OK so a little update before I start never hurt anybody. I am now officially unemployed as I have finally graduated with my Master’s in Business Administration. I have no idea what I’m going to find a job as although I’m pretty sure I’ll be looking for something that falls in my bachelor degree qualification which is I.T. I’ve also lodged my application for an Australian Permenant Residency and have a few more bits and pieces which I need to get sorted before all I need to do is wait until they process it.

If someone wants to give me a helping hand in deciding what to do next that would be great…otherwise I’ll just see where God brings me and in the meantime I shall do some hardcore blogging!

…………………………………………………..so we’re posting about the Hillsong Conference today. We’re back in Sydney. We’re exhausted. We’re psyched!

The Hillsong Conference is held in the Acer Arena which is one of the stadiums in the Olympic Park located in Sydney Australia. Yes, thats the one where the Sydney Olympics were held at…duh! I only took one snap of the Olympic Park which is below. I took some pics of the Acer Arena from the outside with the intention of stitching them together in PS to create a nice pano but I’m too lazy so screw that plan.

Yup, way to start off writing a blog post after 2 months of nothingness and the first picture you post is a happy snap?! …apart from the heavily cropped pic right on top which I try to inject into every post I write…The first thing that happens as we arrived were the massive screens showing the latest #Hillsong tweets…it was there to keep everyone occupied because it was BO-RING for the first half hour we were there. We wanted to get there early the first night so we had epic seats! Guess which one was the one posted by Aaron Lim?

Yes there were actually hot chicks in front of us…and no I didn’t hit on them, puh-leez…they actually asked us to post that! We also got a bunch of leaflets/brochures on our seats which I knew I would never see again after that night so I happily took a picture of them:

When they finally started we were greeted with the famous Hillsong Conference Opening Ceremony…sort of like a not-so-grand Olympic opening ceremony…check the vids out on youtube if you really wanna see the whole thing…I only got a couple of shots:

Gotta love the laser light show they put on! Since the Conference was so long ago now there’s really no point in doing all three days. I’m just going to focus on the main service in the stadium. I made sure I sat at places of the stadium everyday so I got a shot of all the stuff I wanted (which is harder than it sounds!). Compressed into four pictures you can really see the atmosphere that was going on in this place:

I can’t remember exactly but on one of the nights there was a guest worship team from the US. I think it was from Jentzen Franklin’s church or something like that but I’m not sure. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Whats cool is the way they had the lyrics displayed…it was like playing flash instead of the normal camera panning the audience/singers/musicians with the yellow words on the bottom of the screen. It was more like this:

Okay.

If all you wanted to see was my fave Hillsong pics they’re all above or on my Flickr page. I’m not going to post anymore. I’m sure there are plenty of shots of the pastors/speakers/singers close up everywhere else on the web. What no one else has was what we did during the times of the day we weren’t actually attending the conrefence but goofing off somewhere else!

One of the afternoons we spent close to a whole hour trying to get four people to balance together on a metal stump which was about 25cm in diameter. We failed miserably laughing til our we cried while onlookers gave us that look-at-those-whimpy-asian-loosers look as they walked by…We finally made it which was confirmed by counting to “3″ very moderately after which we fell off again. Luckily for us, Steph was around to witness this glorious occasion and froze the moment of triumph in this picture below that oozes awesomeness.

As you can see there were many other stumps which were higher and we couldnt do this on those. You can see in the background on the right an “At/At” sign which I think were all the athletes that took place in the Sydney Olympics back in 2000. It went all the way from Aa to Zwateva.

…then there was this weird one:

Yes, it was a pig on the stump! I took a pic from the other side but I was against the Sun so it was all dark…On one of the nights after taking the train back to Parramatta station we were so hungry and had dinner at the Nandos restaurant there. The owner was really nice and gave us some freebies! We actually had a photo competition of who could make the ugliest face without using your hands. The owner of the restaurant was the judge and the loser (which was chosen by the judge and later agreed by all) had to run up and down the train station shouting “I love Britney Spears!” at the top of their lungs! Guess who won (or should I say lost)?

