More on the Volkswagen Golf 1.4 TSI

Posted on August 29, 2010 by Mark

After mentioning about the Volkswagen Golf GTI Mk VI in my older post here and the new upcoming Volkswagen Golf 1.4 TSI here, I managed to find some interesting videos on YouTube about the Volkswagen Golf 1.4.

Thought the advert above was very interesting.

Some reviews of the Golf VI on Fifth Gear

This video shows the acceleration speed of the Golf 1.4 TSI with a 160hp. Only difference is that it is fitted with 19″ rims instead of it’s stock 16″ rims.

The Golf VI 1.4 in action, tornado red. I like that colour a lot.

And a video reviewing the Golf but in a different language! Anyone can translate this for me?

I Updated my Portfolio Page

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Mark

Yes, I have finally gotten around to sorting through some of the images from my photo archives and yes, I have uploaded them to my Portfolio page. Here are some of the images which I have uploaded.

Blog WeddingPortraits 103 I Updated my Portfolio Page

Capture the shot above while shooting Siva & Sumitha’s wedding together with the Stories team.

Blog WeddingPortraits 064 I Updated my Portfolio Page

This shot was taken during Eric & Debbie’s wedding, also together with the Stories‘ team.

Took the shot of Mun Tzin quite recently

Head over to my portfolio page to view more!

Nicholas and Sharon’s Pre-Wedding

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Mark

I have known Nick for quite some time now ever since the Lowyat photography days and when he asked me to shoot his pre-wedding, I couldn’t say “no” to him. Here are some of the photos from the session. Boy, did I really have so much fun shooting the couple. Both Nick and Sharon were very sporting and they were a really funny couple to photograph. A huge thanks to Mun Tzin as well for helping me out.

I really love capturing the bouquet especially when they are so nicely decorated such as the one above.

The head piece was from Pretty in White! I really love birdcage veils.

We started the shoot from inside the room which was themed after a middle eastern design.

After shooting for a while, we decided to try and capture the sunset. I really love sunset shots and I really love the warm colour tone!

All the best Nick and Sharon. Can’t wait to shoot your wedding next month! Gosh, time really flies!

Episode #0 of the Ninja Report

Posted on August 17, 2010 by Mark

About a couple of months ago, Nick asked me if the RedNinja group would want to host a photography vodcast where it will cover local photography news, interviews, tips and just cocking about (okay, the cocking about bit was my idea into the whole mix). It took a small idea which formed in Nick’s head and after a couple of months of really cocking about (that means not doing anything), we finally sat down, discussed some ideas and voila, episode #0 of the Ninja Report is now out and available.

Check it out below.

In this episode, me and Nick introduce what the Ninja Report is about and we also included in an interview with the core team of WPPM. Note that the double chin was added into the video purposely and that it does not represent the true me!

Apparently some guy said to blame it on the lighting but since I was the one who set up the light, I guess I can only blame myself, haha!

I would like to thank the folks over at Satoo.tv for hosting this videos as well as the other episodes to come! Satoo.tv is a great place for us Malaysians to share some of our local content on local servers so that we view it super blazingly fast!

If you want to know more about what RedNinja is about, head over here or just join us in our Facebook Fan Page here.

First Impressions: The Art of Business Card Design

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Mark

Final Update

At the end of the session, everyone just stayed back and chit chatted about various areas as well as catch up with one another. Tune in to RedNinja.tv to find out more about upcoming events!

Update #3

After the sharing session, the panel then went through various business cards that were submitted earlier for critique and there were plenty of learnings that I personally gained through this session. A lot of them have to do with a sense of purpose why a design is in the card and even the fonts used and the spacing between the fonts would then make sense. Definitely a real eye-opener to me, especially one who has zero design background.

Update #2

Jon and Grace are sharing about how they have recently undergone a rebranding with their own personal businesses lately. Both of them went through a big change in terms of how they branded their own personal businesses and also how they started off with a single focus and focused on that starting with their business cards and websites.

Update #1

I am blogging live now from Integricity’s office at Centerpoint, Bandar Utama on the RedNinja.tv’s event called “First Impressions: The Art of Business Card Design“. At the moment we have Shirley and her husband together with Kris Wong from “That Special Occasion” and “Weddings Malaysia” as well as designer Mike Lian from Integricity sitting at the panel sharing about business card designs.

There is a big group of photographers and none photographers here at the event.

