyday as Tokyo inhabitants safely navigate through seas of people in the crowded streets while their faces are buried deep in their widescreen mobile phones playing a game or texting with their friends. It can also be felt through the efforts that Tokyo put into replacing tedious manual labour through the use of machines to sell everything from water to food coupons but proudly reserves its highest technological showcase to robots that mimics the inefficiency of the human form.

Yes, Tokyo is a city of contradiction and conformity. A city where ying lives peacefully with yang.