Dead End

Another Picture of a Stop Sign

Random Pictures

Selfie with Wife

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.

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I do not understand Hong Kong men's fashion.

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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

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

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Going to school