The other place I took WZ to was the KL Aquaria, once again I went in hoping to take some pics. But when I heard the people at the entrance constantly repeat "Dear visitors with Digital Cameras, please do NOT use your flash, flash photography is not allowed in the venue" Let's just forget the fact that digital cameras are NOT the ONLY source of a xenon flash, This was a problem then, as it would mean I needed to again use my 50mm macro lens as that was the fastest one I had with me. I didn't bring my 50mm F1.7 lens cause, I was going with my family so if I was taking any pictures of WZ and mommy it would mean that mommy would like to have the background in the picture too instead of... well.. a big blue blur. So while it failed for me as a photography outing, here's what I learnt from my trip to KL Aquaria.

While it is possible to take some shots without flash.

You have to realize that underwater creatures swim pretty fast. And they're not inclined to pose for you.

Although there are some things in the place that DO sit still.

But even if they do sit still you have another thing that literally stands in your way

These are living breathing creatures behind a glass case, so the clarity of the case, or the reflection of the glass will throw off your auto focus. But of course, there's a chance to get a nice pic if you're lucky.

Another thing to remember when you go to places like this is that. If you only bring a fixed range lens.

Take note that you might not have a lot of space to back up and frame your subject.

Hmm... so I've tried to go to the butterfly park to take pictures and failed, tried Aquaria and failed cause my equipment doesn't allow me to take nice pictures in dark places.

I guess that leaves me with the Bird Park, and the Zoo. Hmmm... I guess I'll put that on my todo list.

I took a few days off to take WZ around town and also to well... actually take some days off. So the first place we went was the KL Butterfly Park, so WZ can finally see some butterflies actually flying around for real.

First thing first.. WHY THE HECK DO YOU STILL WANT TO CHARGE PEOPLE FOR BRINGING CAMERAS? What an ancient and barbaric practice when nearly everyone has something that can take pictures. Next thing was that, it's actually kinda hard to snap pictures of butterflies flying around. But I guess it's because I had a kid and a wife tagging along so I didn't exactly have the luxury of time to try and setup anything.

But switching the A300 to full auto mode and passing the camera to mommy meant I get to have some pictures taken with WZ.

They had a fish pond in the place which the fish was all too eager to come close to you... once you toss them some feed.

One good thing about the butterfly park is that it has ample sunlight, so there's ample light to take pictures of things.

The person at the counter told us that the feed was for both fishes and turtles. But we couldn't find the turtles, and threw the bag of feed for the fish.. which was sad but let's face it between colorful gold fish in a crystal clear pond, and this...

Which would you rather feed? It's sad that the turtles get no love.. they didn't even put any signs up (or maybe they were destroyed) to indicate that Look turtles HERE!.

WZ tried to see the turtles from the perch.

But the angle just wasn't right.

Thus he walked away disappointed. I think the turtles were disappointed too! They must have been hoping to get something to eat!

I did manage to get a shot of a butterfly close up

It was just constantly sucking on the ground trying to eat something and didn't care too much that there was a big ass black tube pointed at it. (I only have a 50mm Macro lens, to get this picture the tip of the lens was right NEXT to the butterfly) And then there was this... thing.

This ant like praying mantis was in the shade so the end results were a bit blurry cause of the slower shutter speed and I couldn't hold the camera steady.

Hmm.. did whatever ate the leaf, ate the butterfly as well?

They also had some other animals in the place. They had some rabbits in a well... rabbit smelling cage.

They had a python? boa? in a glass case which looked like it had coiled up and died, I didn't even had the heart to take a photo it. The had a chameleon lizard thing, but the plastic screen the cage was made of was clouded and hard to see through.

Overall, while there WERE definitely butterflies in the place and if I had more time to actually find my shots I think I would have gotten some more shots of stuff. I think if you wanted to take pictures of nature you have other better choices than paying RM18 (entrance fee) + RM1 (camera fee) to enter the KL Butterfly Garden.

Here comes a NEW CHALLENGER!

So with the purchase of the Revoltech Chun Li I can safely say I'm done buying figures for the next few months. Note again how they choose to make left and right parts non symmetrical so it looks natural. Still feels weird to me!

Short posing stand once again limits off the ground moves.

This time I took my shots by using a large white colored piece of EVA foam as a backdrop, then I mounted my flash on the tripod and setup for Wireless High Speed Sync flash on my camera so at least there's a background to the photo instead of the dark void you see the last time I tried doing this. Still not perfect, so I guess the next thing is to built on actual light box or a diffuser for my flash.

And of course would a Chun Li shot be complete WITHOUT a spinning bird kick?

