//edit

i’ve been sitting in MEL (mech eng lab) for about 3 hours now, scouring ssanga blogrings for photogs who shoot a lot of portraits. i’ve been wanting to ‘study’ more portrait shoots but i haven’t been able to find anything really.

do check out crynomo’s shoots. i’m really inspired. like… ferreals haha

well i have to go to class…. payce peepo

oh, and btw- does anyone have an old LCD monitor? i don’t want to buy a new one cos its too expensive, and its going to suck to have to ship it to singapore after i graduate (well, unless i stay in the states, huh)- but i really wanna get one cos my baby dell 700m’s 14.5″ or so screen is teeny-tiny!

   -dUnks

//endedit

=DDDDDDDD

   -dUnks

its 6:39am- and i’m up editing pictures because:

1. i’m freaking jetlagged- i woke up at 4am actually (and i slept at 1am =( bleh)
2. i can’t get back to sleep
3. what better thing to do at 6:39am in the morning than postprocessing pictures?

these are taken from the flight home.. wow- did i say home? lol
i meant, back to campus- which is pretty much ‘home’.

note: i wish i had a polarizing filter for the out-of-window shots. i had to trash all but a few because of the reflection =(

Flight: JL710 Singapore to Narita

hello Japan, Land of the Rising Sun

flaps down! kekeke

take me home, mr. JL10

why, hello there, and a good morning to you!
^_^

it was funny, cos the 24-70mmL is a ‘backward zooming’ (do i have the right terminology?) lens, so at it’s shortest focal length, it is at it’s longest physical length-
so i was trying to shoot out of the plane window with the lens fully telescoped and….. it was hard ^_^

   -dUnks

i didn’t miss my flight- but i’m mad jetlagged.

didn’t sleep enough on the plane =(

bumped into a buncha indo’s from UofI- including liana! =D
will have a picture up soon-

also, depth of field crash course 101 during the layover in narita airport for liana-
i’ll see which images i can upload

but back to unpacking =D

   -dUnks

w00t
my previous post was lost because firefox crashed on me !@#&@*

anyhow, as i was saying in my previous post.

i got to check out Singapore’s Jurong Bird Park for free today. my friend sammy is interning at a local film company that’s producing a TV series and they sent her to scout out new locations to shoot at; thus, i got to tag along as the ‘assistant photog’.

i brought out my 75-300mm f/4-5.6 to test it out ferreals since i haven’t had much experience with it. it was a really hard lens to use because it has no IS (image stabilization) on it, so at it’s longest focal length, looking through it looked like something out of Battlefield 1942 when you’re looking down the scope of a sniper rifle. yeah, fun… not.

i did see this other dude with a nice Mark series Canon camera and the Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS. it was the first push/pull zoom lens that i had seen. it was sexy- his wife looked like she was carrying a Canon 5D with a EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens. very sexy- uh, the cameras… not… the wife….
moving on………..

the Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS is the middle, and right lens

anyhow- here are my salvaged pictures after going through them in Adobe Lightroom-

switched to the 50mm f/1.4 for this shot because it was DARK! the owls were in this ‘dark’ room for them nocturnal animals- i wonder when they actually get to sleep. if u know what i mean? i mean- if they keep the birds in the dark all the time, then how do the birds figure out when it’s daytime so they can sleep? do they turn the lights on at night then? lol!

with the 24-70mm f/2.8L. notice the nice bokeh =D

yay!

uh… okay

bye =D

   -dUnks

so i’m not the smartest cookie in the jar. instead of going to the eye doc to check if i have pink eye, i decide that since the itchiness has worn off for a while, it’ll all be okay-

 

now my eyes are itching again- agh =(

 

i’ll go after this little photo post.

 

i’m still really really slow at post processing.
that, and i had about 600 pictures to filter through =

 

 

 

 

here are my ‘featured’ photos… if they can be called that- lol

 

 

 

chinese acrobats

 

 

 

 

 

Forbidden City? 

 

 

 

Free Time

 

 

 

Great Wall of China

 

 

 

if you want to burn out your taste buds and also your sinus, then try this.
read: 56% alcohol…. it hurt =(
lol

 

 

Tian An Men Square- well.. just the flag =P

 

 

 

Empress’ Palace Park?

