I dropped off Aaron at home (which is just outside the race track) and heard such a racket that we just had to be a busybody. So, off we were straight from church with Steph still in her high heels walking down a gravel road to see what all the commotion was about.

We were greeted by this sign:

I guess having a race is an exception then?

You can see Steph struggling in her high heels (notice the appropriate footwear in the picture above?)

I guess you can’t really tell after all…by the way, Coca Cola and 100 Plus is not endorsing us, lol. Moving on, the road to the track is quite a steep drop which gives quite a nice vantage point for photogs. Me being my lazy self when not being paid couldn’t be bothered to change lenses so you can only see the starting line and a bit of the track.

One of the first shots I got was my personal favourite. Its the one thats in the slideshow at the top of the page (if you have the patience to wait long enough because its the last picture before it loops again.

The one thing I didn’t like was the guy that happened to be standing there right behind the bike as I took the picture. “Don’t worry, you’re not blind…you can’t see him there coz I did what any good photographer would do – photoshop”. Sometimes I amaze even myself. If you know me and have followed my work you’ll know I like to get the shot right in camera. Having said that, if an object in the frame doesn’t add to the composition, its taking away from it. Heres the original before my half hour of photoshop magic:

Yes, I know – applaud my genius.

After taking some shots where the crowd was I went scouting for a better angle. I found a place right at the edge of the fence where I was up close and personal with the riders. There was even a conveniently places hole in the fence for me to stick my lens through. It was a tight corner as the came zooming up a slight incline before taking this sharp left turn where the proceeded downhill.

Check out all the dirt being kicked up!

I’ll bet theres a motivational quote somewhere in there. This next one are of two riders fighting for the championship:

I was happy with the shots from that sharp right and decided I needed to practice some panning action. I didn’t do so well. As a matter of fact, this is the only one I dare show you. The rest are garbage.

When one race finishes, another begins. Thats great as you get to see the jump in a group.

BIG AIR!

By this time the annoying pestering of both a best friend and a girlfriend to ditch this joint had pushed me to my limit so I gave in and went home…but not before taking one last jump!

Side note: Aaron (the dude in the picture), just arrived back in Australia after visiting the UK for holidays. While he was there, he and his family visited the TATE musuem where you can record a short video clip and send it to a friend. Little did he know he was going to share it with the world!

ITS FREEZING! ITS FREEZING! hahaha…enjoy!

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!

However, first things first – family priority requires that I respond to my sister’s blog post in which she posted this picture:

According to some absurd cult ritual in the Scottard part of uncivilized UK, November is the month of Movember where you wear a moustache for charity…(I think my dad should be their spokesperson)…anyway, the point is that they wanna see what we ALL look like with moustaches…so…after countless seconds…

VOILA!

@Linzhi, sorry your moustache looks retarded – who ask u not to pose properly…

having said that…lets move on to the next thing on the agenda – Flying.

Before I begin I hope you (whoever reads this) understands that this blog is more of a Plog (word created by yours truly – remember you saw it here first!). This means its a picture-log. What THAT means is that I don’t really care what I write and don’t expect you to read it…its just a way to fill in gaps in between pictures.

Pictures themselves come in two flavours:-

• watermarked
• unsigned

Watermarked ones are those that are worthy of flickr and I actually bothered to put them into photoshop even if I don’t do anything except for adding the watermark, saving a backup of the original and uploading reduced file size version.

Unsigned ones are crap shots/ happy snaps that people in them should enjoy but aren’t something that I’d put up on flickr (eg. group photos).

…glad we got that sorted out.

so where were we…ah! who attended:

• Jiaren
• Aaron
• Yew Meng
• Elena
• Wilson
• Sabrina

From closest to furthest: front row: Wilson, Yew Meng. back row: Sabrina, Elena

can see the guys heads getting distorted from the wide angle…heres a better shot:

heres one with less distortion...

Sabrina surprised this on Wilson as a belated birthday present…apparently his dream is to become a pilot…hes achieving that somehow by studying multimedia at USQ…ironic huh?

If you look closely you can see Aaron being a moron in the background

Aaron and I waited this one out…they went first and we went up for the next flight…

In the meantime we just chit chatted and took photos of random things, and various parts of the plane such as this:

Aaron told me but I cant remember what this is for...all I remember is that its something like a dipstick thingie and theres some liquid inside...

shutter speed: 1/1250 (plane wasn't on full throttle though)

of course we also took them about to take off...

...before returing to taking pictures of various components...behold - the Engine!

Lycoming - best aviation engine manufacturer?

no idea what this is...

instrument for calculating altitude, speed, etc...so don't forgetto take it off before flight!

nostrils?

Aaron.

This is a Piper. A piper is different from a Cessena in that its wing is under the body instead of on top.

When they landed it was our turn and because we were paying by the hour we couldn’t afford to waste time so I didn’t take any snaps during this transition…

up up and away!

Ps. Yew Meng; ex-Singapore air force - from cockpit to pulpit.

ooh...many buttons...must...resist...temptation...

view from the heavens!

You can see the runway in the above picture…wind was really strong that day and we barely used a quarter for both take off and landing!

click on the image to see where I live!

This was the second time I’ve been up here but the first time I had my dSLR with me…so a quick tip for wannabe aerial photogs with no experience:

1. First time enjoy the view. Forget the camera because you’ll get air sick and feel like vomitting. Looking through a viewfinder doesn’t make it better.
2. Second time up stick to the telephoto lens. In this case it was a clear day so aperture wasn’t a problem. I used a 70-300mm VR lens which is very flexible.
3. forget the lens hood. It’ll just make it harder to shoot.
4. Hold the lens at its furthest point with a finger extended against the glass to suppress vibration.
5. A monopod may come in handy but I didn’t have one.
6. At that distance everything is infinity. Use manual focus with shutter priority or manual. Most shots taken at 1/4000 so ISO had to be bumped up.
7. Take a picture. Check histogram levels. Adjust accordingly. then take another hundred or so pictures before checking again. DONT waste your time reviewing pictures on the plane. Plenty of time on the ground for that later on.
8. most importantly, HAVE FUN!

First try at doing a tilt-shift miniature fake

Being in an elavated position I figured it was an ideal time to try out some shots for making tilt-shift miniature fakes. Basically what this does is it makes large images appear smaller so that the images produced appear to be a model instead of a real life scene. What do you think? Any comments?

Here’s another one of my university:

University of Southern Queensland as a miniature model.

The university was probably too big to look good as a miniature but it looked better like this than a regular aerial photography shot so I left it as it is.

After we landed Uncle Yew Meng wanted some pictures and since the sky was so beautiful I took advantage of the wide angle lens:

...and my favourite one to finish it off...also printed one of these on A3 for them.

Done. Next I’ll be blogging about a recent mother son photoshoot I did…I’ll admit its not my best work but I was crap tired that day and it had been a while since my last portraiture session. Either way, they loved the pics and I got to brush up on my photoshoot techniques. Ultimately, it was huge fun both for them and myself – and thats whats important!

sneak preview:

Auntie Ivy and Gabriel.

till then…chao!