NewSc2

Series of photos depicting China. Most are pretty depressing (child labor, overcrowded living, poverty), but give good perspective on life. This one isn’t depressing:

Street side tailor making an instant repair on a skirt.

Page 1 (Survival), Page 2 (Relationships), Page 3 (Desires)

It’s geeky, I know. See the post below.

I spent the weekend working at the LA Pen Show, so I decided to give myself a little gift.

I bought my first ever luxury pen purchase (a Visconti fountain pen), a bottle of purple Montblanc ink, and a few Rhodia notepads. The ink looks great, and the pen is very pretty, but the nib is (imo) not as good as our Taccia nibs — it writes too wet. Hopefully it’ll break in after a couple fills.

I know I’ve been lagging on the picture output, but I shoot everything in RAW format (lossless). It’s extremely tedious for me to process the 2-3GB of photos I can easily shoot in a night, but eh, I guess it’s gotta be done somehow. I’m probably going to start shooting in small JPG + RAW (large JPG is nice to preview details on the fly), and try to use iPhoto instead of Photoshop for faster uploading. On second thought… I hate iPhoto’s file management, so maybe not.

So over the next week or two I’ll slowly chronicle everything my camera lens has seen since the last photo update I did, which… was Vegas I think? (back in June?)

Without further ado, here are some shots that my sister wanted me to send to her. I figure it’s best (and laziest) to start with what I’ve already cropped/corrected.

It’s from a trip my dad, Lillian, and I went on to Disneyland back in August:

A few weeks too late, but here goes:

Elaine (my cousin) and Teddy looking at Elaine’s beagle (whose name escapes me)

That last pic was Elaine’s dad looking at my flash’s hot card thingy. Hence the confused look.

Aw, look at how happy Teddy is. He’s smiling!

POST-PROCESSING (IN PHOTOSHOP) OF VEGAS PHOTOS

Learned some really basic post-processing photography techniques and wanted to post examples to track my progress. I took a few shots from the selection in my gallery of Vegas below, and touched them up in Photoshop. Just did some basic levels and curve adjustments, and unmask sharpened a little bit. Didn’t take more than about a minute for each one.

For the first example, a pretty underexposed picture of the Venetian Canal Square:

The image was processed straight to JPG in the camera, so I didn’t think I could grab this much more detail using the lossy file format. Lo and behold, a few tweaks and the shot looks arguably a bit better, and definitely has more detail. I know it has more distractions (people’s faces, etc.) but I was pretty impressed with the change:

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The next series of pics are going to be from Red Rock Canyon. The canyon was very scenic, so it was pretty hard to take a truly bad shot. But we went in the middle of the day, with the super-harsh sun, and there was a bit of dust and haze in the distance that came up on my pictures. Photoshop helped put back in some of that lost color.

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This was a picture that stood out to me. It has nice composition, but the colors just seem so washed out. This may have been a part of Red Rock that wasn’t so red, but the sky itself seems more gray than what I have in other pics. I might revisit this picture in the future… instead of going for the colored look, trying to tone down the image and work with its boundaries in that way. But for now, I don’t know how to do that, so here goes.

The difference isn’t huge, but the sky is more blue, and the rocks more red. The background mountain is also more clear.

And few more examples for your viewing pleasure:

And:

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This pair is actually one of my favorites I took. The depth of field in the image didn’t turn out the way I exactly intended to, but post-processing gives the log a better contrast and looks more lively:

So that’s it! Someday you can be a beginning post-processor too. Pardon my enthusiasm but I’m pretty pleased with the way things turned out and I’m very bored at work.

This past weekend Robert, Goldsheft, David, and I went to Vegas, and stayed at the Sahara (which is in BFE compared to the rest of the Strip):

Surprisingly, it didn’t matter much. It’s nice to walk out of the hotel and be in the middle of the Strip, but walking out of the hotel and driving for 5 minutes isn’t that bad. The only thing is that the Sahara buffet sucks. Don’t go there.

Buncha pics of Vegas from first two days, from our arrival to me walking around taking pictures (and avoiding leaving Vegas in the red for gambling — I left winning $22 — yay!). Caption is contained in the file name (hover mouse to see):

Continuing on, the four of us went to the Moon Club and Playboy Lounge at the Palms on Saturday night (pics were taken with a small point-and-shoot camera, hence the shittier quality. I do wish I brought my big camera, but club + expensive camera don’t mix):

And Luxor illuminating the moon:

Have I ever mentioned that I don’t like hip-hop clubs? People cheer for songs they’ve heard before, not for a truly good song or a good mix. I’d rather go to a house or techno club, and I might even go to a trance club for that matter, to get away from the hip-hop/pop crowd. Crass commercialism > musical genius for the loss :(. (I’ll save that rant for another day). As you can see, the club at least looked really nice, especially the illuminated bar, and illuminated floor tiles everywhere, and it was really fucking crowded.