 

 

 

 

Musicians and Dancers at the Park

 

 

my mom (in yellow) decided to join in. lol

 

 

 

 

‘Pray to the Heavens’ Temple

 

 

Oldest Bridge in China

 

 

 

Random Park

 

 

 

Some Tomb Thing…
(and overly zealous with curves, in photoshop)

 

 

 

 

Tian An Men Square

 

 

 

 

Chillin in Hong Kong with Sammy, Cheryl, Karina, Edith


sammy just picked up the Canon 400d- so we headed out early in the day to shoot at the Hong Kong harbor

 

 

 

 

apparently i’m too tall for cheryl oO;;

 

 

 

everyone had a try at the cam =P

 

 

tripod shots at ‘Temple Street’

From Left: Edith, Cheryl, Sammy, Karina

 

 

 

cheryl is zee model’ =))

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

payce…

 

   -dUnks

 

need…. to… get…out… of… the…house…………

just picked up a new album today.
in my attempt to ‘chinese-ify’ myself i’ve been trying to acquaint myself with more chinese artists.

mm, cute =)

can’t wait until i’m done pp the 5.4gigs of pictures that i took during my beijing/hongkong trip- i need to get it out of the way and sent to my relatives soon. oh what a chore =(

hopefully i’ll still have time to do a bit of reading about portraits, and people hunting before i have to head back to the states. digging out the Canon 75-300mm f/4-5.6 that came with the 3rd hand gear that i picked up couple of months back. i only shot 20 odd pictures with the 75-300mm, but i put it away after picking up the 24-70mm f/2.8L because the 75-300mm was so slow =(

i plan to explore Little India, China Town, and random street markets with 75-300mm. fun =)

i dont know if joanne kim reads ssanga, but i’m hoping to try my first photojournalist project to illustrate Singapore since she asked me a buncha questions about what Singapore was like during smallgroup.

all this needs to be crammed into 9 days-

long day tmrw, time to sleep =)

   -dUnks

just got back from beijing/hongkong

i ended up having to delete microsoft office and photoshop CS2 because i had no room on my HDD for my pictures uploads

its a rough life shooting in RAW. lol

   -dUnks

edit//

first, i would like to apologize to sammy and cheryl for not giving the
due credit for some of these pictures. i actually don’t remember which
pictures they took, and i took- but they did take some!

sammy and cheryl, respectively =D
i love you girls ^_^

next, just dropping a note-
i’m leaving for beijing… today… now… lol.

dec 24th-31st:: beijing
dec 31st – jan 6th:: hongkong

i’ll be back in singapore on the 6th- i just realized that they’re
going to take the christmas deco on orchard rd (mich ave. of singapore)
down on something like the 30th of dec?

gak- once again, another screw up on my behalf. i love being a noob ^_^

mmk. i’m out

   -dUnks

endedit//

light room is an
interesting program to work with- but towards the end of my pp, my poor
dell 700m was starting to choke and lag =(

gah

on the way to the event- i had my cam on manual and totally blew out this shot
an attempt to recover it in lightroom turned it into this mush of colors oO;;

Presenting:: Shanghai Nights

and thats just about the time my batteries went dead =)
yeah, i’m stupid. i know

someone help me with tips on my black&whites. i dont like how they turned out
i feel like i’m not showing enough contrast? they all look kinda dull.
i
used b&w on the pics that i did, because the stage lights were
REALLY gay and were strobing the stage with pink/green/purple hues …
gak!

*sigh*

full gallery at:: leungd.smugmug.com

   -dUnks

//edit

btw, thnx for all the tips guys =D
and thnx for the rebuke, linda ^_^

just posting an email that i got a while back, and an email that i’ve sent to some of you, but i thought as christmas draws near- some laughs =D

This is the time of year when we think back to the very

first Christmas, when the Three Wise Men — Gaspar,

Balthazar, and Herb — went to see the baby Jesus and,

according to the Book of Matthew, “presented unto Him gifts;

gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”

These are simple words, but if we analyze them carefully, we

discover an important, yet often overlooked, theological

fact: there is no mention of wrapping paper.

If there had been wrapping paper, Matthew would have said

so: “And lo, the gifts were inside 600 square cubits of

paper. And the paper was festooned with pictures of Frosty

the Snowman. And Joseph was going to throweth it away, but

Mary saideth unto him, she saideth, ‘Holdeth it! That is

nice paper! Saveth it for next year!’ And Joseph did rolleth

his eyeballs. And the baby Jesus was more interested in the

paper than the frankincense.”