Since this is Christmas season now, shopping malls are now filled with the usual elaborate showpieces like this one in One Utama.

It's well.. a nice white christmas kind of decoration. So obviously mommy wants to take a pic with WZ of the thing.

But.. because of the the camera compensating for the Flash's tint the white balance is now making the background look orange instead of the white. If we use a simple autofix tool like Windows Live Photo Gallery we can make the background look white but...

The true color of the camera's flash is revealed. So in these situations you need some way of selectively correcting the color temperature, that's when you need to use more advanced tools like Photoshop or well... use a piece of colored gel to tint your Flash so you can balance out the colors later.

Need to ask the Semi Pro how that's done properly.

The moment you get a spanking new Digital SLR is that you're going to take a LOT of pictures. Then you're going to have to sort it out and do your editing and tweaking, and then of course you're gonna want to put those pictures online. Here I just like to share how I go about with my photography workflow.

The first thing I did was to organize how pictures go into my memory card. I didn't want all the pictures I take to disappear into a single 100MSDCF folder, luckily my Sony A350 had the option of creating new folders for EACH DAY of shooting.

Not sure if this is standard among all SLRs though, but even on my point & shoot I could create multiple folders on the memory card. Anyway the setting means that my card looks like this after a trip.

So each day's photos is automatically put into it's own folder by the camera. This is a real time saver when you're on a multiday trip away from a computer.

After taking photos I come back, plug my CF card into the reader and copy the files to my PC. Instead of just opening 2 Explorer Windows and copy and pasting between them. I use Microsoft's SyncToy application, it's actually more of a tool for synchronizing files between 2 storage devices. But because you can set it up so that whatever files that are in your storage card but aren't in the master storage (ie The folder on your hard disk where you put everything) are automatically pushed to the hard disk with one simple click of a button, I choose to use it for the process of dumping images to my hard disk.

Specifically the SyncToy options that I use are to put my CF card reader as the Left folder, my hard disk pic folder as the Right folder, and set the sync mode to Contribute.

Next I use Window Live Photo Gallery to look through my pictures and perform touch ups on the pictures which I want to put online. It's no Photoshop of course, but it gets the job done for simple things like correcting white balance, and some other minor tweaks.

It's not like I need too remove a zit from someone's face! If I wanted to I can also choose to tag and catalog my photos with Windows Live Photo Gallery, but I'm not the cataloging type of person.

If I had a Windows Live Spaces or Flickr account (or any other service that provides the plugin for Live Photo Gallery) I could directly upload the picture from Live Photo Gallery itself. You might also want to check out the spanking new Windows Live Photos which gives you 25GB of storage for your pictures. But I'm not a photo album kind of person. I'm more of a blog person so I use Windows Live Writer to get my pictures up at my blog instead.

Windows Live Writer allows me to have a great editing experience for creating my blog posts, I can compose my posts offline, I have pretty much WYSIWYG results, and it supports various blog engines. But one of the things that definetly saves me time is the fact that when I insert an image in Live Writer. Not only is it able to automatically frame the picture to give it that slick look, it'll also automatically resize it to a thumbnail version, and it'll then create a link to a bigger more clearer version so your viewers can see the detailed one. This saves a lot of time for me to do it manually!

And that's it! That's the process of how my photos go from my camera to my blog.

So I was asked to shoot some rings.

Looks elegant when you're holding it, but up close… you can see the tool marks and all. The guy's ring is… normal.. undecorated.

I'm shooting this on top of the box container, so note the dust on the black cushion. The bride's ring is of course the one that has a stone on it.

I couldn't exactly think of any particular way of arranging it, so I just ended up with this.

While trying to get a depth of field that would contain everything the shutter speed was up to 30 seconds. I spent 5 minutes blowing out all the dust that got attracted to the sensor after that.

The shot on top is cropped and not the full pic, but this was pretty much the closest I could get to the stone. I guess with a lightbox I could take pics like this with a nice.. white uniform background. Hmmm.. interesting.

Went to a little conference organized by Sony for Alpha owners today. They had a cosy little setup, first of all since they were allowing the general public to come and try out the equipment they had a little showroom for the various pieces of technology and gear that go into an Alpha camera. Including this little guy.

An cutaway view of an A700 camera, didn't exactly get the best angle for this thing today, will try again tomorrow.

Then of course they had to allow people to try out their cameras, so they needed subjects.. like

Bikes!

And where there are bikes…

There be posing models!

Sony did a great job of setting up a proper shooting stage, there were ample lights and they were nice and bright that I didn't even need to use a Flash at ISO100, so I could take nice clear shots with my 50mm Macro lens.