Speeding Up My Old Macbook Pro

Posted on July 20, 2010 by Mark

apple macbook pro Speeding Up My Old Macbook Pro

I am currently using a Macbook Pro which I bought a little over 2 years ago. It runs on a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz Intel Processor and has 200Gb of storage space and 2Gb of RAM. Sounds geeky right? Well, this post is meant to be a little bit on the geekier side of things.

Anyway, 2 years a long time and is almost a lifetime for more electronic products but of course I am trying to maintain using my Mac longer and abstain from upgrading to the newer unibody Macs sporting those spanking new Core i5/i7 processors.

I mainly use my laptop to process photo images, that means I would have Photo Mechanic, Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop running at the same time with Google Chrome, iTunes and Tweetdeck running in the background. This used to work out fine until I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, Lightroom 1 to 2 and now 3 and from Adobe Photoshop CS3 to Adobe Photoshop CS4. Same goes for the size of my images. It started off with a 10mp camera to a now 21mp camera.

This definitely put a strain on my laptop and I can definitely feel it moving extremely slowly nowadays. Of course the easy route is to just get a new laptop but throwing that kind of money about isn’t in any of my current plans. So I went off about to figure out what can I do to improve the speed of my Mac and keep it running longer.

There are two ways of speeding it up of course, the hardware route as well as the software route.

Let’s begin with the hardware route.

Upgrading the memory
I upgraded the memory capacity of my laptop from 2Gb of RAM to its maximum which is 4Gb of RAM. This definitely allows me to open more applications simultaneously and Lightroom runs a little bit smoother.
Upgrading the hard disk
This will be my next upgrade, you can choose to upgrade from the stock standard 5400rpm hard disk to a much speedier 7200rpm hard disk or if you have the cash and storage space is not an issue, you can opt for a SSD (Solid State Drive). Personally, I am very much looking forward to this, the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid hard disk. I really can’t wait to get ahold of this baby once it reaches Malaysian shores. It is a hybrid hard disk which sports a 4Gb NAND flash on it and still be able to store 500Gb of data. Proven via benchmarks to be much faster than conventional 7200rpm drives, this drive would definitely speed up my laptop. I just hope that by the time it arrives, my laptop can support it. From my sources, Cycom at Lowyat plaza is selling the 500Gb version for RM700 which is quite a lot as the US pricing is only priced at USD$89.00.

Other than these hardware upgrades, I can’t really think of other ways to improve my Mac anymore. So the next thing I need to look at is on the software side.

Onyx
Get this application directly from Apple and for free! It is a multifunction utility for Mac OS X Intel. It allows you to verify the Startup Disk and the structure of its System files, to run misc tasks of system maintenance, to configure the hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock and of some of Apple’s own applications, to delete caches, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome and more.
Mac Keeper
Not just an ordinary app. It is an all-in-one solution for your Mac that combines a set of drive clean-up utilities, standalone tools, and online services. Simple and powerful, this app will make work easier for beginners and give more flexibility to experts.
Why MacKeeper? You will never have to complain about lack of disk space, slow system performance, accidental file loss, privacy breaches, or be confused with any Mac-related questions.
I managed to recover about 20Gb of hard disk space using Mac Keeper. To some of you, 20Gb is not much but to me where I usually have around 5Gb of free hard disk space, 20Gb represents 10% of my entire storage space.
Download it here.
Remove fonts you never use
If you don’t work with plenty of languages, you can always remove languages that you wouldn’t use. Trust me, there are a lot of them! You can either move them out of the fonts folder or you can use Mac Keeper or Monolingual to do that job for you.
Stop unused extensions
What is the use of turning on Wifi, Bluetooth, filesharing and internet sharing when you aren’t using them? Then open the Extensions Manager control panel via Systems Preferences and turn off the various system extensions that you don’t need.
Disable the Widgets Dashboard
I used to think that Widgets are cool but after a while, I totally forgot about it’s existence and hardly even check it. Hence why I decided to just kill it off completely. Those little buggers can be a system resource hogger.
Open up terminal.app located in Applications > Utilities > Terminal
Copy this, paste it in the terminal and hit enter: defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
Then enter this: killall Dock
That’s it! Dashboard widgets are now disabled
Other wise, you can also follow this guide here on how to disable the widgets using your mouse.