But these words do not appear in the Bible, which means that

the very first Christmas gifts were NOT wrapped. This is

because the people giving those gifts had two important

characteristics:

1. They were wise.

2. They were men.

Men are not big gift wrappers. Men do not understand the

point of putting paper on a gift just so somebody else can

tear it off. This is not just my opinion, this is a

scientific fact based on a statistical survey of two guys I

know. One is Rob, who said the only time he ever wraps a

gift is “if it’s such a poor gift that I don’t want to be

there when the person opens it.” The other is Gene, who told

me he does wrap gifts, but as a matter of principle never

takes more than 15 seconds per gift. “No one ever had to

wonder which presents daddy wrapped at Christmas,” Gene

said. “They were the ones that looked like enormous

spitballs.”

I also wrap gifts, but because of some defect in my motor

skills, I can never completely wrap them. I can take a gift

the size of a deck of cards and put it the exact center of a

piece of wrapping paper the size of a regulation volleyball

court, but when I am done folding and taping, you can still

see a sector of the gift peeking out. (Sometimes I

camouflage this sector with a marking pen.) If I had been an

ancient Egyptian in the field of mummies, the lower half of

the Pharaoh’s body would be covered only by Scotch tape.

On the other hand, if you give my wife a 12-inch square of

wrapping paper, she can wrap a C-130 cargo plane. My wife,

like many women, actually likes wrapping things. If she

gives you a gift that requires batteries, she wraps the

batteries separately, which to me is very close to being a

symptom of mental illness. If it were possible, my wife

would wrap each individual volt.

My point is that gift-wrapping is one of those skills like

having babies that come more naturally to women than to men.

That is why today I am presenting:

Gift Wrapping Tips for Men:

* Whenever possible, buy gifts that are already wrapped. If,

when the recipient opens the gift, neither one of you

recognizes it, you can claim that it’s myrrh.

* The editors of Woman’s Day magazine recently ran an item

on how to make your own wrapping paper by printing a design

on it with an apple sliced in half horizontally and dipped

in a mixture of food coloring and liquid starch. They must

be smoking crack. If you’re giving a hard-to-wrap gift, skip

the wrapping paper! Just put it inside a bag and stick one

of those little adhesive bows on it. This creates a festive

visual effect that is sure to delight the lucky recipient on

Christmas morning:

YOUR WIFE: Why is there a Hefty trash bag under the tree?

YOU: It’s a gift! See? It has a bow!

YOUR WIFE (peering into the trash bag): It’s a leaf blower.

YOU: Gas-powered! Five horsepower!

YOUR WIFE: I want a divorce.

YOU: I also got you some myrrh.

In conclusion, remember that the important thing is not what

you give, or how you wrap it. The important thing, during

this very special time of year, is that you save the

receipt.

Author Unknown (but definitely male)

   -dUnks

endedit//

===============================

so i’ve shot a few things while in singapore-
i also plan on lugging a tripod onto orchard rd (mich. ave of singapore) and stalking out some night shots of the city when i get back from beijing and hong kong.

just one problem.

what on EARTH do i do with these RAW files?
i have NO idea how i should be going about backing up and pp’ing them =

i recently d/led Adobe’s Lightroom- which has been pretty fun- but i’m still too confused to feel comfortable with how i should be storing and backing up my RAWs, so i haven’t converted them into JPEG yet.

therefore- no updates coming up yet =P

*sigh*

switching to RAW isn’t all that fun right now cos my 300d can’t really handle the file sizes. it takes FOREVER for my lil’ thang to store these humogenous files =(
raaaaar.

i’d switch back to jpg cept that i figure its about time i learn about RAW and junx.
i guess i’ll just have to suck it up =(

a;kdsjf;akjdsf;aldjfs;alkjdsf;lakjfds;lajfds;lajkfds;lajfds

   -dUnks

Mostly Cloudy

79蚌 Feels Like 84蚌

Updated Dec 14 11:00 p.m. Local Time

:
Humidity:		89%

jyeahhh… lol

=_=;;; <- sweats… forrealzzz

   -dUnks