Neo

Will

Sabrina

Wilson

Steph

Sudakar

Pei Ling

Patrick

Edna

Yes, I did a face too but this is my blog so you don’t get to see it. I didn’t win or lose so my inclusion doesn’t really matter The winner was granted one immunity to forfeit a dare on the “Truth or Dare” game we were going to play when we got back but never got around to doing so…but go ahead and guess who won or lost. Let me know in the comments and I’ll let you know if you’re right or wrong when theres enough comments, hehe…speaking of winning, one of my pictures in my previous post, the Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk competition won my local Photowalk…can you guess which one?

On the afternoon of the third day of the conference we really goofed off big time. Everyone else had electives…I was too lazy to go to mine so Steph, Patrick, and I went back to the poles and took some portraits!

Less talk More pictures!

Right, got it!

I’ll shuddap and let the pictures speak for themselves so enjoy the rest of the shots. This is me signing off!

You know in retrospect, this would be a great place to take some wedding shots!

Last Saturday…well, last LAST Saturday was the 2nd annual Worldwide Photo Walk. We didn’t know about the first one…Although I have a bunch of photos from Sydney, blue mountains, Hillsong and all that I’ll talk about this walk first simply because I’ve finished with photos…the only reason I’m finished with them is I had to make my submissions by Saturday midnight. Even so, I was actually late and submitted my entries on Sunday morning.

You know the great thing? ..because Australian time is so far ahead I could submit it late and still have it counted because the deadline is a US time zone…

If you don’t already know what a photowalk is let me explain:

All over the world people sign up and create little groups with a max capacity of 50 people. On Saturday, 18th July 2009, all those people met up at a designated time and place. Since I was in Toowoomba, one of the Toowoomba flickr group members started a toowoomba walk and so I decided to join! We’ve (some of the photographers in Toowoomba) been meaning to do this for some time but its difficult to take initiative if you know what I mean…especially since we didn’t know one another personally. This was a wonderful opportunity to meet up with local photographers and break the ice with them. In retrospect, I’m sure we’ll be able to organize regular “Toowoomba Photo walks” or something similiar…ask the creative team to come up with something catchy!

If you wanna know more about the worldwide photowalk, click HERE. Perhaps you can organize one for next year! Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way, lets talk photography!

The main meetup was scheduled for 9.30am – 12 noon. However, our leader told us that there would be a dawn shoot for anyone interested. I WAS interested. Only problem is I’ve been sleeping very irregular patterns since I’ve finished uni…(OH YEAH, BTW, I’VE GRADUATED!!! I FINISHED UNI!!! NOW I’M…I’m…un…em..ployed…! D’oh!) Whoops, digressing there…where was I…ah, so I wasn’t sleepy at midnight…I wasn’t sleepy at 1.30am…heck I wasn’t even sleepy at 3.45am! …so, logically I just didn’t bother to sleep! Took a shower at 5.30am and rushed to meet the rest of ‘em.

Being in the land down under, it was a cold winter day and being so, it was still dark, gloomy, and cold. Unfortunately, what wasn’t there was any mist/fog which we were hoping to capture. We met up at Queens Park and there were four of us. I went to get my tripod and realised that I’d left my quick release plate at home! D’oh! Oh well, it didn’t matter though ‘coz there wasn’t anything nice to take. Luckily, Greg, our walk leader got a call from another shooter who was at a mountain cliff shooting first light. We scrambled back to the cars and headed for his spot.

Now there were 5 of us.

WOOT!

We got there and the others got to talking…I saw a beautiful sunrise and couldn’t NOT take it!

After that we stood there chatting around before we went onto explore the surroundings…

So off we went to shoot some other stuff…this is what I took:

Keep exercising

Go Green!

Then, we decided to hang around and chat some more…

We’re pretty good at that.

