2008 April | Mark Leo Photography - Weddings, Portrait, Landscape

Archive for April, 2008

A quick post

April 30, 2008

After a whirlwind of workshops and conferences, I am finally back in PJ, back in the office and pulling in my usual work. Yes that means concentrating fully on my day job and taking less time to view photos online or even go on Facebook (except for the occasional checks).

This will be a quick post as I will be trying to put up more photos here as I try to shoot a little more to continue to improve on my skills and to train my eye to pay attention to the little details.

I shot this image whilst I was at Life College over the weekend. I know there was a sign that said “Do not open the windows” but hey, it was already open . By the way, I also have proof of who opened the window. Lets just say that you shouldn’t do things like that when you are surrounded by loads of people with cameras around.

Here is a shot of a beautiful girl I shot while I was having dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Sri Hartamas. Isn’t she gorgeous?

And when she wasn’t looking, I quickly took this shot of her which was a little closer than the previous shot. Next time I would definitely want to take more portrait shots of her. She is just so beautiful!

Anyway, this post is meant to be a quick post. A little excited to watch Iron Man tomorrow night. Until then, tata!

Tags: Personal, Photos, Sunset
Posted in Personal | No Comments »

Day 1 at the Charge Up Conference 2008

April 27, 2008

I just had a fantastic day at the Charge Up Conference at Life College at Jalan Tandang. Why fantastic? Because I am learning more and more about photography. What made today even more fantastic is that I participated in my first “No chimping” contest. Basically “No Chimping” is a method where we shoot in manual mode and take photos with our Digital SLR without looking at the LCD monitor.

Yes that’s right, all you film camera junkies out there would probably give me that “now you know how it feels” look and yes, it was definitely challenging. What made it even more intense was that we were given about 2 hours to shoot only 36 shots and we had to select our best 3. It wasn’t easy at all but I tried to have a story behind my shots.

In the shot above I wanted to depict a red stop sign from going in to the 4D Toto shop. I have to thank Luke for helping me to look out for traffic while I stood in the middle of the road trying to nail the shot. I needed a higher angle to get the larger sign.

In the shot above I wanted to let the grey area depict that of an industrialized area or perhaps something that is urban and then show the bright contrasting colours of the flowers peeking through the railings.

I saw this interesting sign whilst exploring PJ Old Town as I walked across the pedestrian crossing.

I saw these flowers at the florist and took a quick snapshot. Really glad that although I got some weird stares from the shopkeeper, she didn’t chase us away.

This is a shot of Julian outside the training room. The competition required us to take 36 shots and by the time I arrived back at Life College, I had only 20 shots! Quick shot of him using the hallway lighting to nail this shot and still get some catch light in his eyes.

The last photo was rather interesting as this was the door handle to the men’s toilet at Life College. Looks like someone was a real “Heroes” fan.

As I walk away from the 1st day of the Charge Up conference, I can’t help but remember about Ps. Sandra Chin’s sermon. What would we be without our equipment? We need to separate ourselves from our skills and realize that we are children of God.

Tags: Charge Up, Charge Up Conference 2008, Church, Louis Pang, Photography
Posted in Personal, Photography | 7 Comments »

More Photos from Penang

April 19, 2008

Its Saturday and I am completely worn out from the week. I completed my training at IBM at Bandar Utama and on Friday I was completely surprised when I received a certificate for completing the course, DB2 LUW for SAP, and on top of that, the trainer, Jeremy from the IBM Development Centre in Toronto gave me a 1Gb thumbdrive for being able to answer the most questions during the Thursday session.

So now you know that I was busy at a workshop and then needing to log online to my client’s VPN and check my emails. Hence the delay in getting some of these photos out. I hope you enjoy viewing them. Here are more of the shots I took in Penang during the “From Ordinary to Extraordinary” workshop.

$\"Reynaldo of Penang\"$

Here is a shot of Reynaldo indoors before we headed out to our on location shoot. He wasn’t looking at me as he was looking at Louis at the time but I do like his suit. Stripe suits are slimming!

$\"Light whispers of two lovers\"$

From the shot above I know that I needed to step a little more to the left to capture them with a completely blue background.

$\"The one with the side shot\"$

I thought that this shot was a little more on the funky side. I find it difficult to try to get the shot with my 85mm lens when everyone else was using their 70-200mm lens. It was only after this shoot that I learned the term “Don’t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness”. Next time I shall be moving my big butt in front of those with the 70-200mm and get my shot and then tell them, “Aiyah, so sorry ”.

$\"Why is he waiting?\"$

To me at the moment in time it was just another shot with someone posing with interesting props. Now as I posted this up, it came to me as a good representation of how Malaysian drivers are. Constantly waiting in “No waiting” zones and constantly parking at “No parking” zones. How ironic.

