DP | @ekhoophotography

This Chinese New Year, we had the fireworks event right in our new old home after dinner. Boy, have the prices shot thru the roof?! I remember buying a pack containing a dozen "moon traveler" rockets (lil inexpensive gunpowder rockets on a stick with a small bang after reaching a height) for less than a ringgit. Today, it's like ten bucks for a dozen. Large rockets we like a couple of ringgit each.

Hmm, the escalating costs of "wars". Back in the good old days when one was a teenager, we used to have lots of firework wars with our neighbors in Ipoh and Penang. Rather belligerent bunch of people we were indeed. Hawks thru and thru. Any misfire by any neighboring kids that landed into my uncle's compound in Ipoh drew immediate retaliation. We were also a well funded super-power -- many uncles had supplies us with more ammo than the neighbors plus we had superior technology (string guided rockets and a bazooka launcher). We also had time to experiment that a moon traveler dropped three feet for every fifty it flew. I remember my brother and I spending countless afternoons performing "weapons research." My goodness how fun were those days. Maybe that's why we're all intact together, nary a missing finger or blinded eye. Research and proper safety. I remember having water, foam, and aluminum foil and styrofoam padded protection! Do not try these at home

The only shot that worked but while my 580EXs were recyling fast enough to keep up with my burst sequence, the 430EX II lagged, hence I lost my sidelight.

Bazooka Mark II in "ground mode" -- didn't want to be a bad influence on my nephew by hand holding it. Anyways, the extraction pipe and laser sights weren't fitted yet

A very different appearance compared to the previous shoot we had. This time round, we were shooting my brother in-law and his family. Despite the clouds and a short drizzle, the weather was hot. Chinese New Year hot. So hot that I got pretty dehydrated before I even got home. Anyways, because of the rain, the lion dance was also pretty tame. In fact, they were mostly going after anyone who waved a hong bao (red packet with money inside I presume) in their face. So tame that even tourists could pose by the lion and take a photo!

On the fourth day of Chinese New Year, we decided that the evening was just the right time to drop by the Thean Hou Temple in KL for a shoot. As usual, it was packed and being the Lunar New Year, it also features a lot of performances and activities that add to the bustling atmosphere. My first time here in the evening and I'm already loving the light or the lack of it. Makes the use of small flashes all the more important but also trying to jostle light to add a bit of sparkle to the already vibrant scene.

With the year of the Tiger, there were many tiger lanterns made from wire and canvas. In the darkness, they glowed beautifully but if you drop by in the daytime, they look faded, dirty and uneventful. Tripods were a challenge in a crowded place like this so I ended up shooting handheld with the McNally grip, high ISO (up to 6400 but mostly on 1600 and 3200), and wireless flash and radiopoppers. We also had another shoot the following morning. I'll post that later and you can see the difference.

During World War II, Allied bomber losses were high, so the powers that be demanded a fix. The engineers set out to eyeball every bomber they could, gathering great statistics for each bullet hole. After a long study they decided to add more armor plating to the areas that had the highest concentrations of holes. A bit after these improved planes were deployed, they received some startling news: more planes were going down than before. At this point I thought, "Did they make them too heavy?"

Then the light bulb went on for someone: they had measured every bullet hole in every plane at their disposal, but they'd failed to realize it was the ones that they did not have access to that mattered. It was the ones that did not return that needed to be scrutinized. They needed to improve the armor in the places that the returning planes had no bullet holes.

Sounds like it might generally relate to product marketing, and user studies: go investigate the customers that don't return for seconds, i.e. upgrade. After all, if I don't return to buy another product from you or upgrade say my first generation product to your newer product, you gotta find out why. Let's see how many organizations actually to do this!

Let there be light. And there was light! A one day seminar at Shangri-La KL was packed full with a large group of people already lined up waiting to get into the ballroom. I mean, this is the Shang, with excellent finger food, coffee, tea and all that and people rather just line up to be the first into the room? Anyways, the day started with a short introduction with Louis Pang showing guerrilla lighting techniques for wedding photographers.

More fun was the "krumping" by volunteers and Joe McNally himself as the "father" of the "bride", Evon. The only letdown was that we didn't get to see the shots from Louis' shoot of the krumping. We got cool stuff in our goodie bags and finally snagged my World Tour DVD!

Joe was funny, humble, instructive, approachable, direct, simple, profound and all that thrown in. He doesn't hide a thing, shoots openly for all to see. His thought process laid-bare. The way he approach the subject, the lights, the step-by-step build up, was just inspiring. Joe started with a single speedlight and built up using reflectors, diffusers, multiple speedlights, EzyBoxes, Octas and more. The gear alone was staggering but the information and stuff he showed were all more important. After all, there'll be newer bodies, newer lenses and newer flashes but light is light. If you can see "light" and you can direct it, control it, bend it, beat the heck out of it, you'd be good to go! I think I need one of those paint pole thingies and an EzyBox, and more speedlights!