Normally I would have made a Deep Zoom album containing my other shots so you can check out the minute details of the pics. But… Silverlight 2.0 is going to RTM soon, and I don't want to risk having to recreate all the Deep Zoom images if there are any breaking changes.

So that'll have to wait.

Mommy let's take WZ to the park near our house, it's a small little park with a little pond.

Then there's the usual children's slide for WZ to run around and play in.

WZ might get distracted by the LRT that passes by over head every few minutes.

I'm sure that the high tension wires that run on top of the park won't do any harm

It's a pretty well equipped park there are some simple gym equipment things here. Like jogging machines, cross country skiing machines.

For sure they are just things that work, and don't have any fancy doodads or instrumentation.

But that's probably because it's a public park and it's better to make stuff that is simple and has a risk of being vandalized and broken.

That's a little on the lake walkway which we'd have to be sure to hang on to WZ if we want to walk on it.

And there are also some rules we need to follow, don't I don't get the bit about the blankets.

So.. what do you say mommy? Shall we go? What do you mean there might be too many mosquitos there? What do you mean WZ is too young to be playing on the slides? So... that's it? Ok... I'll go myself and to take some pics then.

My next little project would be to make it so I can embed all these little Silverlight Deep Zoom albums on the page itself. Currently they don't lend themselves well to being embedded because the image loads whenever you hit the page, so it's a waste of unnecessary bandwidth if you're not interesting in viewing.

But one main problem is that mouse wheel events aren't captured when you go fullscreen in a Silverlight application due to how it works. So I'll have to see how to get around that user interaction problem.

The first album were some little snaps which I took while I was in Thailand... I failed to get any scenery shots cause I missed the river cruise, but I found something else to shoot! Check it out here. The shots here were all taken with the kit lens of the A350.

The 2nd album are shots taken when I took a little trip down to the Lake Gardens, most interesting thing I realised while I was there was that the Macro lens makes a pretty good lens for shooting normal things too! Check out the shots here.

In case you don't know what Deep Zoom is, what's you're looking at is the FULL SIZED image from my A350, use the mousewheel or the controls on screen to zoom in and out of the photos, and of course.. let them load properly. (and that needs to be included as help text on the control as well!)

Mother's Day photo log and notes on what mistakes were made when taking the shot.

Off to the little fish pond we go, with only the A350's Kit lens attached. This shot's mistake : Metering was taking by focusing on mommy's BLACK shirt, therefore to compensate what it though was a dark scene the camera used a slower shutter speed and let more light on the picture over exposing the shot. Granted this is really the first time I tried taking pics with SPOT metering.. maybe I should go with Center Weighted first till I'm comfortable with measuring exposure before taking a shot... hmmm.. but then again I'm taking baby shots don't usually have the luxury of time to measure exposure before shooting.

The main thing wrong here is of course the subject has the sun behind them and me forgetting to pop the flash to catch the details. Point to note 2 seconds after I take this shot, WZ's shoe drops into the pond.

Mommy said "Get a picture with the fish in it!" Luckily I was not using the 50mm or the background would be lost to bokeh. So, tlited the view screen down, held the camera up high and shot from above. Think I focused on the mommy's body instead of head though.

One thing I found was that the A350 produces dull images, or it could just be the kit lens since I don't find my 50mm giving me that feeling. Anyway, bumping the saturation up by one step solves that issue for me. When in doubt shot in RAW mode, then do the adjustments with the LightBox app that came with the camera I'm *pretty sure* whatever settings you apply to the RAW image in that program is the same as what you can apply in camera. So you could take a plain image in RAW mode, then on the PC, use the LightBox app to see what kind of effects you'd get if you shot in vivid mode, applied more noise reduction, etc. etc. Great learning tool. Of course that increases the time to consumption of your shots but it all depends on what you want to do with your pictures.

The problem with this shot is that I took it during the cloudy evening, so white balance is all wrong. In my opinion learning what is white balance and how to adjust it is the first step to taking nice pics, it's also easy to explain than aperture and shuttle speed (it makes white look white) of course I guess the Semi Pro would probably scoff at such a remark. But that's what I think lar.

This pic pretty much sums up why I bought a DSLR, point to note here is that the restaurant had the usual dim mood lighting. So it'd be hard to get a nice bright shot without using a flash, but I didn't bring mine with me using the built in flash was an alternative but that wouldn't have looked nice. And I only had the kit lens which doesn't have a wide aperture. But no problem, like the Semi Pro told me before I bumped up the ISO to 1600 and got this shot which makes the place looks like it's brightly lit.