Now that we were done with that, the sun was out and we headed back to the park for some more photo opportunities. Now theres one thing that puzzles me…one thing that I cannot seem to able to capture. You know when you in a forest with trees all around? You face towards the sun and the light rays come streaming through the trees? I love it when that happens but I’ve never been able to actually capture it. I don’t know why? I’ve tried, believe me I’ve tried…if you know how do teach! There was some light haze (probably something burning) and it was all around…smelt like crap though but pretty to behold. I tried and tried but couldn’t seem to capture anything! ARRGH!!!

So I did what all great photographers do: I quit.

I went to shoot stuff I DID know how to shoot…

A Winter Morning

Windmills

Running Water

Ok, it was now around 8.09:22am (taken from EXIF info) so we decided to warm up and have some breakfast…I tried for the first time an egg benedict with bacon. It was delicious! …nope I wasn’t gonna be Asian and whip out my camera to take a picture of it…although presentation was pretty decent.

9.20 ish in the AM and its time to head to the rendezvous point which was the war memorial next to Queens Park. We waited and finally decided to get a move on. By now we had 8 photographers! yeah!

One of the churches in Toowoomba

An interesting view of the Empire Theatre

Another interesting perspective of the Ticket counter at the Empire Theatre

Free Masons Masonic Hall

This is a list of all the soldiers from Toowoomba that gave their life in WWI. One of the photographers had a contact which let us go into the RSL (Retired Services League) building to tour the place.

After our visit to the RSL, we headed off the main road and buildings into some small back alleys…

Okay, this is a little weird? abstract art in a back alley?

Simple building, Simple geometry

Lonely alley

One of the last things we past during the walk was a walk that was full of graffiti. I took a couple of shots because I liked the colour but it was only when I came to the end of the wall was there a small car park and it took a couple of shots to get it how I wanted it to look.

After a little cropping the frame looks evenly split into thirds and it looks like the graffiti Indian is coming out of the car! haha!

…and thats about it for the day! We had a blast! No group pic…its with Greg in his medium format 120 fuji camera so I guess we’ll have to wait. You can view some of the other photogs pics at the Toowoomba Flickr Group. Alternatively, check out http://worldwidephotowalk.com/toowoomba-ql-au/ to see some of the entries from our walk.

My submissions for consideration were the first and 7th pic, “First Light” and “A Winters Morning“.

It was a fun day, there were many performances such as dances from very exotic parts of the world…

…to a solo by a Chinese Michael Jackson…

…all the way to a marching drummer from the USA!

Besides that, there an authentic chinese opera singer (our very own Robert) as well as some other group song presentations.

Performances aside, a big part of the night was the awesome demonstrations that were done on stage! There was a tea ceremony demo…

Our Chinese brother, Kevin, together with his wife, went up on stage to show the Aussies how chinese dumplings are made…

Their English isn’t that good so auntie sister Elena went up to translate…

Of course I can’t forget our very own pastor and host of the evening, Ps. Yew Meng:

He patiently announced the various country reps present…can you guess where they’re from? Nationalities under the pics…

Will from China.

Korea.

India.

Finland.

Phillipines.

Thailand.

Willy from Indonesia.

Denmark.

…and finally,last but not certainly not least…

Australia!

…and the team that made it all possible…none other than…

ANS! (All Nations Service)!

From left: Ps. Yew Meng, Jun, Will, Wilson, Yvonne, Min, Neo, Ben, Steph, Seng Yee, Jason, Andrix, Roger, and me(behind the lens).

]]> http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/2009/06/16/tcc-cultural-night-2009-31st-may-2009/feed/ 0 http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/2009/06/14/hillsong-brisbane-inaugural-service-24th-may-2009/ http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/2009/06/14/hillsong-brisbane-inaugural-service-24th-may-2009/#comments Sat, 13 Jun 2009 17:32:20 +0000 Jiaren http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/?p=489

Yes, I was there! It was great! They had a video conference with their Sydney branch and everything! Hillsong Brisbane (hillsongbrisbane.com) was originally Garden City Christian Church which has been officially taken over by the Hillsong Mega-church.

