This is a true event between an ordinary Penang-girl with an extra ordinary cross cultural love story!  Guat Har, the BFF of my wife,  came from Penang island, who has been running her business in Indonesia for many years.  Has met his true love, a local boy Rachmad. Since then they fell in love and had now officially wedded!

Earlier this year,  we were invited to the engagement ceremony – ‘Akad Nikah’ session earlier this year in Penang.  As an invited guest and unofficial photographer with limited footage & photos, I’ve made a fusion short film for them.

Today, the story continued, ‘Ah An & Ah Har’,  the nick names of the couple, has chosen Corner Club at Gurney Drive, Penang to celebrate their wedding with relatives and friends from Penang & Indonesia.  Once again, we are there as a guests but this round, with a little helps from JM Sim, a cinematographer of Motion In Style crew, we present to you the fusion highlight for the dinner reception.

We hope you enjoy the film we made, and feel free to comment and share.

As part of the on going after sales support from Nikon Malaysia, I am proud to share with all of you that I am now one of the appointed Penang state liaisons for the official Nikon Club Malaysia.  Nikon Club Malaysia, or NCM will be introducing a series of workshops & activities exclusively for all Nikon users every month!

It is our great pleasure to invite all of you who love photography,  come and join us today!  Registration is very simple, what you’ll need is any serial number from a legitimate Nikon Malaysia’s product, it can be a coolpix, a DSLR or even a speedlight.

To jump start the club activities,  we had planned a series of workshops, get-together and walk-about activities for many states in the coming months.  Do check them out and feel free to join us!

If you need further help in this,  please feel free to drop me an email, or ask me in facebook.

& btw, check out the video promo shot and edited by Motion In Style crew on one of my previous workshop for Nikon D7000 & D90 held on June 2011.

& & btw, I will be sharing in a seminar in UTAR Setapak on 20th Aug 2011,  if you are interested to participate,  please check out the details here.

Dusk is one of the most amazing moment for photography and to get a good picture at this moment is pretty easy if you know your basic.  First you’ll need a steady tripod, then make sure you are familiar with your camera &  system, the more you know the better your chance at getting beautiful photos as dawn fade away very fast, especially the best duration of ‘golden hour‘ is only about 10minutes at most;  You really do not want to be wasting your time finding a feature or setting of our camera.  So,  study your manual and understand your camera before you go out and shoot!

Generally, your will be shooting with a relatively long shutter speed to get the nice colors from the horizon.  In order to get the longer shutter speed we preferred,  we will be using low ISO together with a small aperture.  In this series of photos,  I used mainly Nikon 24-120VR, Nikon 18-35 and Nikon 50 f/1.4 on a Nikon D700.  Generally I used aperture smaller than f/5.6 to f/22 on some cases.   I’ve adjusted the ISO from 100 – 1600 depend on my subjects and the motion blur effects I wanted to archive.

Attached here with some of the photos I shot from a local theme park at Queensbay, Penang, there are edited with Adobe Lightroom 3.  Please feel free to comment or share them to your friends.

&. btw,  I am planning for an intensive class of Adobe Lightroom 3 for intermediate users,  do send me an email if you are interested.

&.&. btw,  if you are looking to turn your hobby into profession, please check this out.

A simple but perfect celebration of love, this is a wedding held in Penang; Andy & An Sin is now happily married and officially stuck like glue!

This is the same day edit video highlight, broadcasted live during their wedding reception at E&O Hotel Penang. Shot entirely with two Nikon D7000 and some lenses. The video was arranged and edited in 4hours time.

I hope you enjoy the film and feel free to comment, stay tuned for more!

Song & Music by Michael Giacchino/Sugarland
Cinematographers – Albert Yap & Chin Siang
Editor – Albert Yap

We are glad to cover the wedding day for Angel & Chin Eng a while ago, and here it is the wedding highlight we produced.

We hope you enjoy this highlight we made, and once again, congratulation to Angel & Chin Eng!

Cinematography by Albert, Eric & JM Sim
Edited by KC Leong

Thanks to TY for inviting me to film this interesting short story.  A short film about a boy day dreaming in office, about winning a contest to visit Queensland.

The purpose of the short film was to join this contest and it was all planned, shot and edited in a single day with only me and TY.

Have you ever got frustrated that your high quality picture turn low quality when you shared them on Facebook?  This is because Facebook is having a very bad compression system and low quality re-size method.

What happens here is when you post and uploaded non-treated photos to Facebook;  The system will automatically re-size and re-compress your photos to smaller file to save resources.  Sadly, there are no way we could bypass this at the moment, but there are some tricks on getting the best out of the system.

Like the most of you, I am very active in Facebook and sharing photos is now a part of my lifestyle.  I found out that by preparing the photos to be Facebook-friendly prior to posting,  I am getting much better picture quality in the album.  They generally appear sharper, and clearer compare to non-treated photos.

