Relatives from Singapore!!

Yup they're here. :D And we're gonna be going to Cameron Highlands. If the weather holds up there, I'm sure I'm gonna have a field day photographing the scenery. Weee!!

And I guess this goes without saying. Another Update will take a while. Hohoho! Pics from recent PKMY happenings. :D Oh and I guess the guys got the KFC ad parts. Hopefully they don't have to be body doubles. Cuz that'd suck. It's about time we get credit for our stuff. And it's about time that Malaysia see what we can do.

It's been a fun week. Hopefully we'll be having more of this in the future. As for me, I've got an infection on my thumbnail. Pretty nasty looking but it doesn't hurt tho. But still, it looks bleugh! I'll spare you guys the grossness cuz I'm a very considerate guy. haha!! But seriously. I'm not kidding when I say it looks nasty. Cuz it really is. :O I guess it wouldnt've been this bad if I went to see the doctor sooner. It's already been a couple of months. Oh well. At least it doesn't hurt right? My thumb nail is gonna fall off tho I think.

This should've been a short post, but I'm waiting for the 3 photos to be uploaded on my flickr. There are a few more interesting shots but my relatives will be using my room till they head back. So, I guess I'll save em for later. ohhh!! 99% complete. Now to link them here.

Gaming update. I've been playing games regularly for the past month now. Just because that the games that have come out are pretty cool. And it looks like there's almost always a new game out every week. Wicked! I just finished Need for Speed Undercover. It's pretty easy and pretty simple. Apart from the constant drop in framerate it's a pretty fun and simple game to play. Too simple for me tho.

Abidu Cam Whore-ing outside the cinema. Before watching the gay-est movie on earth. TWILIGHT wtf!!?? I blame ABIDU <-- Yes this is the correct spelling. XD

These are the dudes Cam Whore-ing after the tricking performance at my brother's college event. (From left Muril, Apam and Acappan)

Cam whore-ing again. (From left Apam(again??), Irsyanuddin and Quddis)

So till I get back. Have a good one. :D

1 more

Visiting Granny :)

Woke up at 10 yesterday morning and went straight to my computer for some web surfing marathon. I was planning on editing some photos, post em up online and continue playing Dead Space. Unfortunately my mum had other plans. The minute she heard me land my ass on my super creaky computer chair she came into my room and told me that we're going out to shop for Ammar's shoes. Wooot!! I just got up and it's only 10am!! Are you insane??

But I didn't really have a choice so I went to take a shower and got ready. Off to midvalley in the early morning for shoe shopping. Man was it boring. I drove all the way there, found a parking spot after about 20 minutes of searching. Finally. What the hell? What are all these people doing here so early in the morning. It's not even noon!

Went into Studio R and started looking around. The choices are pretty sucky there. I wonder when these people are gonna upgrade their inventory. In the end I told her to get Ammar the same shoes as mine just because my mum has some real trouble making up her mind and I was starting to get really annoyed. I'm not much of a morning person and I'm not happy when I'm hungry.

Got them shoes, paid for it and got a gym bag. what? How come I didn't get a gym bag when I got my shoes? So after wasting time at Studio R. We went for makan and this was when my mum decided out of the blue without prior notice to go and visit my grandma. There goes my day of gaming. Before we left for granny's, I got another cetak rompak game, Left 4 Dead. Haven't played it yet, I'm gonna wait til my brothers get back. Looks like a co-op game. :D

And here are some photos from my nenek's place. I call her Mak cuz she used to look after me when I was little cuz both of my parents were working full time. She has lots of these potted plants in her garden and of course her really cute and very fat cats!! :)

This is "Mak" :D She's camera shy

This is one of her potted plants. :D

This is one of her really2 fat cat guardians!! :D:D

I woke up again at 10 today. Hoping to get to finish Dead Space. But noooooo. Mum suddenly decided to vaccum the whole house!!! and that's why I'm back upstairs writing this blog. ARGGHHHHH!!! WHY CAN'T YOU LET ME PLAY MY GAME IN PEACE!!!

HDR Photomatix Tutorial

sAlright so here it is. I dug this up from my hard drive. This is actually one of the shots that didn't make the cut due to camera shake. So it's gonna be a little soft but it should do for now. Here's a little tutorial on how to use photomatix to merge 3 exposures into 1 HDR image.

