DP | @ekhoophotography

Well, there's lots of photos to process is one thing but there's also a ton of other work from my real job to the garden to the house. Oh well, short post... since a photo is worth a thousand words (cheapskate, a few thousand maybe).

In case you didn't notice... I've updated the Blog theme slightly. Yes, it's a bit more blue-gray now. Slightly duller perhaps but it's just a start for now. I'll end up tweaking it over the next couple of days. Of course probably the blog will be harder to view with smaller monitors and iPhones. I'm trying to get a plugin for browser detection and adjust accordingly but it doesn't work right yet.

Anyways, I've had my 5D Mark II for two weeks now and loving it! The 21-megapixel results taking some getting used too but they're so buttery smooth and silky in terms of tonality and depth that I can tell instantly the difference between the 5D and my 40D. The bokeh is also so amazing. Anyways, looks like I need another pair of Terabyte disks... looking at 2008, I've shot over 250Gb and that's with 10 and 8 megapixel cameras. 2009, with 21-megapixels and 1080p video...

And of course, the next thing comes the horsepower to push all those pixels. Although I've had a quad-core CPU for a while now, I think RAM is probably the next thing to upgrade which then comes the question : Vista 64-bit or wait for Windows 7. Windows 7 is not too far away but probably too long a wait for me. Shucks. Have to think about the upgrade to CS4 as well since it's 64-bit on the PC now and look at all the RAM...

In what was probably the coolest and best themed wedding (Pink Gothic!) that we've shot this year, Irnny & Af'fan, thanks for the honor and privilege to be part of your big day. We started off with a big dinner before the Akad Nikah ceremony at Irnny's home in Seremban. Af'fan showed his loving and gentle spirit when he shed some tears reciting his vows and responsibilities. This guy takes this very seriously and I'm sure they'll be a wonderful couple. I've never seen a pelamin covered with fresh roses before. The bersanding ceremony was held at 1388 Seremban Golf and Country club and the Pink Gothic theme was equally well executed.

This time by Kong Weng while I was batch processing about 150+ photos and assembling the 'Our Big Day' Slide show. I look more relaxed now since at this moment the photo was taken, the slide show was almost completed.

After Canon mucked up their EOS-40D firmware at version 1.0.4 (we're still waiting for 1.0.5), Adobe comes to the rescue with a quick fix on Camera Raw 4.3. Yes of course there's more changes that just making it read slightly flawed 40D raw files (only from 40D's with 1.0.4 firmware), it includes support for cameras I can't afford like the 1Ds-Mark III. It does add support to Canon's sRAW format but I don't have an sRAW file right now to test. Download the new Camera Raw over here.

Blogging live from the Sapphire Conference room of Mandarin Oriental KL City Center via Maxis HSDPA!

Image workflow... 2015 RAW images. 24 Gigabytes (including the JPEGs).

1. Tag, tag and tag images for post-processing
Images are tagged with stars (1-5) and color tags (yellow, blue, red, etc) for various purposes - PhotoBook, bulk printing, etc. First cut invariably always ends up with about 20% of the photos selected. Subsequent passes will reduce PhotoBook selection to about 60 photos.

2. Adjust white-balance, tonality, exposure and color
Photos are grouped together according to physical location (i.e. dining room, hallway, ballroom sections) to ease correction of white balance. Color, tonal curves and exposure are also tweaked. Occasional photos may require individual adjustment, others, group adjustments are made.

3. Post-Process!
For PhotoBook images, they are individually hand-processed, tweaked, adjusted, cropped and have full works from tonal adjustments to special effects done on them. They retain full resolution. Bulk printing photos are batched processed, reduced to 4 Mega-pixels for printing up to 8R (8" x 5.33") with few exceptions. All images are post-processed to ProPhoto color space and 16-bit before reduction to 8-bit sRGB images. Bulk images are saved as Quality-12 JPEGs. PhotoBook images are saved in Photoshop PSD format.

4. RJT PhotoBook Layout and styling
RJT PhotoBooks layouts are done in sRGB 16-bit for quality and flexibility. Once completed, the final pages are output as 8-bit sRGB TIFF images for printing on a Gretag LightJet Digital printer.

5. Bulk printing & PhotoBook printing
Off they go!