Moon

Nikon HB-8 Hood

This is as expensive as it's hard to find. I guess it's not hard to find if you are willing to pay up for a hood. I have a "for" Nikon hood which is just another way of saying, hey it's is not a genuine Nikon hood but it works, kind of or hopefully. When I bought my used Nikon 20-35, it comes with the or a hood. I thought it's a Nikon hood as it doesn't say non-manufactured like it says with other stuff. Oh well it turns out it's a "for" Nikon hood. It's not tight and quite easily comes off. Imagine you play to be some professional and then the hood comes off, how embarrassing. I wonder if it's because of its used condition or because the nature of it being a twist click on and being plastic. Some of my hoods or shades are metal, threaded or spring loaded threaded and they are pretty secured. Of course there are always some exceptions. I have one hood (HK-2) for the 24mm which is a crazy a-screw-tight-on-the-side type. And the screw broke pretty much right away. Sure I bought it used. Fortunately the vendor gave me a refund. I think the HB-8 hood is almost a necessity for the 20-35 unless you are into ghost and flare. A genuine used HB-8 is selling for almost $30. Ouch!

Birthday

OpenShot video done by me

Once in a blue moon, I go back and learn video editing from scratch.  I never get any good at it.
Wow, the video quality is unbelievably bad.  Sure my editing is bad.  So it kind of deserves bad quality I guess.

Here should be a better version in Vimeo

Star Track Practice from Robert Lai on Vimeo.

I like to keep my video short and hopefully sweet. So at least you won't have to sit through something torturous for anything longer than a minute or two. The shooter or editor or both usually think the video is great but the audience thinks very differently.

Untitled.

I do not understand Hong Kong men's fashion.

Untitled

I do not understand Hong Kong men's fashion.

Happy Mother's Day

Kissena Velodrome Twilight Series

Kicking back and relax

The point of this picture is not the Vans.

Lee Jeans Newspaper Ad

To get them you have to go to eBay.  I like the yellow stitching and fade and the seven belt loops instead of the meager five.  The run through leather patch is nice too.  Now most Lee are made fugly.

Bacon egg toast sandwich

I'd like to share what I eat with you.  Because sharing is caring.

Little Gift

You can get whatever from Chinatown cheaper and better.  But they aren't the same.

A materialist with little possession.

Grad ND Filter

Finally got one from the world's biggest store.  eBay has it selling at a stupidly higher price.

My picture will look infinitely better.

Jeans

I don't believe in not washing your jeans or my jeans.  Don't be gross.

Jeans

I don't believe in not washing your jeans or my jeans.  Don't be gross.

Random pictures

    

NYFW FALL2014

NYFW FALL2014

NYFW FALL2014

NYFW FALL2014

NYFW F2014

NYFW Fall 2014

On Photography ... part 2

Or the world hasn't suffered enough.

After my nifty copied-from-somewhere script did its job converting NEFs to JPEGs, the job is pretty much done done.  But I want to inflict more sufferings to the world by uploading the pictures to more social media in addition to this blog.  I figure maybe I should downsize the pictures more so I can upload them faster to Instagram--the destination for what I have for lunch.  Hence the below nifty script I copied and modified from somewhere ...

mogrify -resize 40% -unsharp 0x6+0.5+0 *.jpg

This resizes the files to 40% of the original and sharpen the pictures.  Sounds good enough for me.

Here comes the more difficult part.

The above were done on my cheapo Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.  It's an adequate machine until you need to talk to iPhone for example.

Anyway to make a short story long.  Here is what I have been doing.  I make the folders where my downnsized JPEGs sharable.  I copy those downsized files to my Windows machine which is installed with Instagram within Bluestacks which is forever in beta and rightly so as it's quite unstable but not to the extent that's totally unusable.  But it has its fair amount of glitches.  My recent New York Fashion Week Fall 2014 #nyfw, #nyc pictures are almost all done in this fashion.   http://instagram.com/laichungleung--post from the Instagram within Bludstacks on the Windows 7 machine.

That's all folks.

On Photography ... part 1

Once I am done shooting.  I remove one or two of my cheapo SD cards from my D7000 and plug it into my, what else, cheapo card reader.  I run Ubuntu 12.04 with four cores and a meager 4GB of RAM.  Shotwell Photo Manager is the piece of software to organize the pictures.  "Organize" is such a word that I most often ignore or fail to live up to.  Basically the software copies all the pictures and arrange them in year, month, and day order,  which is good enough for me.  To convert those NEF files, I run ufraw-batch to convert those files en masse.  Usually I blindly convert them without being selective.  Defending on the number of NEF files I process it can take some time.