Here are some of the ways that I managed to find and source out in order to speed up my old Mac. If you have any tips and tricks, I would definitely want to hear what your solutions were and I would definitely love to try them out as well. Any method especially if it doesn’t involve buy a whole new laptop.

What Happened at the Photographers Meet Up

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Mark

When Grace posted an event ”Photographer’s Gathering” a couple of weeks ago on Facebook, I was totally not expecting the crowd last night. There was a huge group of photographers, mainly wedding but nonetheless new faces as well as old friends. The mood and the event was totally awesome, we packed out the The Olive Branch to the max, running out of seats.

Here are some of the photos I captured with my iPhone, I had no choice as I had just sent in my gears to the service center for focus calibration. Surprisingly, for a photographer’s event, there were only a couple of cameras there and whole load of iPhones in the midst.

The event started with Grace introducing herself and thanking everyone for joining in on the event. It was mainly a way for photographers to meet each other, catch up, mingle around, meet new faces as well as listen to some of Grace’s, Patrick’s and Zung’s experience with WPPI (Wedding and Portrait Photographers International) when they were there last March in Las Vegas.

Grace also brought quite a number of brochures and magazines she collected from the WPPI tradeshows.

Patrick and Zung also joined Grace at the front to share their WPPI experiences with everyone, ranging from the total cost of the trip, the cost of the conference, travel methods, 25 cents chicken wings, Hooters, airlines and definitely lots of funny jokes as well. They were really frank about the trip, what they have learned about the trip and what they brought back from WPPI.

After that, Peter who was the current president of WPPM (Wedding and Portrait Photographers Malaysia) came up to talk about WPPM and explain what WPPM is all about. If you don’t know what it is, check out their website and watch out for the upcoming WPPM conference in August.

Patrick later on shared with the group on his experiences with the print competition as well as what he had learned when participating in the competition.

Whilst Patrick was speaking away, me and Jon quietly slipped away to the kitchen to bring out a birthday cake to celebrate both Patrick’s and Alex‘s birthday. Alex at that time hadn’t arrived yet but we managed to sing happy birthday and eat some good old cake which surprisingly again, for a room full of photographers, there was plenty of cake left. I think everyone must have been on a diet.

There were plenty of new faces and new people I met and the mamak session after the event was also funny as we heard proposal stories and weird photography poses which gave us all a huge laugh about.

Definitely can’t wait for the next one!

World Refugee Day at KL Sentral

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Mark

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the World Refugee Day or sort of announced that it was going to take place at KL Sentral over the 19th and 20th of June. So, on the 19th of June, I decided to head over to KL Sentral to check out the World Refugee Day myself and I did have a bit of fun. What I am also pleased is that my photos also managed to be published here on the Nut Graph. Hopefully they will be able to make an impact and create more awareness about.

Here are some photos which I took when I was there. One of the things I noticed was that there was a huge crowd already gathering around the stage as there was a competition or quiz being held by the UNHCR folks. Basically the emcee will ask a question to the crowd and whoever can answer the question gets a prize.

The UNHCR have set up two booths or rather exhibitions for members of the public to enter in and view. One of them was called “Take a Minute to be a Refugee“. The exhibition provides a view of how a refugee lives by showing images of real refugee shelters look like. A good touch was that they also recreated a room where refugees normally would live in, and this isn’t some single room for a person but where up to 5 people might have to squeeze in and share. This really provided an up close perspective of how a refugee has to live even in our country.

WorldRefugeeDay Blog 019 World Refugee Day at KL Sentral

A visitor taking an image of the exhibition sign

There were plenty of stalls there where the refugees were able to sell some of their wares. I managed to get some items for Mun Tzin during the exhibition which made her very happy. Unfortunately, I only noticed that most of the tourists were the ones who were browsing through the stalls. My theory is that because of where the event was located, which was at the entrance of KL Sentral towards Le Meridien and KL Hilton, that is usually where tourists would walk by. As a local, when I disembarked from the LRT (yes, I took the Putra LRT from Taman Jaya), I couldn’t find where the exhibit was. Location does play a very important role but I am guessing because the locations where there is high traffic, businesses would have already paid the management of KL Sentral for.

Overall, I hope that the event manage to gain more awareness among the public and I even do hope that this blog post and my images will help create awareness amongst the public. This is UNHCR’s first public event on World Refugee Day so I really do hope that there will be more to come.

For more information about refugees, check out this site here.

