We started discussing on what Willy & Rachel are expecting and then we have the actual shoot at May 2010!
p/s: I have been slacking a lot (From May till July) for delivering the photos. lol

On the day of shooting itself, my body kept disagree with me and I had a severe migrain problem under the hot baking sun, luckily my buddy, CS Low was there to rescue the day!  A big thanks to Low for helping me to capture some of the beatiful shots!

During the shoot, we had ice-kacang at Rachel house, and also we took the chance to visit, Chymes Hotel for a indoor shoot before the sunset session.

I’ve selected some of my favourite shots and compiled into a slideshow,
please feel free to view them by clicking here

And for the geeks, the photos were captured with the Nikon D700 with a few lenses from ultra wide 12mm to tele 200mm.  Photos are then arranged and adjusted using mainly Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 with custom presets.

Here’s 2 clips captured earlier with Nikon D700 and compiled with ProShow Producer.

Video 1 is a sunset scene with Penang port, take note on the interesting boats movement along the straits.

Video 2 is captured during evening at Egate, Penang.

Feel free to comments; Both video is available in 720p HD on my facebook page
I am going to share on how to create the video shortly after this, stay tuned!

The restaurant is a 3 stories building with the 1st floor as the  main dining area and 2nd floor as a relaxing corner for the after-works; The 3rd floor is reserved for private party, weddings, corporate events.

We were having great times there with the dishes served by GEM and among them, my top choice would be the Crab Soup!

For more selected photos, feel free to check them out at the Photo Album

Enjoy!

All shots taken with D90 & 50mm at various aperture and exposure, the clips then combined and adjusted in Adobe Premier Pro and finally exported to FLV for web viewing.

@Making a living
Since I made the biggest change to my career from an IT slave to a full time photographer last year; I attended, covered and witness endless weddings and its going strong!  I took more photos in a month than the whole year combined previously (pity my camera shutter’s life though).  I also made my debut for speaking publicly for Han Chiang High school photography classes, Freezed.asia photo club and also some photography workshop for Nikon Malaysia.  Once again thank you for all the supports and I will keep on sharing what I like the most!

@Lovely days
This year, I met my darling – Angelina, and thus officially self-declared that I am not another otaku anymore (yes, I do watch anime quite often previously)!  And to all of the friends out there who kept asking me about my darling, the following picture is a shot of me with my darling.  And yes, we know when to get married and when to have some Mini-Bert, and appreciate all your efforts for reminding us in Facebook (You know who you are, my dear-friends!).

@Having fun and plays
This year, I also made a lot of purchases including a 32” Panasonic LCD HDTV, WDTV Media player, some hard-disk-drives, a brand new Nikon D700 and also a soon-to-come Lenovo laptop.  There’s still quite a big list of items in my wish-list too and I am looking forward to get them slowly!  For the time being, its just not feasible.

@Family
Parent is getting old day by day and ages has started to take the toll on my mom. She was admitted to hospital 3 times this year with the last one having a bypass surgery, thanks god she went thru all of the darkness.  It’s good to have a family and I wish it last as long as possible! 

@Finale
It’s a good-good year that I met a lot of new friends this year!  You are all welcomed to share your stories to me as well!  I will end this post here with a few shots from my recent photo coverage of Music for Life, a concert in aid of Hospice at Home Programme.

Enjoy and see you again in 2010!

As the response is overwhelming, we have decided to split it into 2 workshop, one in the month of Nov and another one at Jan 2010.
Held at E & O Hotel, Penang, everyone had fun sharing, learning and enjoying the fantastic buffet!

We had the theory session in the morning in one of the cozy seminar room.  Things get excited when the specially arranged models arrived after lunch!

The shoots was carried out around E & O Hotel, and everyone were really enjoying the shoot, some would even go the extreme by lying on the wet grass just for that very low angle!

As I am busy capturing the event in video, I did not have a lot of pictures to share, here’s 2 shots on Stephy, one of the model from Velvet Production!

The video will be ready shortly after this, stay tuned!

If you are using D3000, and are interested to join the next workshop, please feel free to contact me!  Last but not least, feel free to comments!

I took a short 2D1N trip to Cameron Highland with family last weekend.  As titled, I had a ‘bowlful’ of strawberries there!   Sadly though it was raining cats & dogs over there, so I din’t get the chance to go capture some regular tea-farm scenic; instead, I visited a few indoor farms and had fun shooting/eating/hanging there!

We stayed at Titiwangsa Hotel,  a twin king-sized bed at a super duper low price of RM 218 a night!  And best of all, the price includes a buffet breakfast & a steamboat dinner for everyone!  A step into the room, we were amazed by how spacious it is for such a good deal!  Will I be visiting the same hotel again?  Definitely yes!

A look of the delicious steamboat!  A treat for the freezing night!  After the great meal, we went for a traditional body massage right at the main entrance of the hotel for a cost of RM 60 an hour.  The massage was so-so and you can forget about it if you wish.