How do I do it?  Here’s my recipe for Facebook-friendly photos,
This tutorial is based on Adobe Photoshop CS5  and the steps are more or less the same with other editing software.

Step 1: If you need to make adjustments to your photos, just go through all the tweaks and settings.

Step 2: Once you have finalize your adjustment, go to ‘Image Size’ [Alt + Ctrl + I], and re-size your photos with the following settings.

*1 – Make sure the longest side of the photo is set to ’720′, this is the longest supported size in Facebook currently.
*2 – Resample Image using ‘Bicubic (Best for smooth gradients)’ to get the best possible results.
*Notes: Resolution here served no purpose but I put it at 96dpi anyway, as most modern PC are now displayed at 96dpi.

Step 3: Once re-sized, you may view the photo at 100% by pressing [Ctrl + Alt + 0].  At the time being, you Photo may not look sharp enough as you lose details when re-sizing.  So, in this step, we are going to sharpen the photo by using a filter called ‘Unsharp Mask’.  You can call the filter out by going to ‘Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask’.  Adjust your setting with the following settings.

*Amount: 350% – 500%
*Radius: 0.2 pixels mostly and 0.3 pixels at most
*Threshold: 0 levels
*Notes: I usually start with 0.2 pixels in ‘Radius’ and 500%, if the photo appear over-sharpen (White lines around the subjects),   then I will slowly lower the value of ‘Amount’.  On some rare cases, I will use 350% & 0.3 pixels.

Step 4:  Alright, now you got a good Facebook-friendly photo and now you are ready to save it for posting later.  To get the optimum quality with smallest possible file size.  I recommend saving the file using the following setting from ‘Save-For-Web & Devices’ by pressing [Alt + Shift + Ctrl + S].

*1 – I used Jpeg with custom setting.  I turn on ‘Progressive’ option, but Facebook will make it into ‘Interleave’ anyway.  I set the Quality to ’95′ instead of the usual ’60-80′ ranges recommended by most,  as I noticed that at ’95′, after downgraded by Facebook, I am getting better photo compare to quality of ’80′.  I do not use ’100′ as I don’t see any difference between ’95′ and ’100′ with my bare eye.
*2 – Some of you might have shot the photos with Adobe RGB profile.  So, remember to turn on ‘Convert to sRGB’ for compatibility and since Facebook does not store and show exif data, so you can safely remove all Metadata here to conserve file size.  You can safely ignore this setting if you have no idea what it is.
*Notes: Once you are done with the setting, press ‘Save’ and export your file.

Step 5: Now you got a Facebook-friendly photos,  it’s time to post them.  Make sure to select ‘High resolution’ option when you are uploading using the new Uploader.

Once uploaded, you and your friend can enjoy your photos at better quality now!

Thanks for reading and if you think this tutorial is useful, please share it to your Profile, sharing is caring.  Stay tuned for more tutorials.

Thanks to Freezed.asia, I had a chance to share on Time Lapse photography with the members on 19th Nov 2010.
It was a short sharing session, and I managed to pull it through with some slides and time-lapse videos I liked.

Many thanks to all that come and support and I hope you learn something from the session.

Please check this one of the best Time Lapse video I found and shared during the sharing session,

Want to do your own time lapse but have no idea where to start?
Download my PDF guide of Time lapse photography and have a read and feel free to comment.

The club members will also be having an outing on 30th Nov 2010 for a time-lapse try out at Fly ver bridge near Komtar Penang.  For now, enjoy and stay tuned!

Updates:
The outing with the club members is a big success! I can see many videos floating in from the participants already in facebook.

This is one of my commercial photography assignment done earlier for ATI College Penang, With only 1 and 1/2 day time slot for the assignment, I managed to cover the main campus, Penang International Airport and a few of Penang’s tourism hot spot.  It was truly a unique experience for me, as I get to shoot difference subjects in such a short time!

The above shots was done very quickly as everyone is complaining about the hot baking sun, the shot was shot right in front of the college main entrance!

A few shots from the kitchen, where the future chefs learned their basic here…

A few shots for student’s activities in campus.

The last shooting ground was a real life heavy traffic International Airport Penang,  as we only have permission for a really short session there, I quickly executed a few shots inside the airport with the helps of Air Asia Crews (former students of ATIC) and a shot on Firefly Air Plane just happen to land at the time.

I hope you enjoy these photos and do write me a comment!

For Penangnites,  if you pass by Burmah road from Komtar,  look to the right and you should be able to see the new campus for ATIC, they have printed some banners with my photos. 

If you are interested, here’s the ATIC’s corporate video done by a friend of mine.  The video was shot with mainly a D90 and a slider.

You can also get more info on what courses are available from ATIC by visiting their official website or facebook page.

Inspired by Cede Prudente, a Malaysian nature photographer based in Borneo. I restarted finding the right spot for time lapse photography.

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!