First Day of School 2014

Middle School Graduation

This is a difficult shot, I was giving up but I am glad I didn't.

Skiing

Getting Ready for Dinner

Nikon D70

I am just checking my Nikon D70, see if it's still working.  Oh No, it's still working, rather fabulously.  I mounted my good old trusty Nikkor 24mm f2 manual focusing on it and shot a few.  And here are two of them.  The first one was at f2, wide open and at 1/100sec.  The second one was at f2.8 1/100sec.  All at ASA400 hand held.  The 24mm lens work out to be a 35mm in a 35mm film camera.  I kind of like the perspective, it's wider than the 50mm and yet not so wide that you either find it hard to fill up the frame or you find it just gimmicky to exaggerate.

For the kind of pictures I take, I find it hard to persuade myself to update my DSLR ... even I am such an irrational person when it comes to photo gears.

I am still rocking my Nikon D70 in 2010, I can't believe it.  My Nikon experience is positive.  Their gear never breaks on its own.  OKAY, of all the years I own my Nikon FE, there was this one time the shutter wouldn't close, and I have to set it to M90 to close the shutter.  Only once.  And I changed the tiny little battery once on my FE, I believe that was a mistake, I didn't really need to change it.  Then it was a few weeks ago, I think I forgot to put back the film advance lever that also acts as an on/off switch (isn't it auto power off?) so the tiny battery is drained.  Now my FE is powerless but it will open its shutter at M90 (and Bulb?).  Nikon rocks.

Year 2005

I am a static person, I normally don't do any panning.  This is one of the few exceptions.

November 10, 2009

I think this was taken on November 10, 2009.  Kodak E100G.  Before I drove them off to school.  Every day is a special day.  When it's gone it's gone.

A Room With A View

Alex: This is what my Dad gives me for breakfast. A slice of nutritious white bread. why does he have to be so cheap?

Balto In Central Park

Mr. Alex and Balto

Mr. Harry and his favorite dog, Balto.

Mr. Harry was very excited when he read about the story about Balto. The dog that practically saved Sarah Palin in Alaska. So we finally made a trip to the city and let him see Balto first hand. What a magnificent dog, very quiet and very still.

Untitled

Nine cheesecakes.

Having take-outs from Outback.

Taekwondo

Alley Pond Park Camping

Wall Climbing

Taekwondo

note: with repeat slow motion and zoom in.

(52 second video with audio, if you use Firefox 3 or even 2 under Ubuntu 8.04, it may crash your browser. Notice that it takes two guys to hold the board when Harry strikes, he generates so much force with his pint sized body.)

This is done by Kino. Unfortunately the interface and functionalities leave something to be desired. I was trying to mix a sound track, but alas, it wasn't doing it right. The video was slowing down even I didn't check the speed and the sound became garbled. And when I went back to edit mode, the speed of the whole project went up. So that was weird. I closed the entire project and re-opened and it at least then played normal. So forget about mixing a sound track and do the opening and closing credit, I just rendered the the dv to MPEG. I did the first run IN MPEG1, which gave me a smaller file 8MB but longer rendering. And this MPEG2 took shorter to render but got a much bigger file, 23MB. Enjoy.

Untitled

A History of Violence

Shot in the kitchen. Natural lighting. Nikon D70, Nikkor 50mm f1.4 manual focus, manual exposure.

Untitled

All shot using a Nikkor 80~200 f2.8 lens. Natural lighting.

Cycling In The Playground

Look Mom, no training wheels.
Training technique adopted from a friend of mine, Raul.
Kid's legs should be able to duck walk comfortably with butt firmly planted on the seat.
With butt on seat, upper body leans forward, duck walks to push bike forward, once got some momentum, pedal. Every now and then give a slight push from behind on the seat. For the most part, I just stayed away. It took less than two hours to get him pedal by himself.

Back in 2005 when Alex was learning to Ride.

A Day in Queens Botanical Garden

Nikon D70, Nikkor MF 35~105, Nikkor AF 17~80. The flowers macro shots were shot using the manual focusing lens, with manual exposure, set on a tripod. The people shots were done by the auto focus lens with camera set at continuous dynamic focusing.

Taekwondo

Mom, this is especially for you.

(The video is about 1:27 minute long, the audio is kind of loud I think, maybe because I am using a pair of earphones to edit ....)

Just whipped up this short video using Windows Movie Maker. The original was shot using a Canon G3. I can't suck the video out using Vista as there is no driver for my old G3. Ubuntu is my friend, so it sucked out the AVI video OKAY. But unfortunately kino can't edit the AVI. So I just have to move the AVI back to my VISTA notebook over my wifi by dancing some samba and did some quick and dirty video editing on my notebook. The Windows Media Maker wasn't all that bad for what I tried to do, until I tried to render or what Windows call publish the video. I just clicked publish and the notebook started thinking ... then I went to take a shower. When I was done showering like 10 minutes later, it was still thinking and then I noticed the title bar says not responding. Good thing I saved the project first before publishing. The second time I tried to publish, it went okay but the only format I can publish to was WMV. I was like where is my mpeg? Anyway, Google is okay with wmv. So wmv it is. Enjoy.

Untitled