Day 3, Sunday, saw a nice segue to an outdoor excursion, away from all the hustle and bustle of Vegas. Sadly, it wasn’t away from the heat. We got to Red Rock around 2 in the afternoon, and it wasn’t really that far away from Las Vegas. 30 min.?

(I wish Wordpress had a bulk thumbnail upload. That just took me about 10 minutes to upload those images individually)

On the way back from Vegas we hit a traffic jam — big rig flipped over the side of the 15 fwy. Sorry, no pics of that…

To pass the 6/7-odd hours the return trip lasted, we played the movie/actor game, where someone starts off with the name of the movie, the next person has to say an actor/actress that was in the movie, then the next person says another movie that actor/actress was in, and so on and so forth. No name can be said twice, so after, about, 4 hours the game got a little difficult. Especially considering I rarely watch movies anyway — my music takes up about 300 gigs on my hard drive, and movies maybe 20. Whoever says a movie or actor has to back up that name with one step more (so I can’t blindly say a movie without knowing a legit answer for the next person). The penalty for missing is a punch.

The game ended on a high note with me unofficially winning as we pulled up to Robert’s house. It somehow got from Val Kilmer to Batman Forever to Jim Carrey to Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and it was my turn. I’ve watched Ace Ventura several times, but I’m not really a names-of-actors person. I racked my head really quickly and came up with — yep, you guessed it — Dan Marino! And I knew another movie he was in! David couldn’t get it after a couple minutes, so he challenged me, and… yep you guessed it again — Dan Marino was in Bad Boys 2. He got his car stolen before the ridiculous car chase. Whoo hoo! That $8 I spent to see the movie back in high school (and the 2 hours I wasted) actually came to fruition.

Great weekend, fun memories, Vegas, hiking, and good company. What more could you ask for?

Well, I got my camera about a week ago (see last post), and I’ve already gone through close to 1600 photos. Like any noob photographer, I’d say maybe only 100 of them are good pictures, and about 300 more are decent. The rest I should trash — most are plain ol’ blurry, but some are overexposed/test shots/bad angles/bad lighting/bad composition/etc. My Macbook Pro’s 160gb hard drive isn’t a big fan of my new toy.

A few of us went to the Angels game last night, to see K-Rod blow a save and Speier lose the game to the Mets in extra innings (boo!). Snapped about a hundred photos with the camera; see two examples below. I’ll put together a more thorough update with my first few pictures and how I’ve started to learn the camera’s functions.

I’ve been having a lot of free time lately, with a need to focus my attention away from dwelling on things.

Piano has been coming along very well (hopefully in a couple weeks I’ll be posting songs), and I decided to make my second major purchase of the past few weeks. I’ve always wanted an SLR, and after seeing a few acquaintances’ photo albums, and images like the one below, with the nice background blur (bokeh), I decided to take the plunge.

Photo owned by Sir Mervs (cc)

I purchased a Canon EOS 40D, which is Canon’s next line up of SLR digital cameras above the entry-level Rebel series. I was initially looking to pick up the Canon Digital Rebel XTi (~$650 w/ kit lens) or Canon Digital Rebel XSi (the newest Rebel, $849 w/ kit lens), but Canon just announced a $200 instant rebate on the 40D, and the it apparently comes with a much better and more expensive kit lens, among other upgrades, like a higher quality metal body frame, dual control knobs for easier setting manipulation, and a more durable shutter. After manipulating Amazon’s Gold Box, I got the 40D down to $1079 w/ lens.

I’ve been (impatiently) waiting for the camera to (freaking) arrive, which it looks like it’ll do on Wednesday (great, I have traffic school that night). I also picked up a Crumpler 5 Million Dollar camera bag, as well as the extremely popular 50mm f/1.8 II lens (only $90 on Amazon).

In the meantime, I’ve been reading a few resources and books on the topic. Before I purchased the camera, I was reading an endless stream of gear reviews, but afterwards the impulse seems to have subsided and I’ve been reading more on the technical aspects of photography. Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography books have been good brief reads, going into basic actions needed to get certain types of shots (tripod/ball head necessary, stand here, take picture with this type of light shining this way, etc.). I also came across this website a few months ago, and re-read it all over again — Bernie’s Better Beginner’s Guide to Photography, which is an excellent brief read.

I’ll be posting photos after I get the camera, and I really do want to explore photography as a creative outlet, and not just as a snapshot-for-memories device.

I know this blog has been pretty materialistic up to this point, and I hope it’ll change. For the time being, I guess retail therapy really works. (New camera!! Yay!!)