And here are some shots of the day...

Of course I have to have a shot of us and the Guru of Lights... and of course, he signed both my books! Awesome!

Almost seven years ago. Let me see if anyone knows the equipment I used ... I feel like the time I showed my 8 year old nephew a film camera and he asked me where's the LCD display!?
Camera bodies:
- Canon EOS 30 (with Eye-controlled focus)
- Canon EOS 50E ( " )
Lenses & Other (hmm, my lens collection is pretty old!)
- EF 16-35 f2.8L lens
- EF 28-105 f3.5-5.6 IS
- EF 70-200 f2.8L lens
- EF 50mm 1.8 lens
- EF 2X TC
- 550EX Flash

And my sensors, aka film were Fuji Velvia (ISO 50), Fuji Provia 400F (ISO 400), Kodak EliteChrome 100 (ISO 100)! All the photos you see here are almost as-is. What's done is my Nikon film scanners is the Digital ICE correction (for dust and scratches) and for resizing, unsharp mask was used. The output from the scanner was intentionally left soft for any post-production work if needed.

Aoraki Mount Cook, shot on the side of Lake Pukaki, 70-200mm lens at 200mm with 2X teleconverter. 400mm on Fuji Velvia.

Church of the Good Shepherd on the shores of Lake Tekapo. 16-35mm lens and Fuji Velvia

Another view of Aoraki Mount Cook while hiking in the area. Kodak EliteChrome, 28-135 IS lens.

Farm gate, on the Road to Wanaka. 16-35mm lens, Kodak EliteChrome

Queens town from the Peak. 16-35mm lens, Kodak Elitechrome and guesstimate exposure. Hey, no LCD previews then. I'll guess exposure times from 1 to three minutes at f/11. Shot half a roll on this!

Saw this sign while driving/wandering around the Milford Sound area. Kodak Elitechrome

Our 25km hike from Wanaka. Kodak Elitechrome. 16-35mm lens

Prancing Pony from Lord of the Rings or in real life, the Cardrona Hotel, Arrowtown. 16-35mm lens, Fuji Velvia

Morning drive along Lake Wanaka. 16-35mm lens, Cokin 2-stop graduated ND filter, Fuji Velvia

If you want him, come and get him! The black riders cross the Bruinen Ford here in Lord of the Rings. Near Arrow town. The water is very cold but I walked across! 16-35mm lens and Kodak Elitechrome

Pesky Kea parrots. They were rather destructive, trying to take the wipers off our CRV.

Sheep making love? Te Anau downs, 70-200mm lens, Fuji Provia

On the road to Milford Sound. Fuji Velvia, 16-35mm lens

Looking for Isengard! Near Te Anau. 70-200mm lens, Fuji Velvia

Angry cows near Wanaka. Found out later that they were bred for beef, hence their hostility -- milk cows it seems are friendlier. 16-35mm lens, Fuji Velvia

Parked at Isengard. Tea with Saruman? 70-200mm lens, Kodak Elitechrome

Sheep pasture, Te Anau, 70-200mm lens, Fuji Velvia

Looking for Navorra lakes and the spot where the Riders of Rohan ambushed the Uruks of Saruman... 28-135 IS lens, Kodak Elitechrome

On the Milford Explorer cruise ship, Milford Sound. 16-35mm lens, Kodak Elitechrome

Milford Sound. 70-200mm lens, Fuji Provia

Arriving at the woods of Rivendell, near Te Anau. 70-200mm lens, Kodak Elitechrome

Road-kill possum. No, I did not run this one down. They are a pest in NZ though and some bumper stickers urge you to run them down. It was getting dark and I had my 16-35mm lens and ISO 50 velvia... hand-held at like 1/2 second exposure. The digital era has spoilt a lot of us

Henry, the Tuatara at Invercargill. 70-200mm lens, Fuji Provia

The YHA we stayed at Dunedin. Supposedly haunted. Didn't bring any IR film and nothing untoward happened anyways. 16-35mm lens, Kodak Elitechrome

Lands' End at Bluff. 28-135 IS lens, Fuji Provia

Arthur's Pass, the high road cross the south Island from Christchurch to the West Coast (Tasman Sea). 16-35mm lens and Kodak Elitechrome. Obviously someone felt that the name Arthur's Ass was more appropriate!

Misty mountains? Not really but it was really misty when we drove across to Hotkitika. 70-200mm lens, Fuji Velvia

Toast on a clothes line. Near Milford, this home of Murray Gunn, an elderly bachelor is a museum of sorts. 16-35mm lens, Fuji Velvia

Caitlin Falls, the Caitlins. 16-35mm lens, Fuji Velvia. 2-stop ND filter, Again, another guesstimate exposure.

