DP | @ekhoophotography

A lot of my life seems to revolve around Cameron Highlands. No reason why but it's been the place for a lot of interesting and life-changing events in my life. One reason could be that I'm kind of a winter person. Anything above twenty-one degrees celcius is warm and I think the sweet spot is a lovely fifteen. Camerons, being at an altitude of 5,500 feet above sea level makes for a more pleasant temperature for me.

Anyways, this time round, we returned to my favorite place to stay, the OMF bungalow just outside Tanah Rata (flat-ground in Malay). OMF trumps every hotel I've stayed in Camerons mainly due to it's lovely caretaker and surrounds. The old bungalow still has charm and Mrs Chye, the current caretaker serves up good old plain home cooking and unbeatable scones. Don't waste your money on those pathetic scones at Ye Olde Smokehouse. This one's made with love and freshly baked. The only other scone worth spending money for in Camerons (my opinion anyways) is at T-Cafe in Tanah Rata. T-Cafe is going to be renamed to Lord's Cafe soon. All the best Terese!

Secondly, this is a great place to unwind from the hustle and bustle of any city. There's only 8 rooms and the nearest neighbor is about two miles down the road. Being on an isolated outcrop, it does get windy and cold but get yourself a mug of steaming hot chocolate, a good book and you can enjoy the great outdoors.

It was a good getaway and as usual, was filled with quite a lot of good food. Probably overdid it but don't you always overeat on holiday anyways? The Sungai Palas Tea plantation has now been upgraded and it looks fantastic. It looks awesome but I didn't take any photos of the exterior because the excitement has now been spoiled by stupid drivers who don't know how to drive on single lane roads. I mean if you see an approaching car and you're at a section which permits passing, stop the car and let the incoming car pass. Seems like all the good drivers are long gone and we have city folk who think that giving way is a weakness. Pure stupidity which results in a fifteen minute journey taking over half-an-hour. Not recommended if you're not a good driver! Looks like all that off-road driving on even narrower trails had some benefit after all!

That's it for now, more photos to come...

I've had my little Lumix GF-1 for two months plus now. This is not a technical or "proper" review of the camera but it's more like my experience using it. My GF-1 comes with the 14-45mm stabilized lens. I might add the 20mm pancake lens at some point but for now, it's a one-lens camera. My reason for the GF-1 is purely to complement my full-sized 35mm DSLR. I use the 5D Mark II by the way so the GF-1 is not a replacement for my main cameras. The GF-1 is used for situations where a larger DSLR and lenses are not required. For me, it's primarily for travel and all-round carry with me camera. My need for the GF-1 comes from situations where I would like a better camera than my iPhone but the situation doesn't warrant me carrying my 5D.

Travel. I always travel with my full kit of photo equipment. However, there are times the GF-1 gets used such going down for the hotel breakfast, on the flight, serious hiking when my DSLR is stowed because I need my hands. Since the GF-1 is lightweight, I can have the GF-1 around my neck, ready to shoot something. It's also less intrusive when doing street photography. As the GF-1 can look like a little point and shoot camera, more likely everyone's going to ignore what you're doing. When not traveling, the GF-1 goes with me to little restaurants, coffee shops, work (sometimes), and all sorts of places. Currently, either I carry it naked as is or in my ThinkTank Photo Speed Changer. I'm looking to get either the Trim Changer or All the Other Stuff as a permanent GF-1 case though. It's a relatively hardy little camera though and fairly well built.

Performance
The GF-1 is pretty much fast enough for almost everything I use it for. From street photography to people and a little bit of action. Yes, the buffer is small when you shoot raw but if I'm shooting fast action, chances are, I'm using my DSLR. Quality is good if you keep the ISO below 800 and if you shoot raw. In well lit scenes (i.e. outdoors), the quality can be comparable to a cropped sensor DSLR (i.e. 500D, 50D, etc). In low light, the sensor does struggle but you can have everything. Battery life is amazingly good -- I do have a spare and I only charge it after three days. Note that I do use my DSLR as well so remember that this is assuming a second camera. That said, I have the camera power save set to five minutes and it's hardly turned off. Auto-focus is mostly good with occasional misses. The stabilized lens helps here. The lens hood works well to minimize flare and I've used the GF-1 in light rain, heavy wet fog without problems.

The ability to shoot HD movies is great although audio capture is just average without an external mic. The wind-filter works to some extent but it doesn't help stop user and other little sounds from being captured. The AVCHD lite codec is a pain in the ass to work with though.