Take a look at the rest of the images I took below.

: A huge crowd gathering around the stage listening to the UNHCR rep speaking

: People trying to catch the performances from upstairs in order to avoid the crowd

: A view of how a refugee lives

: A security guard buys a drink at a vending machine whilst the refugee performers are waiting for their turn

: A refugee performer plays the drum in front of the visitors

: A mum teaching her children about refugees

: A man stares deeply into the exhibition room

: A visitor viewing the “Take a Minute to be a Refugee Exhibition”

: Even the police were checking out the UNHCR booths

: A visitor taking an image of the exhibition sign

Cameron Highlands Portraiture Shoot

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Mark

Cameron Highlands has been a very nice and eventful place for me. Mainly because I can only remember going there twice when I was very young and the only eventful thing that occurred to me was that I bought cheap flowers there and the weather was quite cooling and there was a roti canai that was completely covered with flies!

You can find out more about Cameron Highlands in my other posts here and here.

Whilst I was there recently with my friends, I decided to bring some of my gears up to Camerons with me to take some portaiture shots at the tea plantations. Here are some of my favourite ones.

These shots were taken at the Boh Tea Plantation where it was quite difficult to drive in. Trust me, it is only a one way dirt road so I think this was where my car rims got bent when I was travelling through it. The view there was fantastic and I just loved the tea plantations.

On the way back from Camerons, we also passed by another tea plantation called Cameronian Valley and decided to snap more shots there as well.

And finally a group photo of us before heading down back to KL.

Sorry guys, I will pass you all the full set of photos soon ok? Organize a makan event and I can pass it to you all then.

An Evening With Simon Yam

Posted on May 31, 2010 by Mark

Exactly a week ago, me and munz decided to take up an offer by Canon Marketing Malaysia to attend an event for photographers where Simon Yam (yup, Canon’s ambassador) would be there in person for a quick question and answer session with everyone as well as provide a couple of photo opportunities for the attendees. This was then followed with a free movie screening of “Echoes of the Rainbow” which helped Simon win the award for Best Actor in the 29th Hong Kong Film Awards.

SimonYamCanon 001 An Evening With Simon Yam

SimonYamCanon 003 An Evening With Simon Yam

SimonYamCanon 004 An Evening With Simon Yam

The event was held in Pavillion, so by the time me and munz battled through the Monday evening traffic, we arrived there slightly late where we saw Simon entering the Gold Class Lounge at GSC Pavillion. There he was speaking to a couple of reporters while a huge crowd of 200+ photographers filled up the main hallway before entering the cinema.

Whilst the rest were waiting at the main area where Simon would be speaking, I tried to enter into the Gold Class Lounge but didn’t manage to get past the guards!

So I decided to take a couple of shots of the folks I know who was there.

Yup that is camera shy Xavier in the photo above

A shot of Jason, he tried to get me into the Gold Class Lounge to get up close to Simon but the guards wouldn’t let me

Jason and Mun Tzin

Once Simon left the Gold Class lounge, I managed to sneak in near the door to capture a couple of shots.

SimonYamCanon 008 An Evening With Simon Yam

By the time he arrived at the main hall, there were so many photographers there that I could hardly get a glimpse of him so I ended up chatting with Jason. Most of the time I didn’t know what he said because he was answering questions in Mandarin as well as Cantonese, so me being a “banana“, I was just “lepaking” in front of the air con vent because it was getting a little hot in the hallway.

SimonYamCanon 012 An Evening With Simon Yam

I even took a couple of shots of the people surrounding him trying to get photos of Simon.

After he has completed his Q&A session and adjourned out, everyone was ushered into the cinema to catch the show where they even provided free popcorn and a tin of coke. Not too shabby at all.

4336echoesoftherainbow04061 An Evening With Simon Yam

Overall I thought the movie was actually quite good. It was a proper serious type of show which depicted life in Hong Kong in the late 60′s for a shoemaker and trying to make ends meet to send his two sons to school. The movie talks about how the sons went through life, private school (yes, the parents worked very hard to pay for their school tuition), bribing police officers with moon cakes and facing harassment all around.

My rating for the show is a good 3.5/5 stars!

p.s. Check out Jason’s blog post as well with his up close and personal shots with Simon.

Mark Leo Dot Net

Loving all things photography, tech, gadgets, Apple and cars

Category Archives: Photography