If you plan on visiting, its located at:

16 Rover Street,

Mt Gravatt, QLD,

Australia.

Aaron, Steph, Reshaun and I went for the 2nd 10.30am service. We went early so we could get good seats! Unfortunately, this mean’t my “overview wide shot” didn’t show the real size of the auditorium.

This was from about the 4th or 5th row. Also, photography and videography was STRICTLY PROHIBITED in the auditorium so all my shots were spy shots!

First EVER praise and worship from Hillsong Brisbane (Actually second, it was the 2nd service)

Brian Houston, Hillsong Church Senior Pastor.

Reuben Morgan, lead singer/guitarist.

Joel A’Bell,  Executive Pastor.

This was one of the backup singers during praise and worship. What’s interesting is his resemblance with a friend of mine, Will. This is Will:

Funny right? …maybe not to you…

Right now I think I’m the only photographer who hasn’t already submitted their photos…and I’ve only just finished going through day 2!

…so without further ado, lets get on with it shall we:

1) New Empire

2) Austoville

3) Lucy Hannah

4) Into the Ocean

5) Naturally 7 (although only 6 of them were present)

6) Paul Coleman Trio

7) NewWorldSon

enjoy!

1) New Empire

2) Austoville

3) Lucy Hannah

4) Into the Ocean

5) Naturally 7 (although only 6 of them were present)

6) Paul Coleman Trio

7) NewWorldSon

Got church in 6hrs! See ya!

Friday – April 10, 2009.

There were many bands playing today. Many many bands. Many many many bands. I think you get the point. Anyway, I couldn’t do all of them but I did manage to catch the BMX & MOTO X event as well as some of the bands.

Here is a list of bands and events that I shot that day (in chronological order):

1)BMX & MOTO X

2) Opposite Lock

3) Compliments of Gus

4) Rubies and Rumours

5) Austoville

6) Simeon

7) Spacifix

NewWorldSon

9) Rebecca St. James

10) Audio Adrenaline

I didn’t upload any pictures of the first 2 bands, Opposite Lock and Compliments of Gus because they looked mediocre.

Anyway, here are some of the shots before I go to sleep.

Enjoy!

BMX & MOTO X @ Easterfest 09

Rubies and Rumours @ Easterfest 09

Az Hamilton

This is Az Hamilton, I can’t remember what hes famous for but all I know is that later on (Sunday April 12) if there are 500 donations to a certain charity he will be cutting off his dreadlocks – on stage! It’s a huge event that will go down tonight!

Austoville

Simeon @ Easterfest 09

Spacifix @ Easterfest 09

NewWorldSon @ Easterfest 09

I love New WorldSon, Aaron doesn’t. Their stage performance is even better than their recordings!

I met this guy on stage when I was taking pictures for the band before them. He shook my hand when I turned and said “hey, you’re from NewWorldSon, right?” …really nice guy, on Saturdays performance he waved at me from stage! AWESOME!

Rebecca St. James @ Easterfest 09

Audio Adrenaline @ Easterfest 09

There is something special about this band and the Paul Coleman Trio band which I took on Saturday and will be uploading a little later. This grammy award winning band split up in 2007. In Easterfest 2008, it was announced that they would be reuniting for one last gig at this years Easterfest.

Sure enough, a year later here they are!

This was not the last band of the night but Steph wanted to go home so I didn’t stay til the end…

Okay, for the next few days I will be updating rather frequently for the Easterfest 2009 event. The first thing I’ll start with is the Easterfest Superstore. Its sponsored by Koorong, and Australian retail chain dealing in Christian books, bibles, CDs, DVDs, etc.

I was given the honour of shooting the Superstore on Wednesday prior to the opening of Easterfest. The pictures will be displayed as a promo at the Easterfest Mainstage Venue. Here are some of the contents of the Superstore where you can get your Christian daily fix.