I created an executable batch file like below

ufraw-batch --conf=DSC_1019.ufraw --create-id=no --wb=camera --rotate=camera --out-type=jpg --compression=95 --clip=film --out-path=JPEG/ *.NEF

... to be continued (or not)

New York Fashion Week Fall 2014 Part 2

New York Fashion Week Fall 2014 Part 1

New York Fashion Week Fall 2014 Part 0

The Mysterious World of Syncing i Devices

I don't bother syncing anything.  I don't understand it and I don't do it until I think I absolutely need to do it.  Anything I know about syncing is I thought I know but actually don't.
I thought I could create an empty folder on my PC and sync to my iPhone pictures so as to delete them in one shot.  No can do.  According to somebody, sync has nothing to do with Camera Roll.  So that's news to me.  So to erase all my pictures on my iPhone Camera Roll, I just do it via Windows erase after import.

I can never understand syncing.

On Photography ... part 0

Just kidding.

I don't know what people's digital workflows are but I know mine is painstaking, painful and rewarding.  The rewarding part is bull, I feel like to write it in.

I have illusions of grandeur and I'd like to think my files would enjoy some later use, like for Magnum, AP, Reuters, National Geographic so on and so forth.  So for stuff I think that are important which is like everything, I tend to shoot in NEF which is the equivalent of I don't know what I am doing so I will shoot with the biggest, baddest and most salvageable format in case I need to squeeze the last bit of data from the file.  The "in case" part have never materialized and if history is any indication, it most likely will never happen.

... to be continued (or not)

Bike Messenger

Untitled

Alex is going to see Ride Along with his high school friends after the finals.

Untitled

Going to school

Thanksgiving 2013

Roasted garlic for mashed potato.

Rosemary and citric rub.  Actually only lemon zest the rosemary is from the backyard.

350F for 2.5 hours.  Temperate reaches 165F in both thigh and breast.  Not bad.

Time to eat.

Fancy cake.

Electronic Mails Intercepted

Names are redacted to protect the innocent and not so innocent.

痴撚綫
aaa 提到：
I only had bbb in mind. He really thought he was British.
Sent from my
On Nov 27, 2013, at 7:11 PM, ccc wrote:

On Nov 27, 2013 6:27 PM, aaa wrote:
China is not at war with anyone right now, so any talk of 愛国 or not is BS. But if China is at war, u should keep quiet. There are many crazy people out there. U can keep yr views to yourself.
Sent from my

On Nov 27, 2013, at 5:59 PM, bbb wrote:
sometimes I would rather there's small scale confrontation between China and Japan/US in those islands, I am almost sure that there's 70-80% communist will fuck up, then they will know who will teach "who" a lession.

But I am also sure that communist will always have their own way interpret the outcome, even they fuck up, they will propaganda that they have "won"

ccc wrote

除了有美国这个大佬之外，形势十足十甲午战争前一样，中国很自信，以为日本只是一个不入流的亚洲小国。

日本面积和人口虽比中国小和少，经济、创造力和综合国力却一点儿都不小，在世上强国之林里是数一数二的。仅仅日本一国，中国都可能打不过。如果美日同盟一起打中国的话，中国必然死定。

小日本这个称号，其实是一个misnomer，误了国人，令国人一厢情愿，自我感觉良好，其祸无穷。但愿中国人民解放军不是甲午战争时的清兵那个模样就谢天谢地了。

bbb

> Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 17:46:56 +0800
> From: aa
> To:
> Subject: Chinese nationalism
>
>
> Many people absolutely believe that China has effective control of the islands. What a lack of common sense? Or can we blame them? First, they are nationalistic. Second, if you watch the Chinese news, namely the CCTV, then everything is so rosy. There are technological breakthroughs everywhere. Sure, China has been growing by leaps and bounds. There are breakthroughs on so many frontiers. But when it comes to military prowess, the States still has the edge. Then if you pay more attention to the Chinese press bulletins. At the height of the confrontation two months ago, they only said their patrolling in the surrounding waters would be in a 常态 from now on. OK, from this phrase alone, you can get the picture. To begin with, how close did the Chinese ships get to the islands? What do you mean by 常态? How often do you get there? Certainly, I don't think they are there too often. If they do, the Japanese would be raising hell all the time. After all, the Japanese have been talking of the China threat for a while. Last but not least, if this is going to be '常态 from now on', that means the '常态' in the past was that: there were no Chinese boats there whatsoever.
> The Chinese communists were not lying deliberately. But the way the news is presented, coupled with the indoctrination of the people from an early age, do mislead people. Many people in China are very war-like. They think China is strong. It is time to teach 小日本 a lesson. These guys have never lived through wars. As neighbours, China and Japan got learn to live with one another.
>