First of all, you're gonna need to have 3 shots of the same thing but on 3 different exposure times 2 stop apart. What is 1 stop you ask? Turn ur DSLR mode dial to manual and then look into the viewfinder, and you will see a bar. The bar represents the exposure of the scene. To the left is overexposure and to the right is underexposure, the middle is the optimum exposure for the current scene you metered off from. For those that have a camera which supports bracketing. Use that.

One stop is the equivalent of exactly three flicks of the exposure dial. Make sure you have a tripod for this and use a remote or timer if you don't have one. So once you have the three shots it'll look something like this. Oh yeah! I almost forgot. Shoot in RAW!!!!

Underexposed -2

Optimum Exposure 0

Overexposed +2

Now fire up photomatix. Click on Generate HDR Image button and a small window will pop up. Browse for the 3 shots you just took and load all three of them. And now just follow these screen captures for the rest of the steps.

You can play with the sliders and see which one suits you best.

So here's what I got from photomatix. this is a pretty bland shot actually cuz I prefer adding the extra punch in photoshop. You can sometimes get pretty decent HDR photos straight from photomatix. As for me here's what I did to spice it up a bit. This one's pretty bad. I would suggest taking shots with an aperture of f/8 and above for sharpness. I took these on f/3.5 so I lost a lot of detail.

And there you go. The basic steps to get your first go at HDR photos. :D Happy experimenting!!

Obesity, It's even affecting the cat populace!!

It has come to my attention of how this particularly fast spreading "disease" has reached the feline species of the civilized and pampered kind. Yeps, I'm talking about our household pet cats. With the current advances in science and technology, it's no surprise that people are getting fatter and lazier due to the ease of comfort of things such as cars, motorcycles, trains, and all the other motorized vehicles. Add that up to the number of fast food outlets that's spawning like a virus all over the country, it's a recipe for obesity disaster!!! I guess a future as portrayed in the Wall-E movie is not that far fetched after all. Heck it might even come true. Now that's a scary thought.

I went to visit my granny earlier today. She has 3 stray cats, well not really strays, they have their owners but they seem to prefer chillin' at my nenek's house. So the owners would bring them food and the cats take care of my nenek who live's alone. So baik lah these cats. Oh did and did I mention that all three of them are OBESE?? Like seriously obese. I've never seen cats as fat as these. But they seem to be healthy tho. Haha!! Here's on of 'em. You can't really see the obeseness in this but still I think it's pretty cool. :P

HDR - High Dynamic Range

So I just did this like a few minutes ago. Again it's a shot of the inside of my house. And ran thru photomatix. All of each are from 5 exposures.

Some random shots.

I've been going out a lot these past few days and most of the time I have my camera with me. So these are a few that made it from this week. :)

KLCC

On the roadside while waiting for my dad's train tickets

Yummy Clouds

Another stray cat in the garden

Reebok - Your Move!

I got me a new pair of shoes but I went a little of budget. So Ammar's pair of shoes will have to wait til he gets back. After going into every sports outlet in KLCC I finally decided on these. Not really the ones I wanted but I don't have 500 bucks to burn on a new pair of shoes. So I was happy going with a pair that was half the price. It looks pretty good too.

It's a pair of training shoes. I highly recommend anyone who parkour to get a pair of training shoes instead of running shoes. Cuz it's a good all rounder. Light and comfortable and they don't have that stupid gap in between the soles like most running shoes do.


It's a Reebok Second Session with DMX and IMEVA midsole cushioning. Priced at RM269.00 at RSH. Very awesome! I copy pasted the DMX and IMEVA stuff. I don't really know that these kinds of things have a name. Oh!! and apparently these are a pair of entry-level sports shoes!!! ENTRY LEVEL!!! like my D40!!! hahahaha!!! Even shoes have this kind of thing going on. Lucky I'm not a shoe nut. Otherwise it'd be another money consuming hobby I'd have to keep up with. :P

DSLRs 101 - Shutter Speed

For today's topic I will explain what shutter speed is. This one goes out to Hariz :D Okay so what a shutter speed does is control how fast the shutter opens and closes to reveal light to the camera sensor. The faster the shutter speed, the less light reaches the sensor which also means less time for the camera's sensor to collect all the light data.

