DP | @ekhoophotography

On a lovely Sunday morning, Elyana and family got together, dressed up and spent some quality time with each other. In addition, they brought us in to have a portraiture session with them. I must also say that Elyana's mom really cooks well and we had a boxful of yummy dumplings to take home with us! Oh, congrats to Elyana and Roslan on their tenth anniversary! Many happy returns!

Anyways, we started in their cozy home in Bandar Mahkota Cheras with their family and relatives and then took a short drive out towards Putrajaya where we had great fun near the Putrajaya mosque and main boulevard. Great time for the kids to go out, parents, relatives, and grandparents had great fun too!

I'm actually quite impressed with the way this outing was organized and we wish more people would actually spend the time to take photos of their family. You may not appreciate the photos right now but years later, when you look back at old photos, the memories are priceless. A lovely outing with the family, quality time with the kids and get family photos to boot! Excellent combination if you ask me!

And here I am caught by my lovely wife shooting on the move

First off, apologies for the lack of entries for quite a while now. I've been busy with way too many things. Of course the last two weeks also bring a lot of changes for me personally.

One big event this week is Kodak's retirement of Kodachrome. The thing about this is it tells everyone how old I am. It does show also when I got into photography... I didn't use Kodachrome much due to limited labs processing them here in Malaysia but I tend to use it's newer siblings, the Ektachrome series. There are some nice links here.

The other product I'm playing with right now and yes, it does have promise is DSLR Remote from OnOne software. Yes, I do think it needs to do AF but besides that, it's pretty cool and I think I've got quite a few new uses for it once my Manfrotto camera clamps arrive! Canon really needs to drop the price of their Wi-Fi transceivers (more later)! And of course I'll say it here again: OnOne software really needs to move their plugin suite to 64-bit. Like yesterday. 32-bit is so Windows XP

Anyways, back to topic:
Over last weekend's Focus on the Family event, I found out for the first time that the Direct Print button on my 5D Mark II actually had a use. Of course finally Canon's listening and the Direct print button doubles up to use as a toggle to get into HD Movie mode but prior Canon cameras don't have luxury. I still think it should be fully programmable though. Anyways, printing direct from Camera is cool for once and it does streamline the workflow... Shoot, connect camera, select image, hit print, swap camera, shoot, repeat the process. Easy!

However, the problem now is that in public events, that's not as sexy as a big widescreen monitor. I'll probably try this approach with the orang asli trip next... instant prints. Everyone loves that! So the next day, I lugged my laptop with a 22" wide-screen monitor along. Using the EOS Utility software, I ended up shooting tethered. The Capture Preview window was maximized on monitor 2 (external display) but the main display (laptop) was showing Adobe Bridge. Of course with Bridge CS4, you can have a second synchronized window so that can be toggled if the family wanted to preview the shots taken and select the best one for printing. Otherwise, the Capture preview was nice to show people what was the camera shooting at that time. So, short of having wireless USB, I think Canon ought to halve the price of the WFT-E4 transceiver! When I've more time this weekend, I'll post a more detailed description of the work flow and software used.

However, with a hungry horde of friends and cousins... it's near impossible to get a good shot of any of the food before it's attacked! Never mind that, there's a big lunch treat for my father-in-law at the Shangri-La hotel. I'm sure the food there will be more neatly arranged !

In reality, it's a big, big mess for I guess I had to neatly get a small pile and arrange it nicely just for this pix. I've not stopped eating since like 10am...

No photos worthy of this blog yet -- too busy feasting and munching down goodies...

Well, haven't really had time to catch up of sleep. Ten-years ago, I would have easily recovered from a month of 16-hour work days in 48 hours. Now it's much tougher. I guess there's a lot more responsibility on my shoulders now, from the burden at work (they don't pay you to do nothing) and of course, my responsibility to my lovely wife but also not neglecting church ministries and family and friends too. Right now, our humble lil' home is a construction zone and managing that as an extra responsibility doesn't help. I really can't wait to move out of our box in the sky to my new old home and have a pair of tail-wagging furry friends greet me when I pull into the driveway.

Edit: sorry, draft status prevented this from showing...

Lots to pack when visiting relatives and parents!