The light house at Bluff, Land's End. 70-200mm lens, Fuji Provia

Kaikoura Whale Watch catamarans. 28-135 IS lens, Fuji Provia. At ISO 400, my fastest ISO available! The Pacific ocean is no joke. Expect the boat to be rising and falling over fifty feet and getting soaked with sea spray. Suffice to say, my Canons had no problems with the ocean water!

Sperm Whale tail. 70-200mm lens with 2X Teleconverter. Fuji Provia.

Dolphins decided to show off instead. 70-200mm lens with 2X teleconverter. Fuji Provia

Christchurch Cathedral Square. 16-35mm lens, Kodak Elitechrome

What do you do when you start getting a large collection of movies, videos, music and photos? Shuffling around DVDs or audio CDs gets old very fast and if your house is fully wired, you definitely want to also pull content off your PCs, Macs, NAS boxes, USB sticks, internet, whatever. I went with the Popcorn Hour C-200 since my workplace has a couple of their A-200 and S-210 store front units. I chose the C-200 because it had the ability to put in a BD player or two hard drives (2.5" and 3.5").

I've had the C-200 for about 3 weeks now. In a nutshell, the C-200 is still not ready for prime time. It's still too rough a product, doesn't do what it advertises on the box (Yet!). There's pending firmware updates though but that should not be the case for a shipping product. You advertise 10 functions and it should deliver all 10 functions. Firmware updates are good and can bug-fix, polish-up or add new features but to back-fill functions it suppose to do when shipped is wrong. It, however, works for people who are willing to live with the rough edges, quirks but the ability to play a large set of media types. Tested firmware version is 02-01-091113-19-POP-408-000 (19 November 2009). There's a new version released last week but I haven't had chance to upgrade yet.

Here's a summarized list of what works, what needs a bit of work and what doesn't work.

What works:
- Plays almost everything I threw at it. That includes AVI, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264, WMV, MP3s, JPEGs, MKVs and even complete DVD ISO images.
- Playing media off the hard drive, USB sticks or portable disks work perfectly.
- Good quality playback (can't test the audio properly since I don't have a good audio receiver) but HD content looks awesome. Anything less than 720P pales in comparison now.
- USB ports front and back along with HDMI interface

What needs a bit of work:
- Gigabit ethernet connection seems flaky and unstable. Wired it to a 100mbps switch and it was faster to transfer data across. Go figure!
- Interface is still on files. While that may be the underlying structure and may be used for the technical users, content should be the primary means of the UI. Why should you navigate to the videos folder on your disk and then into the folder named Transformers_HD and then select the appropriate MP4/MKV file to play? Give me a catalog of movies, songs and photos, not a directory structure!
- File-based interface means using it as a jukebox is also quite poor. No shuffle, no selection of genre, artist, etc.
- Photo support and slideshow support is again also poor out of the box
- One or two AVI files had problems and required some patching/fixing in VirtualDub. Not a big issue if you're the one ripping/extracting your own videos.
- Stability. Lock-ups on network hiccups or corrupted videos/images/music is more frequent than it should (I've to hard reboot the unit 5 times so far)

What doesn't work:
- The remote is too laggy. Anything over 100ms is noticeable and the lag can be as long as a second. Don't know if it can be fixed in firmware.
- Size. While the need to be able to accomodate a Blue-ray drive and 2.5" hard drive is good, there's a helluva lot of empty space inside.
- The network services is terribly slow and buggy
- The display panel is totally not viewable/readable from a distance greater than 2 feet.

Conclusion, it's expensive for what it does along with all the rough edges. At this price point (USD 299), I'd expect a much more refined product. Would I buy one again if I had the choice? Not really. I'll probably build a HTPC next

What happens when you break your phone. I mean shatter. Well, whether its covered by warranty or not, you'd definitely want it fixed pronto. In today's mobile, connected, internet world, how is one suppose to have no phone for four to six weeks?

Well, that's exactly what happened to me. With a broken four month old iPhone 3GS, Maxis' reply was simple. It'll be fixed for RM600 to RM700 and you'll get your phone back within six weeks. I'm not sure how certain (I've friends who have had Maxis take up to 8 weeks to get their iPhones fixed) the six weeks was gonna be but it was 5 weeks and five days too many. I expect a 48-hour turnaround at any time for a critical device like this. Otherwise, they better stop billing me anyways.

What to do? I put the word out on Twitter and @thebackpackr came to the rescue (via @zilch) to recommend an excellent iPhone repair specialist (well, he certainly qualifies) and I got my phone fixed (glass replaced with an original part) within two hours. If you'd like to contact him, he's on the Low Yat forums here : http://bit.ly/aZtNVe