Usage :
There's not really a definite rule to follow, because photography is a very subjective thing and it's up to you how you want to present your vision. But the basics are, faster shutter speeds are used to freeze action. You will get sharper pictures too. For this to be in effect you should generally use nothing less than 1/500s for best effect. But the downside is that you will only be able to do this in very brightly lit environments. You could counter this by using flash or multiple flashes. But that's another topic entirely.

So here's an example of an action-freezing shot. Shot on ISO 200 at 1/800s under the midday sun at f/5. Apertures also play an important role in your photos. But I will explain this at another time. So as you can see I froze this quite nicely. Everything is clear and no motion blurs.


Next off!! Low shutter speeds. Low shutter speeds are usually used for low light photography or for more artistic approaches. There are a lot of things you can do with long exposures. Light painting, light trails, motion blure, etc. But basically its used for low light shots. Here's an example of one. Shot on ISO 200 and 3 second exposure time at f/4.5. Make sure you have a tripod on for these kinds of shots.


And now I'll show you a creative way to use a low shutter speed. I took this at ISO 800 and at the shutter speed of 1/20s to get more of the background in since it's pretty dark and have some light trails by swaying the camera around as i press the shutter button, but at the same time freeze the action. So all I had to do was use my SB-600, set it on manual, around 1/16 if I remember correctly and set at a zoom of 85mm.


So that's it from me. :P If you're ever in a bind you can always google it. But if you can't find what you're looking for you can ask me. I'd be happy to help. :)

Brief training session due to some.. errm... "inconveniece"

Today I finally finished fallout. But I still have quite a few accomplishments to get done with. I dunno whether I'm gonna start over again and try to get the evil and neutral alignment accomplishments tho. It's really hard to get to the maximum level. The max level in the game is only 20 but it's really, really hard to get there. Gonna take a lot of time if I start all over again. :O

So the review will come shortly. hohoho! And It's gonna be a long one. So after I finished fallout, I immediately smsed a'a to inform her of my super duper menangness!!! XD and decided to try end war cuz it has this tagline of controlling everything with voice commands. Which is a really cool concept, and what's even cooler is that it really works. Everything I say is recognized spot on. Unfortunately that's where the fun stops. Apart from the voice command thingy, everything else about the game screams "I suck" full stop. So yeah, I'm gonna skip that one. So now it's either COD5, Dead Space or GoW2. All are great shooter games. wooh!!

Wow!! I feel so geeky talking about games all the time. hahahahaha!!!! Loser gile. But it's fun to be a loser from time to time. :D Oh! earlier today, went out training at TTC with Abudi. And since I just finished fallout I decided it's time to excercise!! wooh!! But I was sakit perut so I went to the toilet first then got ready and drove out. I had my new sweat pants which are really comfortable. Cost me only 23 bucks.

When I got there I could see Abudi running around to greet me. He looked so hyper hahaha!! I guess all that exam stress does that to a person. But I was pretty ummm.. let's just say not as energetic as he was. The weather was cloudy, and I'm really, really malas when it comes to warm ups. :P Usually I just let the heat of the sun do it's thing while I jalan2 and then when I feel that I've loosened up, I go do my thang.

It's been awhile since I managed to train at TTC. I tried doing the usual things that I do before I got my injury. Side's from the platform - check. Vaults - check. Didn't do drops cuz I feeling like it. Would've hurt if I did any, so scratch that of the list. Climb downs - phail. Body-ups - first time phailed but I managed to pull myself up the 2nd time. But the pressure it put on my injured arm was a bit too much I think. I guess it's not ready yet for that. So I'm gonna have to wait a little more. Wallruns and climbups - check. Still have some pain in my arm when doing this tho. So, note to self. More conditioning.

Next off! Precisions- Phailed. Tic-tac - Still got it. wee!! With the precision I kind of hurt my heel while doing it. My left foot kinda got jammed between the floor and the stair. But it's not that serious. Should be back to normal in a coupla days. I hope.

Brought my camera but only managed to take 3 shots of the same thing and this one stands out the most. Didn't bring my sb-600 for this cuz takde battery. But the pop-up flash did quite an okay job tho. Oh which brings me to the title of today's post. I came, I did my thing and I had to go back by 6.45-ish. Which makes it about 20 minutes of training on my part. Because, for some reason I had to go to the toilet again real bad. hahahaha!! So it was cut short, and I think I should be training more often starting from now. I'm nowhere near the shape I was in back then. Gotta work work work!!!!