I’ve selected 80photos to share with you, for your convenience, the exposure info is included this round so that you have a rough idea on how I captured those.
Please feel free to comments and ask if you need further details!

>> Please click here for the flash album <<

For your info, the photos were captured with a Nikon D700, I swap between a 18-35 ultra wide angle, a 50mm, and a 135mm short tele lens.  The photos were then edited with Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta.

I received quite a lot of inquiries on how to create the above photo montage.  The original idea came from another article off the net, which I can’t remember which one to credit to at the moment. So, I’ve created my version on how to create this montage in a few minutes time with minimum efforts.

To do this, you will need the following items (Click on the name to download them respectively)

- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (LR2)
- Adobe Photoshop (PS)
- PanosFX.com Big Pictures action script plug-in (Free Edtion)
- AlbertYap.com Template for exporting original file in Lightroom 2

Notes:
I assumed you already know how to import action script for PS, and also template for LR2, if you do not know how to do this, please do a Google search or contact me.  You are also assumed to be able to understand PS & LR2 basics such as running an action, exporting picture in LR2 and etc.

Instructions:
1. Select and prepare 25 landscape photos in LR2, vertical oriented photos does not work very well in this montage.  Arrange them in the way you preferred after adjustments.

2. Once you have selected the 25 photos to be included in the final output, go to LR2’s Print module. As illustrated above, by using the attached template (Star 1). You get to preview the output similar to the above screenshot.  Here, you can click and move the small individual picture a little bit to the left or right for better composition.

3. When you are ready for the next step, click “Print To File” on bottom right (Star 2) and save the photo montage as a JPEG file.

4. You will then have a newly created JPEG file similar to the above, without my watermark of course, if you are not happy with the arrangement on the small pictures, you can always go back to step 2 and rearrange them in LR2.  When you are ready and happy with the result, proceed to close LR2, and execute PS for the final effects.

5. I am using Photoshop CS4 for this tutorial, so it might have a difference user interface as your Photoshop especially older versions.  Nonetheless, they are all the same, download the correct version of action scrip from PanosFX.com for your Photoshop and we are ready for the next step.

6. There are 2 actions included in the current edition from PanosFX.com, one is called “Big Picture flat actions”, and another one is “Big Picture curled actions”.  I am using “Big Picture curled actions” for this tutorial sample,  you can try either one of them as they work the same way, just produce difference results.

7. By executing the action, you will be requested to open up a landscape picture, if you already opened the file you saved earlier, just close the open dialog and it will then automatically proceed with plenty of recorded actions and once they are done, you will get a few results, pick one and save a copy and then your are done!

Thanks you for reading this tutorial and enjoy creating your very own photo montage!
Please do leave a comment if you find this tutorial useful and please share them with your friends.  I will be sharing more in the future and if you are interested, you are recommended to bookmark this blog and visit me regularly.

Kota Kinabalu Air Port New Terminal

Thanks to Aunt Teoh, I was allowed to stayed at one of the staff’s apartment of her company.  it was located at Beverly Hills, the Sabah’s version.

Beverly Hills Apartment

Along the trip, I’ve visited quite a number of places including KK’s town, Tip of Borneo – Kudat, Lok Kawi Wildlife Park, UMS’s Aquarium and many more.

Warisan Square, KK Town

Not to mention the foods I had here, most of them are awesome except the 1st night’s Bak Kut Teh at Beverly Hills

Su Tong Poh Pork Leg

Along the long list of foods I had ‘Tarap’ is one of the special local fruit, that smelly like oily-road-tar!

Malaysia Local Fruit - Tarap

I also manage to captured a few shots on the superb sunset in KK, here’s one of them.

KK Sunset

>> Like the photos?  Click here to view my album <<

Here’s some infomation for your references,

- I flew to KK directly via Air Asia, and returned with Mas to KL, then transit back to Penang.
- Fishes is cheap and available wherever and whenever in KK.
- It is easy to hitch a ride on public busses and travel around town.
- My photos were all taken with a Nikon DSLR D700, with 3 Nikon lenses including 18-35mm F3.5-F4.5, 50mm F1.4 and 135mm F2 DC.
- Most of the ultra wide photos were taken with a Hoya CPL.
- Most of the photos were taken with Nikon’s Vivid Mode with adjustments.

If you need further details, feel free to comment.  Thanks for reading my post.

A shot of Albert Yap (Left)

I am used to be a geek during the school days, and works as a software-programmer and tech support before I quit and convert my hobby to my career. From now on, I will be sharing my works (Camostudio.com), my fun discovery, nonsense-rants in this blog, and hope you’ll enjoy reading them.

If I see fits,  I will also sharing some of my know-how in photography & IT, I hope you can make use of this, and please let me know if you need anything!

Lastly, I would like to end this 1st post with a great thanks to Tofurious for releasing this wonderful designs, and many thanks to my buddies especially Teetoo & Lovu4ver for the tips on the fun images slideshow above!