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.

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

Finally I have the time and idea to edit this set of photos, which was taken a long time ago, back during Chinese New Year this year.  Anthony was a schoolmate of me who happened to be working in Shanghai and met his soul-mate, Stephanie there in a land far far away.

They had a simple buy fun wedding in Anthony’s home town, which is pretty nearby to my neighborhood - Setia Pearl Island!

The wedding kicked off in the morning with fetching the bride, gate crashing and tea ceremony session at Sungai Ara, followed a church solemnization.  The reception is held at EQ ballroom.

I shot all these photos mainly with a 50mm, on a Nikon D700.  Some shots are taken with 18-35, and the rest with 70-200.  I picked and edited these photos on Adobe Lightroom 3.

Feel free to share them if you like, and of course, I am always open for wedding assignments.

Finally I am able to take a break from the busy month of March; And before I move to a new blogs site, let me share this wedding video taken entirely on Nikon D7000 by me under Motion In Style.

This is my first visit to Lone Pine Hotel after the renovation,  the new looks is very nice with the newly added building and facility!  I really enjoyed shooting there with the ambient.

I came to know Jimmy & Yin Ming thru a wedding planner, Antz few weeks before the wedding.  Unlike my regular work flow,  I did not have the chance to personally meet the couple and have no clue on anything about the wedding plans until the the actual day!  To be honest, me and CS Low quite nervous as we do not know what will happens next.

The whole ceremony was held in the hotel, from the morning gate crashing session follow by a garden wedding and then finally with a buffet reception.

We also met and had plenty of laughter together with official photographer, Alex Tan; in which also happen to be shot ‘accidentally’ inside the footage a numbers of time.

In this filming process, beside 2 units of Nikon  D7000, we used a numbers of lenses including 50/1.4, 70-200/2.8 and some ultra wide as well.  We bring along our custom made slider, a Fly-cam 5000, a few Z96 video lights and the portable Zoom H1 mic.

I came to know this place, Wat Charok Padang from my buddy, Joo Liang.  It is an interesting place, a Buddhist temple built with a lot of glass bottles.  Located in Sik, Kedah, the temple is about 100km away from Penang Island, and is easily reachable using North-south Expressway.

It is frequently visited by many in the morning exspecially during Chinese New Year holidays.  As it was a casual family trip for me, I arrived very late in the afternoon and voila, an almost empty temple!  I did a few quick shots around the temple under the killing hot-sun before I continue my journey to Sg Petani to visit some relatives.

>> Click this to view more photos from the trip <<

The whole set of photos is taken with a Nikon D700 DSLR, my favourite 50mm f/1.4 and an ultra wide 18-35mm.

If you are interested to pay a visit to this temple,  the exact location for GPS is at 5°47.782N, 100°42.635E or view in google maps here.

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.

Finally I got my hand on a unit of Nikon latest DSLR, the Nikon D7000.  Basically the camera is so hot that it was sold out the moment it arrived in the local store;  I am not going to write a technical review of this camera as you can easily get a very comprehensive review from the internet such as this and this.

My 1st impression with the camera was very positive.  At a low investment like this, you get a very solid camera, with lots of features and fantastic image quality!
In this round, I was invited by G3k Photography to a shooting assignment on 2nd of Jan, 2011 in a Ballet Graduation Concert held in Dewan Sri Pinang, Penang.

Paired with a single 70-200 f/2.8 tele-lense, I set up myself on the platform with about 100m away from the main stage.  I had a hard time getting a pin-on exposure as the stage lighting was arranged in a not-photographically friendly way.  The spot-lights was badly distributed across the stage sections with a lot of colors.

I’ve have no complain on focusing with the d7000’s new module as the contrast of the subject was reasonably good there, I only used AF-S (single shot) here and no continuous-shoot.  The WB was set to Auto in this case as the lighting and color themes changed too fast for me to coup up with.  As it is really dimmed in the stage main-lighting, I had to crank up the ISO to 1600 – 2500 ranges to obtain a shutter speed of 1/160s – 1/250s at aperture of f/2.8 – f/4.

I’ve shot in full resolution jpeg in camera, and had selectively cropped to a better composition.  Minimum color treatment was done, most of the photos from this series, was basically similar to the out-of-the-camera photos.  I also noticed the default Picture Control gave a slightly more saturated colors compare to Nikon D700. So I’ve tuned down a bit in the saturation from the ‘SD’ picture control, and crank up a bit on sharpness as usual.

The performances went on for about 2 hours,  I’ve captured about 400 over shots from the series, and have selected some of my favorite to share with you in the following flash album,

>> Click here to view them now <<

As usual, comments are welcomed and please do share with your friends who might be interested to my photographs.  The photo below is a closing shot I captured using Nikon D700 & 50mm.  As from you can see, the stage was flooded with a warm yellow lights with nothing else,  I am really having a hard time shooting the performances.

Months after the short d90 video I do for fun, here I am with a brand new short video, shot entirely with a Nikon D3100 at 1080p24.  Geared with lenses like 18-55DX VR, 50mm F1.4D, 70-200 F2.8 and a 24-120VR.  Here I present to you, ‘Static . Motion’.  Have a look and feel free to comment!

Here’s a small reviews from me after using Nikon D3100 for a short while, the 2nd generation D-movie from D3100 (and D7000 also) is ways better than the old version. The rolling shutter problem is almost non-visible now.

The new expeed engine and sensor also provide a much better low light performances; the most obvious improvement I noticed is got to be the very sharp video so long that you got the right focus compare to the soft, and low detailed video from D90, D5000 and D300s.

Last but not least, I will be having a small talk on ‘video filming using SLR’ at Freezed.asia on 3rd Dec 2010 and if you are interested on the topic, feel free to join and kindly share this page to anyone who might be interested.