$\"The Hitman chronicles\"$

An attempt of a glamor shot with a touch of macho-ness. Notice that the tie was caught in the wind. Thank God for the wind as it was rather hot that day. Yup, this was shot outdoors as with the other photos taken here.

$\"The moments that are worth preserving\"$

Max and Vicky spending a little intimate time together with at least 15 photographers breathing down their necks. Well not literally but I really wonder how it would feel at the other end of the camera. The shot can be improved of course with a little better composition.

$\"The one with the running\"$

Managed to execute this shot with the motion blur I wanted but I was so engrossed with the effect that I totally forgot about the background. Funnily, I was reading about this in a blog post, about how an amateur and a veteran shoots and how the newbies would miss out some areas like the background and the framing and concentrate on the subject while veterans would take everything into account. Yup, I totally fall into the amateur category.

Thats it for today folks. As I find the time to run my other errands, I will post up more photos up here soon.

Tags: From Ordinary to Extraordinary, Louis Pang, Models, Penang, Photography, Photos, Portrait, Pre-Wedding
Posted in Photography, Workshop | 2 Comments »

The One with all the Photos

April 16, 2008

Well, not all of the photos are up yet but I did manage to export them out of Lightroom and added the border and watermark on Photoshop before uploading them to my blog. Decided to upload them straight to my blog rather than upload them to Flickr and then copy the codes over here.

First photographer I know to have his own notebooks

Took this shot when we were presented with notebooks to write down our notes from the lectures. I would have loved to use this notebook but I brought my trusty “Photography Notebook” along with me to Penang. This notebook contains a few other notes from my other photography workshops which I attended.

Presenter with an Apple?

I am glad that I finally gotten my Macbook Pro after waiting for a month for it to clear SIRIM and arrive at my supplier’s doorstep. A huge thanks to Siva who helped me to order in the Macbook Pro and also bearing with my constant SMSes, asking when is the stock arriving. From the shot above, Louis is explaining about what the slide shown on the wall contained and what it meant. Want to know more? Sign up for his workshops here.

According to Louis, my Macbook Pro wasn’t well “trained” enough and he offered to give me his well “trained” Macbook Pro and swap it with my “untrained” one. Too bad Louis, I am going to train mine in my own special way

Show by example!

Here we have Louis explaining to the models on what he intends to do with them. It was good that Louis and Arden hired models who were not experienced in posing. This really made us work hard to get them to pose properly!

Shooting with a D3 and a 70-200mm f/2.8 VR lens

Noticed that the white balance of both the shots above this and the previous ones were different? That is due to the light coming in from the window versus the yellow ambient room lighting. What I learned here is that you don’t need a fantastic location to create wonderful shots. Look at all the equipment everywhere in the room. And yet, I managed to steal a shot with my 85mm lens.

Using my Nikon D300 and 85mm f/1.8 lens

Using my Nikon D300 and 85mm f/1.8 lens (portrait shot)

No studio lighting was used to get these shots and we relied heavily on natural lighting. A round of applause to our wonderful models for that session, Samantha and Reynaldo. Appreciate you guys tolerating a newbie like me during the workshop!

Looking at the time now, I am already late for cell group. Hope to get more photos up here soon.

More to come soon…..

to be continued…

Tags: From Ordinary to Extraordinary, Louis Pang, Photography, Photos, Portraits, Reynaldo, Samantha
Posted in Photography, Workshop | 6 Comments »

The One with the Rat Race

April 15, 2008

Yup, two days have passed since I last updated my blog and although I would love to publish the photos I took over the weekend at the “From Ordinary to Extraordinary” workshop, I need to find the time to even select them. I took quite a number of photos that day and I just need to sort through them. My priority right now would be to send out the group shots to the participants and also to the models who played an important part.

At the moment, still no pictures up yet because I am at yet another workshop. Nope, it is not a photography related workshop but more towards work related. The bright side is that I don’t have to travel to Cyberjaya for the next couple of days (the workshop is at IBM in Bandar Utama) but the down side is that I lose out on my travel claims. The sacrifices I make in the pursuit of knowledge

Anyhow, today was an interesting day as I learned a lot about DB2 and how it interacts with SAP. Keat Seong played an important part to me today as I had little experience as a Basis Engineer and that was where he came in. Of course not without his antics of trying to copy over the instance to another client. Because I was at training the entire day, I had little time to check my work email so I gave my weekly badminton session a skip and concentrate on my work instead.

See, you can’t really blame me for not posting up any photos here.

Anyway, the Charge Up! 2008 conference is coming soon, next week to be precise. Really looking forward to it and I need to practice shooting this weekend as well or else I might forget what I learned. Baby steps is what I need to take.

Until the next post, unless extra work suddenly falls on my lap.

Tags: Charge Up, Louis Pang, Personal, Photography
Posted in Personal | 2 Comments »

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