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!

About a month ago, we headed off to Sydney for the Hillsong Conference. Altogether there were about 20 of us which was pretty cool…unfortunately, we didn’t all travel together (nor did we all stay together). I headed a group of 11, nine of which were gonna fly to and from Brisbane together, while one of them took the flight before and the other came from Singapore! Here’s our group of 9 after we disembarked from the plane:

Okay, that creepy non-Asian white guy in the back is a advert poster…Will isn’t in the shot coz we were on the horizontal escalator where as he wasn’t…of course I was behind the camera…
After countless hours (yes, literally HOURS) or arguing which would be the best transport to get to our accommodation we finally decided on a big shuttle bus which brought us on a 40 minute drive to Parramatta, which is located to the West of Sydney. We happily unpacked our bags and was out the door! We took the train down to the city where we were just in time for dinner before heading toward the Harbour to meet up with Christoph.

Meet Christoph:

Christoph was our housemate back in Toowoomba for a year. He’s currently somewhere between Thailand and Singapore on his holiday before heading back to Germany where he comes from. He moved out by this time and happened to be in Sydney that night so we planned to meet up…being Asians, we had to take a lot of group pics…

How many people can you spot? One of us had relatives in Sydney so he didn’t join us…thats why there’s only 10 ppl. *EDIT* Actually theres less coz I cropped Edna out of the frame…Sorry Edna! I didn’t have my tripod and so I had to improvise…this next shot is heavily cropped so the lamp post I used wouldn’t get in the picture of the Eye of Sydney.

I think its funny how every major city now has an “Eye”…

We walked along the harbour past the Sydney Aquarium and other attractions which were almost closing as it was rather late by this time…We checked the schedule for the ferry and saw that we would be able to make the last one so while we waited for the ferry we walked back to the Sydney Aquarium where they had a nice backlit billboard of Spongebob Squarepants. I noticed it on the way to the ferry and went back for one purpose and one purpose only: to get this shot:

That’s my friend Patrick (which also happens to be from Miri). This picture is titled, “Patrick & Patrick”.

Anyway, we then headed to a place called the Rocks to have some sort of famous pancake. Indeed it was a pancake house franchise which had been sort of springing up all over the place. We went in for dessert. Now, let me make it clear that I do NOT take pictures of the food I eat…its sooooooooooooooooooooo cliche doncha think? …but they insisted so I took a happy snap of my chocolate strawberry pancake…YUM!

Hmm…I’m really sorry but my timeline of the events that occured after this pitstop seems to have screwed itself up in my brain so I can’t remember what we did when we did…All I remember is that along the… (this crossed out paragraph corresponds to the “Patrick & Patrick” picture and the paragraph above it…)

Although I took a bunch of pics after that I’m not going to share anymore simply because I still have a lot to cover…by the way, the current time now is exactly 5.13am. I don’t plan to sleep and I want to finish by dawn-ish so we can go to the Sunday Market before church Who’s “we” you ask? That’s me and Steph…I’m not sleeping tonight because I slept this arvo…what’s “arvo” you ask? its Aussie for “afternoon”. What’s “Aussie”? It’s short for “Australia”. What’s “Australia” you ask? A big island surrounded with water which has a severe water problem. Go figure.

Fast forward through the night and early the next morning…

Yours truly together with his team of intrepid explorers, Patrick and Stephanie, went to pit their strength against the wrath of the mighty Blue Mountains.

The Blue Mountains is one of Australia’s biggest tourist destination. It is a collection of mountains that expand across the landscape that when looked at appear to be blue in colour. Its blue haze is of a different hue and deeper than anywhere else in the world. This is caused primarily by Eucalyptus trees emitting oil vapour into the atmosphere which along with fine dust particles and droplets of water vapour scatter the blue light (blue light is short wave light) more than any other colour in the spectrum. (That last sentence was taken from the guide book. If you’re interested, look for it on wikipedia.)

Also the home to the Three Sisters, a natural rock formation which is sort of difficult to explain so I’ll show you a picture:

You can see the Blue Mountains in the background. I’ve already warmed up the tones to make the Three Sisters more prominent in the frame of this picture and even so the mountains appear so blue so you can imagine how blue it actually was!

We took the ExplorerBus to Scenic World, home to the steepest railway which has a maximum gradient of 52 degrees!  It feels like its almost 90 degrees!

See how the trees are straight? If I left my bag on the empty seat im front it would’ve ended up right at the front! When we got to the bottom Partrick helped me take a picture of me and Steph and the three sisters…thx Pat!

We continued by foot through the forest to the bottom where we would take one cablecar up to the main platform and another back to the place the bus dropped us. We managed to sneek in a strobist shot while walking through the forest. After a few attempts we got it right…credit to Steph for taking the picture and Patrick for holding the flash:

Heres Steph in the cable car enjoying herself on one of the cablecar rides:

Oh, by the way, this is our ExplorerBus…the hop-on hop-off tour bus we used to get between places…the bus driver was kind enough to let us take a picture before he zoomed off to the next stop:

The driver was very friendly. There are actually two busses but this one seemed to always be the next one up! We walked through the cold forest to Leura Cascades. Its a beautiful stream of water falling all the way to the bottom. Be warned that I LOVE LOVE LOOOOOOOVVVEEE waterfalls. If I see a waterfall I MUST take a picture of it…that means I have to take out my ND filters and spend a good 15 minutes taking the fall from almost every conceivable angle. These are my three favourite shots:

How convenient the series is actually in order of how I shot them and its going from top down so you can actually sort of visualize the waterfall as it slowly cascades down to the bottom where you can see the pool in the last pic…

After this we continued our jungle trek for another hour or so until we finally reached the end and waited for the bus to pick us up. These were the last few shots I took during the day because I was too tired by the time we were out of the forest.