Ergonomics and usability
The menu system is overly complex and the usage of icons and abbreviations doesn't help. I find it easy to inadvertently set something up when the camera is bumping around powered on. The small size however makes camera shake more pronounced. The shutter lag is almost negligible with the camera focusing and taking the shot almost as you press. That can't be said about the video though. The dedicated video start/stop button is great but it's laggy and sometimes takes a second or two to register. That said, if you ensure the shutter speed is relatively fast (1/100s), you can get great results. It's also the camera I let other friends, local guides or strangers to take photos of myself or our group.

Image quality
In China, I shot RAW exclusively. While noise levels above ISO 800 was fairly high, it definitely beats any point-n-shoot's pixel dense sensor out there. The ten-plus megapixel (I'm no fan of 4:3 ratio images so the GF1 is set to 3:2 ratio) images are quite awesome - with some processing, they look great. With ISO 1600 or 2500, a bit of noise reduction processing (I use Noise Ninja), the output is still pretty fantastic. With ISO set below 800, prints up to 12R (12" x 16") are quite achievable and look indistinguishable from any mid-range DSLR.

For some real reviews, you can check DPReview or Steve's Digicams.

Looks like wet weather put a damper on my predicted shoot rate. The other factor being the red-eye flight contributed to a wash-out day in terms of photography. How much was I off? Well, I predicted for 10-days I'd shoot approximately 280 Gigabytes. I returned with 93 Gigabytes. Looks like off by quite a bit but then, we had spent over 12 hours and 1500km on the road and rail. How much can you shoot from a moving vehicle? Also, I realized that my GF1 cannot be counted to be a third camera when estimating disk/shoot usage. You can't use two cameras at the same time so the 60 gigs I estimated for the GF1 dropped to only 21 gigs -- and I had 30 gigs of SDHC available. Anyways, always good to be prepared so while I could have saved some cash by not getting my 320Gb Seagates, they always will come in handy next trip... or anyone interested buying them off me? They are in black and silver colors.

With over 94Gb (or approximately 5,800) of photos and videos, it's going to take sometime to get through and process. There's also lots to do around the house at the moment along with a wedding PhotoBook so please be patient while I get the backlog cleared!

Few things about China for those uninitiated for the Rise of the middle kingdom is now due.
1) If you still think China is a 3rd world Country, pay a visit.
2) Like America who thinks Europe is quaint, China will be advertising "quaint" New York and ancient Europe.
3) People (or society) needs some catching up to do but they are a nation of fast learners.
4) For overseas Chinese, it's sometimes a shock but it is awesome to see the land where our forefathers once fled from.

p.s. It was too early and foggy -- the Maglev only hits 430km/h between 9am and 3pm

It wasn't very long ago that RM1,000 (about US$300) bought you a 128Mb Sandisk Compact Flash card. Go a bit more and that same amount got you a 1Gb Sandisk Ultra II that wrote at about 5mb/second. Today, you can get a 32Gb Extreme IV (the Extreme Pro's are a bit more than that) that has a 60Mb/second speed. That's the good. The thing also is that when I had a 128Mb CF card, I had a 1.6 megapixel digital camera, shooting JPEG only. I think it also only had ISO 100, 200 and 400. Those images were about 500 Kb in size. Now, I shoot 21 megapixel 14-bit RAW images, ISO 50 to 25,600. Oh, plus HD movies that chew 320Mb per minute. So, the point is basically this - you can never have enough storage cards. I'm packing over a hundred-twenty-odd gigs (CF and SD combined)... and sure, I could use a couple more 16-gig cards

I think it's safe to say that most people would like to travel. Most people would also love to travel abroad. If you love traveling and photography means that you'll definitely bring along a camera. If you really enjoy traveling and really are into photography, you will probably end up taking a lot of photos. You'll also wake up earlier and stay out longer.


Back in the old days where photos (not images) were captured on chemicals, the average storage capacity was thirty-six photos. If you lucked-out, you could sometimes get 37 before the rewind kicks in. Rewind? WTF? I remember lugging forty rolls of film to Spain. It was estimated at that time that I'll shoot on average 2 rolls a day. This is to negate out time spent traveling between destinations (we almost always self-drive), chilling out (hey, you need to take a break and enjoy your time too), recovering from jet-lag and so on. I digress. Fast forward ten years and I can now have 630, yup, over six-hundred photos (21-megapixel RAW images) on my 16Gb CF card. Only that I tend to shoot a lot more and more little things get shot, food, street signs, mundane things, etc. Then came HD video. So unless you're super rich, buying twenty 16Gb CF cards is not the solution.

