DP | @ekhoophotography

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.

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

During a recent wedding that I was photographing, I had a short chat with the videographer during the customary "how we were born and met" slide show. He commented that nowadays, with the plethora of digital cameras, the weddings of this coming generation might just have a slide show that will last over two hours instead of fifteen minutes. My reply was maybe or maybe there won't be a slide show because the disk crashed and they have no photos left. Don't laugh. This actually happens. A colleague of mine just remarked that he lost a year of photos of his two kids due to a disk crash. Even DVD backups didn't save him. One DVD was unreadable after two years. The second one was partially readable. When making backups, do we even bother to test the backups? Another story I heard was that of a notebook theft, resulting in the lost of all the photos. Backup? Well, a flaw in the backup to portable hard disk methodology. The backup hard disk was kept in the notebook bag. Oops!

Right now, my main PC stores the recent 1.5 years of photos, backed up every fortnight to my storage server where it sits on two mirrored hard drives. My storage server is locked down to prevent anyone opening the case but also cable locked to my desk. Anyways, big heavy (15kg) boxes aren't easily stolen. I'm still working on an off site backup solution. In a nutshell, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate. I buy a pair of disks every 18-months. This allows me to retire the smallest pair after 3-years. Experience since 1990 has shown me that chances of disk failure increase tremendously after three years. All my disk failures were disks four years or older. Of course, there was one odd case but generally, three years is a good time plus it allows me to hit sweet spots of disk prices. Such as when I got a pair of 320Gbs. Next came my 500Gbs. Soon, it'll be a pair of one terabyte disks. So I almost never burn to DVD. What do you do? Sound off in the comments if you have other ideas or methods.

Three-frame HDR attempt from my Condo window

Over a belated Mother's day lunch (blame Ericsson for that), we had a short baby portraiture session. These are my two favorites. No time to do more but you can head over to my other blog to see more if you're interested. Of course everything shot with my 70-200 f2.8 ...

Long shutter speeds and sparklers create interesting patterns!

PMA, the Photo Marketing Association Expo. Las Vegas. January 31st to February 2nd, 2008. What's to expect? Well, the Nikon-Canon DSLR battle just got wilder with Sony jumping into the fray. All in all, it's all good for us users and expect the tussle to result in better cams and lower prices. Who's complaining? So far, just two over weeks into 2008 and we already have:
= Sony A200 DSLR (preorder)
= Casio EX F1 60fps 12X w/RAW
= Nine Kodak cameras + C813
= Four Samsung NV-series and some more
= Four new Casio Exilim compacts
= The Megapixel Wars continue, unfortunately. Everyone knows I prefer image quality over two extra MegaPixels...

A rather old comic from my favorite strip.