A view from one of the many many lookout points.

Patrick at the bus pick up point to head back to the main town.

The rest of the group actually asked us to go back to the Sydney CBD after our trip to the Blue Mountains but we were just too tired to bother…otherwise we could have met up with Rachel who lives there… By the time we got back to the accommodation (which is 2hr + away from the Blue Mountains) it was about 9pm and I couldn’t wait to sleep!

Fast forward through the night and early the next morning…

Today we had big plans. Places to go, things to see, and stuff to do…unfortunately, we were late.

…sooooooooooooooooo we ended up going to see the Sydney Opera House and then went to some small town for lunch before we did some other things which I can’t remember…crap this is the second time in this post! Well, that doesn’t matter because I only want to share my pics of the Opera House and ask you a question.

This is a rather famous bridge. The Sydney Harbour Bridge. Now for the question. Which of the following two photos do you think is better? They are both the same picture just differently cropped.

Personally, I like the second one. That’s all I got. The day after this was the conference so I’ll get working on it right away! Til then, thanks for reading!

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…

First up here are some of the more “unique” Easterfest-goers…

The Power Rangers made an appearance with Spiderman…haha…

Here are some campers…recognize anyone?

Next we have the shots from the church service…there were two services but I’m just gonna combine them coz I can’t remember which is which (too lazy to check exif info eiher)

Evan Shelton, our church’s music director…wonderful singer as well!

Ps. Peter Pelicaan, he once prophecized over me…very gifted man of God. Also, he’s the chaplain of Christian Outreach College (COC), Toowoomba.

This is Isaac Moody, CEO of Easterfest. He’s been running it since it started. Nice guy! That’s his daughter during the service…

Next up were the games at the Red Frogs Colleseum. They had stuff from “So you think you can dance” and some games…the games were cool!

This is one I particularly liked. Basically, everyone holds hands in a huge circle…then, a chair is thrown in the middle. The objective is to get everyone else to touch the chair without touching it yourself. If you break the chain then the two people who let go their hands are out. If you touch the chair you’re out. As there’s less and less people more chairs are thrown in the middle. Last one wins!

one of the two hosts…

The Red Frogs Colleseum

There was also some more BMX stunts but I prefer the shots from the first day a lot more…anyway, here are 2 shots of the day that I like:

Ok next is simply a MUST-MENTION. I mean when I saw this guy I was amazed! If you look closely at his fingers you;d notice they’re sort of twisted and tangled…sort of like a disability…but his passion for Christ is unbelievable! respect!

Lead singer of Selaphonic

Next is the Paul Coleman Trio secret show that was at the Epicentre

…and last but not least, before the night was out, I shot Fatis Valor…they were an hour late and I was waiting for them to come on so I missed out on a lot of good shows…oh well…

…and that is the end of the Easterfestseries…at least for this year.

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…

On Chinese New Year Eve my family and I went on a road trip to Marken, North Holland. Its a little plot of land surrounded by water and is almost an island if it wasnt for the piece of land that stretches all the way out to the mainland which is how motor vehicles access the place.

As asians we always have to make numerous pit stops before we reach our destination. These are some of the shots that were taken along the way…

Mummy obviously enjoying herself…

This is really one of the best places to put in a windmill…its SUPER windy!

On the left is the road, right is the bicycle path.

When we finally arrived we were greeted with beautiful seascapes, vintage houses and some very cozy restaurant/cafes…

Of course no dutch tourist spot is complete without a bar serving its legendary beer!

Mum and Dad

As you can imagine it didn’t take us very long to get lost…

This is cool! Jiaxen noticed this dude riding on a bike and so I quickly burst off a few shots in his direction…This is the only one I could salvage. What was so interesting you might ask? …he’s wearing CLOGS! -you know, those wooden shoes! They actually still wear them! (thats why the watermark had to be moved away from blocking it).

I noticed these clothes hanging outside one of the houses. I think this adequately represents their lifestyle and culture. Also, it was a B&W scene just asking to be taken…

I think I’m getting better at seeing things in black and white…Before I would never “see” the world in B&W but I’m slowly noticing some things which is wonderful! I have a great appreciation for black and white photographers because its one of the two main areas of photography that I feel I could really push the envelope with if I just practice a little more – the other one is portraiture.

Mummy and the lil guy! …in front of a green house!

As you can clearly see we had to ZIP UP coz its was freezing! …so we decided to go to a nearby cafe to warm up and eat some POFFERTJES!!! Poffertjes (pronounced [pɔfəɹcəs]) is a dutch pancake thats delicious! Unfortunately I’m not one of those who like to take pictures of my food…perhaps I should start? I did however take a portrait of my mum…

Mummy enjoying her coffee…

My favourite shot of the day is below…just before we went into the cafe we headed out to the coastline where the wind is strongest! I used a Hitech 0.6 soft edge graduated neutral density filter to get this shot…Should’ve used the Tian Ya 0.9 one but was too lazy once I zipped up my bag.

Here it is:

I went with the square framing not because I liked it but because of the cars on the upper left hand side which distracted from the composition. Thats the annoying thing about ultra wide angle lenses!

After that we headed home because we had a Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner that we had to attend…I took just two group shots of the two tables which are below. (Sorry I can’t remember all the names so I just didn’t bother)

women and childrens table.

Men’s table. I was on this table. I’m a man. – true story

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