My travel buddy has always been Breeze Systems Downloader Pro (DLPro). I also use it for wedding and other large shoots coupled with several card readers. Today's multi-core computers can handle quite a bit of simultaneous downloads. So far, I average 16MB/sec per CF (8Gb SanDisk Extreme III) with five SanDisk All-in-one USB card readers downloading simultaneously into a striped disk array. Not very fast, but very convienent. I can go shower, have lunch, nap while the download is running. I've tried those image tanks or similar devices. Never worked out for me. Some were horribly slow, others just had poor UI and with the costs of today's disks drives and netbooks, it makes sense to go with that route. For trips where I'm with a rental car (i.e. Australia or the US), I'll normally take my full-size (14") notebook but trains, backpacks and mountains don't really agree with heavy notebooks.

For travel, I'm using DLPro to download from a card reader into two hard drives. Here's my typical desktop configuration (Quad-core, 8Gb RAM, etc) so I won't be configuring it to show thumbnails on my Mini9 for example.

Downloader Pro basic job-code, download preferences, IPTC keywords, etc.

Downloader Pro Back-up Plugin allows downloads to be replicated onto a second or even third storage location. My Wedding shoots get backed up immediately to a NAS this way. So here, mine goes to the NAS drive immediately. For my Mini9, I'll configure it to go to the second hard drive.

You can launch multiple instances of DLPro, hence the beauty of this solution. My Atom powered Mini9 is going to choke on multiple card readers so I stick with one reader for now. I can't wait for the dual-cores though. For now, weight is the main factor so have to make do with the tools at hand. More to come.

Specifically, Shanghai. The packing challenge is compounded by the fact that a hard case is better protection for your stuff that's going to be checked in. Not to mention a bit more secure in terms of airport pilferage. The problem is once in China, I've a couple of trains to take. From maglevs to intercity fast trains. Packing a backpack in there solves the problem but not the capacity and weight issues. My empty hard case weights 4kg empty. My 65-liter backpack weights 2.5 kg empty.

I also have to pack in my Manfrotto tripod. Clothes for a week at least (I always do laundry on a trip) and enough rain gear considering that certain places are nicer with rain. You also don't want to stop shooting when the weather turns bad -- you'll miss out the better photos of the trip! Target loaded weight - 18kg. Usually airlines won't give a hoot if you exceed the weight by a kilo or two but I do have fond memories of three people with 105kg of checked baggage at Beijing Capital International Airport! On our return trip, we have five this time which should give us about a hundred kilos. More than enough unless someone was overzealous in their shopping!

Other problem is that my day pack will primarily consist of camera equipment but I'll also have my Dell Mini 9, Sandisk card readers, two portable SATA drives, battery chargers, batteries, assorted cables, you know the drill. For longer excursions out of my Shanghai base, 65-liters is good. For overnight sojourns, it is unwieldy. Looks like I'll have to bring along a little stuff sack so that I can cram a nights' worth of clothes, etc into the stuff sack along with my day pack loaded with cameras.

Travel light. Depending on what you like to do, that's going to be a serious challenge. Photographers have had this challenge for a while now. If you're also going to do some serious hiking or outdoor activity and more, it's also going to be even more difficult.

My camera equipment alone weights about 5kg, excluding some smaller non-accessories that I can check in. I don't check in batteries, CF cards and chargers. Those are essential if the bags don't arrive at the destination. Then I add my notebook (netbook this time round) and portable hard drives. I use Downloader Pro to copy from card to disk and with the backup plugin, it makes two identical copies to two physical hard drives. Two drives because single drive can fail plus me and my wife can carry one each in case a bag gets stolen.

Since I'm going for some serious canyon hiking, I also have my trusty Garmin 60CSx GPS along with me (Downloader Pro can also load a GPS tracklog and geo-stamp your images). Add a couple of little things you carry onboard and that gets heavy pretty fast. Not to mention my checked in baggage. I've never been on one of those tour packages so usually our trips are more photography and activity loaded and less hanging around shopping. With all the restrictions on baggage means my usual swiss army knife, leatherman wave tools all go into the cargo hold. Along with my tripods, monopods, leki trekking poles. My excel spreadsheet pack list has reached 145 items. Of course this includes little things like 2-stop neutral density filter, polarizer, 16 Maha Imedion AA batteries, ziploc bags, first-aid items like anti-diarrhea tablets, band-aids, etc and a lot more little things.

The only problem is trying to fit all that into the luggage, backpacks and more. Of course there are tricks to lighten my carry-on bag. Worse case scenario sees me hanging my 5D Mark II and 70-200 lens around my neck (whatever you wear on your body doesn't count it seems). Never had to do that before but my aim is to have my Think Tank pixel rocket (CF wallet) and the Panasonic GF1 in my ThinkTank bum bag. My Mini 9 will be carried separately again with the hard drives and two 580EX flash units and RadioPoppers. That's already 2.5kg out of my carry-on pack. If need be, since all my lenses sit in the Think Tank modular pouches, I'll just belt my 70-200 and my pack will pass airline weight and size restrictions!