Overview of the Superstore

CDs for your audio needs

Newsboys Go

Fiction section

Books and Resources

Music

The Understatement

plenty of cool shirts

more clothes and shirts

Gift ideas

Leeland "Opposite Way"

Chris Tomlin "Live from Austin"

Everything will be just fine...

Veggie Tales

She Teen Magazine

Ps Joseph Prince "Destined to Reign

Joyce Meyer "The Confident Woman"

]]> http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/2009/04/10/easterfest-2009-superstore/feed/ 2 http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/2009/04/05/dato-david-goh-thanksgiving-banquet/ http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/2009/04/05/dato-david-goh-thanksgiving-banquet/#comments Sat, 04 Apr 2009 17:15:15 +0000 Jiaren http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/?p=409

Dato’ David Goh

The first day I arrived in Miri after travelling for over 24hrs was to shoot a formal Thanksgiving Banquet event for Mr. David Goh who was newly named Dato’ David Goh. For those of you how don’t know, the term “Dato’” is sort of like the British equivalent of “Sir”…correct me if I’m wrong.

So I was shooting with Ian and the Medianlabs team – Ian Salang,  Nick Lim (who’s work I’m a huge fan!), and Djohan Rozario. Its funny because they’re all using the same Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 lens (the same one that I sold coz it sucks) but Ian’s on a FF Nikon, Nick’s on a Canon, and Djohan’s using a Sony. Whats with that right?! So anyway, they’ve all posted this like ages ago…wanna see their posts?

Here they are:

Ian Salang:http://iansalang.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/from-mr-to-dato-david-goh/

[no pic]

Nick Lim: http://nicklimjg.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/dato-david-goh/

Djohan Rozario: http://lynnroz.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/thanksgiving-dinner-by-dato-david-goh/

The event took place at…erm…crap I can’t remember…some golf course place in Miri…anyhoo…heres a picture of the beautiful ballroom:

When the event started, I pulled out the 50mm f/1.8D coz I didn’t have an f/2.8 zoom and my travel kit consists of rather slow lenses (not anymore though : ) ). I’m not particularly fond of flashes at formal events and I’d rather crank up the ISO…I was shooting at ISO800-1600 most of the time. Really pushing the D80 I’ve used it plenty and the results are fine.

Ok, this is a lil tip which just so happens to have a perfect example that follows it:

When taking portraits, look around the frame, check the composition and avoid blown out highlights because the human eye is attracted to bright colours and lighter colours…unless of course its a hi-key image or something.

So basically I took this first shot of some two young ladies who were helping out with the event. As you can see I just said “Hey, can I get your picture?”

“Okay, smile!”

Luckily after a quick review on screen a quick repositioning (180 degrees from the before picture) I was ready to reshoot. Simple posing tips like bending joints and creating angles are all that are necessary to make a normal happy snap like the before picture appear to have more quality to it.

Both straight out from camera + watermark + border. No touch ups.

Notice how you can see the shadow of their heads on the wall behind? thats BAD.

My one complaint is the girl in red let her hand hang like its dead…try to avoid the flat back of the hands.

Heres a fun fact:

All humans have red in their skin whether it be white, Asian, black or anything in between. Its the pigmentation of the skin. play with red tones and it will no doubt adjust the hue of a persons skin tone.

by the way, the fashion show exhibits apparel from Giordano, one of the companies managed by the group of companies that threw the banquet.

Notice I didn’t have any pics of the guest of honor besides the first one? …too blur to notice. Jetlagged and I only found out it was him about half way through.

Also I’ll admit the shots are pretty mediocre. I have learn’t one lesson from this:

Can you ued a 50mm prime to shoot an entire event?

“YES”

Should you?

“NO”.

All in all I had fun with the Medianlabs team. Good experience and learnt some new things. In Malaysia? Want an event photographed? Contact Medianlabs!