PhotoPlus Expo 2014 p3

The church of Nikon is in its usual location, right at the right of the entrance.  Attendees were greeted with its yellow plastic fantastic bags which were in generous display and ample supply everywhere on the floor, just like all prior years.   The first thing I asked the Nikon rep I met was the Calendar.  Nikon used to give them out.   Alas it stopped last year and there was none this year either.   What a let down.   The truth is there are really fewer freebies each year.  Did Kodak even bother to show up?  I don't think so.   Fuji still came this year and they were giving out instant pictures and prints.   Pretty generous of them.

Corey Rich (left) preparing for his presentation.   His "Dedicated" for the Nikon D4s is by far the best promotion video coming from Nikon.  It pretty much set the standard.

Sean demoing the "drone" which was used for shooting "Dedicated."

Corey and Sean using the rig to demo a shoot using a volunteer from the audience.

PhotoExpo Plus 2014

Or PhotoPlus Expo, whatever!
Being a VIP, self-proclaimed of course, and cheap I got to pre-register and just pick up the expo badge when I got there.   But the lines for pre-registered attendees were longer much longer than those for on-site registration.  Adding to the confusion and crowd was the many marathoners who were there to pick up their bibs.   But nobody should get confused with who is who, one is lean, mean and healthy and the other is just like yours truly.  The lines weren't moving just like the morning traffic of Manhattan.  It was uber ridiculous.   Anyway I just waited in a shorter line that is meant for  on-site registration.  I noticed I wasn't the only one.  The woman behind the counter asked for an ID and printed out my badge.  No begging required.   I was then on my way to candy land

PhotoPlus Expo 2014

It's this time of the year.  All the camera nerds congregate on the midtown west at Javits center gawking at camera equipments.

Yosemite

Just give it another chance.  Why not?

it took about an hour to download and install the latest and possibly the greatest OS X.

Hopefully this MBP will last, unlike the iBook I had eon ago.  Maybe I shouldn't have said that but here it goes.  This one is bought refurbished directly from Apple.  The model was first released in June 2012, according to some web site OKAY not just some web site, this mid 2012 model is probably the last of its kind that is user upgradable.  The newer retina display models aren't all that user upgradable.  The machine looks new to me.  The battery has 2 cycle counts and I don't see anything that looks or feels old--I read somewhere "most" of the refurbished items are just unsold inventory or actual returned items with battery and case changed.  The machine is cling wrapped.  Almost immediately I upgraded the whatever OS X there to Yosemite and upgraded or downloaded many of the free apps like iPhoto and such.  I haven't heard any noise from the machine or feeling the heat from the palm rest area.  So all is well.  The machine is not cheap but hey it's 38% less than the sticker price; while most are just 15% off which I don't find so appealing.  I did some research on eBay even with no sales tax collected and I don't think I can get this peace of mind and condition from any eBay sellers for a machine like this.

Finally, at long last, I can use iMovie to edit my movie.  Well it doesn't make a whole lot of sense but hey that's me.

First Day of School 2014

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.

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