And today's photo. Abudin-dang!!! Doing a monkey-vault. He kinda looks like a monkey too!! :P just kidding. haha!!

A flower for you

Holy sheeet! I'm wasting my life away. I'm now a certified couch potato I think. I've been couch potatoe-ing for the past week!! This is great!! hahaha!! I've left most of my activities out in the cold cuz I'm now addicted to this couch potatoe-ing extreme sports. I must say it's a very-very dangerous and extreme sport. Probably the most dangerous of them all!!

Seriously, I face mortal danger everyday. I sit at the same spot staring at the same spot for at least 6 hours a day, 7 days a week. So how is this dangerous for me you say? Well I can tell you one thing. It really takes out your concentration. Especially when I do my tricking or parkour. I need like at least 30 minutes of warming up, 30 minutes of getting mentally ready, and about 30 minutes more to get my concentration at it's optimum level. If not, there could just be another bone shattering incident. yeesh!!!

Couple that with my nasty fast food eating habits. Yummy. I'm eating all this junk food on a daily basis and I almost always skip breakfast. So it's fast food for brunch, and for dinner I would have preservative ridden food from the local restaurant. yay!! Talk about digging your own grave.

I should be out training more often now that my arm is getting better. But I made the mistake of buying 5 new games for the 360. aaahh!! And I haven't even finished one!!! The weather has been rather sucky as well. Heavy rains almost everyday. I was never a morning person, so morning training sessions are a no-no for me. My body just won't respond cuz it's still asleep. haha!!

As for the massive amounts of KBS photos I still have in my hard drive. I still am too lazy to go thru them to pick out the ones that stand out. Cuz I think that there's at least 500 pics in there!! And my brain has been slowed down due to lack of any mental excercises for the past week is in no shape to do any of this time consuming work. :P So it's gonna have to wait. For now, I'll just pick out pics that I don't really have to work much on to fill in the void. I want to have at least a pic per post, even tho it doesn't have anything to do with the topic at hand. haha!!

So this is another flower shot. I like flowers. They're pretty to shoot. And easy to process. A very good stress reliever. Okay, so I'm gonna try and finish my fallout. 50-hours in. Yay!! I have no life. I know. Thank you very much.

Why is it always raining!??

It looks like its gonna rain again today. And after today's incident with one of the cheer girls I was really looking forward to some training. Gotta get this guilt out of my system. Can't believe she cried on the phone. Dang. I guess I shouldnt've led her on. I thought she just wanted to have a good time. But I was wrong. :P It's okay tho. I'll make it up to her.

and now a pic of me and my new ugly hair haha!! kinda hard getting the manual focus right without actually looking through the viewfinder but close enough! :D And Abudi, your pic will be uploaded very sooooon. haha!!



and my loser test from abudi's blog!!

Still Alive

I'm addicted to Mirror's Edge's theme song Still Alive sung by Lisa Miskovsky. It just has that nice flowy sound. I love it. I might use this song for my sampler if I ever make one. I should get them clips from Abudi. haha!! I think I've said this a few times before but I still haven't gotten it from him. :P Procrastination is a very nasty disease. haha!!

I'm taking a break from Fallout. Yeps. I still haven't finished it yet. Wicked! I'm gonna lose a lot more hours before I manage to finish it I foresee. :D Edited some photos. Got more and more and more intense as I finished processing each. In the end I played with a lot of textures again. So to Kuyem, hope you like it. It was on the fly. haha!! I didn't plan anything actually for this edit. But came out okay.

Updates whenever I can escape the grasp of Fallout again. Hehe! which for your information, is quite far between. :P

Oh and as a last note. Mirror's Edge is a game that emphasizes on parkour. So far it looks really great. The Unreal engine, nuff said. The gaming industry is really pushing it lately. FF13 had better be really super good. Cuz it's been around since the PS3 came out and has been delayed eversince. WTF?? hurry up already Square-Enix bitches!! roarr!! :P

Irasyadnudin*corrected hehe* doing a backflip from a measly low platform. XD

This is me doing a triple super duper quadruple backfull to sidehandspring!!!

Sabree the pendatang haram!! haha!!

