First Day of School 2014

Slave Journal

Guest post by Harry Lai

   South

   When I was little, I was separated from my family and brought to the South.  I worked there for many years.  There was a lot of conflicts between me and my master, but I could do nothing to make them understand how cruel slavery was.
   Today, I was beaten 15 times, the highest amount in a day of my miserable life.  1/3 of these beatings were for no reason.  I decided that I was going to escape.
   One stormy night, I wrapped the bread I had saved for my journey in a piece of cloth.  I climbed on a chair and crawled out the window on and landed like a cat onto the ground.  I looked up at the sky.  Other slaves told me that the North Star, the brightest star in the sky led North, and when you were north, you were free.  I ran toward the North Star.  I stopped, thinking if the rumor was true.  But there was no time to think.  If the overseer saw me out of my cabin, I'd be beaten bloody.  So I ran and ran.  I soon grew tired and slept under a bush, hoping it would conceal my body fully.

Skiing

The Meerkat

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 2009

 

© 2010 laichungleung

Student of The Month February 2010 

I think many of the pictures I like happens to be on the very last frame of the roll.  It's like I shot the whole roll just waiting for the very last frame, that's all.  The "modern" camera just doesn't allow me to shoot an extra frame or two.

Picture taken on Nov 10, 2009.

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.

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.

Pear Orchard

These were shot using FUJI PRO160C, expired in 2006/11. And the camera was a used Hasselblad 500C/M with the 80mm CF lens. Again, I am so impressed with my exposure. Or I should actually be thankful to the latitude of the film. I guess I will never find out. The f16 rule just works for me. (I am full of it, I figure if I don't love my work who will?)

The place is in New Jersey, the orchard is run by Korean Americans. They have these big dining halls there, two of them at least, and you can actually order not so fast made to order food from their kitchen, mainly or only chicken dishes. It's $40 for 4 people. There was this dragon lady manning the cashier and she wasn't all that friendly.... I guess the food is very Korean, except you can order soda. It's whole chicken in soup, a big bowl of steamed rice with some beans, kimchi, raw green hot pepper with dipping paste. My kids wouldn't touch the food except for the rice. The chicken and the soup actually were pretty good. I had some kimchi. I like Korean BBQ better.

The pears were good. They had the brown and yellow ones. That day we weren't allowed to pick the brown ones. They were big and juicy.

Untitled

Nine cheesecakes.

Having take-outs from Outback.

Taekwondo

Portrait of Mr. Harry

Alley Pond Park Camping

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

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.

Crazy

This is not Cloverfield. This is better. Original footage shot using a JVC GR-DVM70 U. Video captured via FireWire in Ubuntu 7.10. The FireWire combo card is listed a few posts below. I downloaded Kino and barely understand how things work. I rendered this video in mpeg2. And uploaded to blogger. The original mpeg2 is 720x480 30 frames per second, 42.6MB in size.

There is this good post detailing how to get FireWire, Kino, and essentially video capture going in Ubuntu 7.10. The poster uses a different or better FireWire card while your truly uses a cheapo combo card as told in my post below. Let me get the permalink ....

Season's Greetings

Harry and Cheese Cake

Nikon D70, Nikon MF 50mm f1.4.