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The Nine Emperor Gods Festival (Chinese: ä¹Â皇爺; Cantonese: Kow Wong Yeh) is a nine-day Taoist celebration beginning on the eve of 9th lunar month of the Chinese calendar, which is observed primarily in Southeast Asian countries like Myanmar, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.
It was a hot afternoon that we visited the Ampang temple on the 14th of October. According to many, it’s suppose to rain for nine days and nine nights but nary a drop of water was seen and it was literally a scorcher of a week. Arriving at four made it easier to get parking and of course avoid the times where there would be hundreds of people everywhere! That made it easier to shoot. We did bump into a couple of photographers, including Cheryl Hoffman who runs the 9 Emperor God’s blog here. It’s always fun to meet online friends in real life!
Anyways, here are my shots from that day. Sorry for the delay as my schedule got quite hectic after that. And, yes, today’s Diwali day so for my Hindu reader’s, Happy Diwali!
For the Photographers, the shots were primarily taken on 2 lenses, a Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 and my favorite, the Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8 IS II.
As photographers, many of us sometimes don’t know how to give back to society. Photography charity is not as common as other types but there’s still a role for photography to play. The most obvious is to highlight or enlighten people about the cause. For me, it’s partnering with SEMOA Berhad who works for the advancement of the Orang Asli in the Peninsular. Besides providing a 4×4 vehicle and driving, the photography can be used to help illustrate the plight of the people and their living conditions. They also can show what ordinary people can do to help. Giving of yourself or your skills is actually very uplifting and encouraging and you not only feel better about yourself but also touch the lives of others. Here’s some photos from last Saturday’s trip along with Sanofi-Aventis.
The interiors were lit with two Canon 580EX IIs triggered by RadioPopper PXs. One flash was justin-clamped to the roof with a Sto-fen diffuser to provide ambient light while another unit was fired through a Lastolite EzyBox hotshoe for directional light.
Children in some ways are easier to shoot that adults. Of course, there’s a different set of challenges and also not everyone’s the same. Like adults, some are more comfortable in front of the camera. Recently, I was at Camerons and while relaxing and also planning out some big changes ahead — including a large photo seminar for university students as well as the upcoming Shoot4Charity event. My niece Julia was there and she’s a gregarious and rather happy to be in front of the camera. She proudly exclaims “I’m shooting pictures!”.
Most of the shots were flash assisted with my RadioPoppers, even some of the daylight ones as I wanted more directional lighting. I like the ones at dusk (about 7:30pm) where I had to drag the shutter down quite a bit. You can see the slow shutter in the shots — I was going down to 1/30 at f/4.5, ISO 1250 in those shots. Some shots had 3 580EX IIs going off to provide enough light but as I didn’t move my light around, some shots had to make do with a single flash (the others were off position).
It was a bright, hot, sweltering day that the official opening ceremony for SEMOA’s Kebun Orang Asli in Tras. We had the privilege to cover the event and it was an amazing day. It started of course with a day that was so bright, there was about five-stops difference in light between outdoors and indoors. Again, I relied on my RadioPoppers to illuminate the scene. We had like five flash units going off to equalize the light difference. Enough speedlights and you can match the power of the sun! Besides Yang Berhormat Bernard Dompok, Minister of Plantation, Industries and Commodities, we also had the local Tras assemblyman, Mr Choong Siew Onn.
Kebun SEMOA is an effort by the SEMOA group (supported by many churches and individuals in Malaysia) providing education, help, and medical care to the local indigenous population (orang asli) in the Tras, Raub and Bentong area.
You can never have enough CF cards. SDHC cards too.
It wasn’t very long ago that RM1,000 (about US$300) bought you a 128Mb Sandisk Compact Flash card. Go a bit more and that same amount got you a 1Gb Sandisk Ultra II that wrote at about 5mb/second. Today, you can get a 32Gb Extreme IV (the Extreme Pro’s are a bit more than that) that has a 60Mb/second speed. That’s the good. The thing also is that when I had a 128Mb CF card, I had a 1.6 megapixel digital camera, shooting JPEG only. I think it also only had ISO 100, 200 and 400. Those images were about 500 Kb in size. Now, I shoot 21 megapixel 14-bit RAW images, ISO 50 to 25,600. Oh, plus HD movies that chew 320Mb per minute. So, the point is basically this – you can never have enough storage cards. For most weddings, I pack about 30+Gb per camera. Right now, 16Gb cards are the sweet spot and if you don’t really need the speed, Sandisks’ Ultra line is super cost effective and 16Gb means your chane of getting the dreaded “CF Full” when the action peaks is slim.
For my shoot in Shanghai, I’m packing over a hundred-twenty plus gigs (CF and SD combined)… and sure, I could use a couple more 16-gig cards!
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