Kuyem chillin' at my place.

Fallout 3 Madness

This game is sucking my life away!! It's just too good!!! OMG!!! Expect a full review when I finish this game. I know I said that I'm never gonna do another game review but this game is just too good. It's been a long time since I've played anything so engrossing and so polished!! It exceeded my expectations!! arghhh!!! Fallout time again. Don't expect anything productive from me until after I'm done with this game. hehehe!! till later!!

My brother's annual college event

My younger brother Alif is gonna have this annual end of the year event thing going on at his college and he wants us to perform for the night. It's gonna be on the 25th this month. So, I'm gonna bring in the usual suspects. More on this at the end of the week. We must hold a meeting! :D

So it'll be just one of those things where we could ask for some tables and stuff to have some sort of obstacles for us to diversify our moves with. The hall is quite big, it's just a normal lecture hall. I went for last year's event and they had a little stage built down there so for those guys who are expecting to find waist high or above platforms to flip from, I'm sorry to say there aren't any.

I'm gonna be checking the place out on the 19th. Take some pics for you guys to see. Decide what to do and what to add into the scene and we'll just improvise on the night itself woahahahahahaa!! Who needs preparation? Definitely not us. Let the flow of the environment lead us and see what we can come up with.

Here are some more pics.

Woahahha!! So cute!!

This is Abudi. He decided to quit parkour and joined cheerleading instead. His farewell gesture was a super high ro-back XD

The guy on the far right is the coolest of the three. Yeps.

This guy is enjoying it a little too much. haha!!

This is Aksel from Sweden. Also a fellow traceur.

Parkour+Shuffle+Cheer+Aerobics = Lotsa fun XD

Ah. Still tired and hurting all over. It's good to have finally some time to rest. Yesterday's gym session was really funny. Next session I'm gonna give the bar another go. It's a lot of fun and kinda scary too. Gotta strengthen my arms again. Won't be easy but I always loved challenges.

Nothing to do today. So I guess I'll be spending most of my time today on Youtube. Gotta take my shower now. Updates coming up. For now, we have the Parkour dudes indulging themselves in some aerobics session. Look how happy they look. hahahahahaahhahahahah!!! so gay. But still despite the gayness, I was in the whole gayness of the moment as well. But being the guy who owns the camera. I am able to save myself from having my lots of gay photos posted online :P

The Sunday Crew

Here's a shot of the whole crew on Sunday before we called it a day and headed back home. A job well done, and I think we definitely attracted a lot of interest from the crowds. I saw cameraphones everywhere. Spread the word people! :D Hopefully we can get more performance offers from which we can earn some cash with. Then it'd be like killing two birds with one stone. Income and exposure. :)

I'm really confident that our group will expand from this point onwards. We've got a few newcomers who joined in or came to see the Demo. Next jam sessions I hope I get to see these guys again and I really hope that more new faces will join in as well. The more the merrier I always say. It's a lot more fun doing this with friends and so much the better with having lots of friends.

More photos to come in. I'll process them after I get sufficient rest. No point doing things half-heartedly.

The morning commute.

After the usual late night jam session with the JB guys prior to their arrival. We had our 4 hours of sleep and for the first time in the history of PKMY everyone arrived right on time. Which is truly an amazing feat. I never thought it was possible let alone getting to see it happen with my own two eyes. Even Ammar woke up and got ready on time!?? That's already a miracle right there. XD

We gathered at my place at 7 and we moved out at the same time. We were all gathered by the time the first train arrived. I also forgot to mention, that Irsyad managed to get the T-shirt done in just 3 days. Have to thank Siddiq for the shirt design. It was great teamwork.

Saturday morning was a foggy one. It was the first time I ever arrived at the commuter this early in the morning. The atmosphere was really nice. Barely any people around and the cool morning air was refreshing. The train arrived 2 minutes later than the ETA and we were off.

The arrival

The arrival of the JB dudes. After some minum2 and makan2 we went to Putrajaya for some tricking action! We were supposed to choreograph something but as usual, training sessions are too much fun that we often forget everything. lolz!

So here are a few shots of the night that made it through. Most of them are unusable. No editting done guys. haha!! Too noisy. But are cool nonetheless. :) and for some reason i can't upload anymore. damn maxis connection. will update when i can. haha!!