My Chemical Romance - I'm Not Okay

Just an old music clip from My Chemical Romance that I like. It was named REVENGE!! haha..

Enjoy :D

Kendari Morning Stroll

At last, an entry from my laptop after a long hibernation, HURAAAAHH!!. I have just discovered that in Kendari, suppose that you have a laptop, then free internet is available everywhere, all it cost is a - mediocre not so tasty - cup of cheap coffee around 5K rupiahs, and you are set for an unlimited time, surely better then 4K an hour at warnet around here.

Okay, a little update about me. I am now at Kendari, jobless but not wage-less, don't blame me, blame the local health department for requesting medical professionals to national health department in Jakarta without carefully planning the public health centre where I'm supposed to work. Mine is suppose to be at the island of Wowoni, and happen to be still 80% finished, and believe me when I say that the process will take quite some time due to very limited access and complicated bureaucracy. So here I am, waiting aimlessly in Kendari.

Now back to business. Being jobless is not such a bad thing, especially in a place you've never been before. other than reading novels, browsing the net, and "thinking", I can doze off doing a tourist-like sight-seeing. Kendari has a - not so beautiful - beach, an MTQ monument, and a mosque like - they call it MTQ - building, and those will be my photography objectives. and here is the first project. I wake up early at 5:am to take a walk around Kendari Beach and bring with me my Canon 400D and EF-S 55-250 mm IS and take some photos.

Just one?Are you fucking kidding me?yes and no, this is only the first image uploaded. You can see the rest at this album. I've decided to stop uploading every single image that I shot here at blogger since my template only allow me to display pictures not wider then 400 pixel, and that sucks, so I just post one here along with the link to the album at facebook. There are 25 images uploaded, along with personal commentary from me.

Enjoy :D

PS: I just found out that if I uploaded the images somewhere else prior to put it on blogger, I have a better control to the images display size compare to if I uploaded it directly to blogger. but I'll leave this post just the way it is for now, and save it for the next post.

Desperate Attempt.

Yuhuuuuuuu...

Added: I MADE IT..I MADE IT..I MADE A POST WITH BLACKBERRY AND OPERA MINI BROWSER..WOHOOOOOO!!!!

"A Journey" Landscape Photographs Slideshow by Yadi Yasin

During my early days of browsing about photography, I stumbled upon a post at www.fotografer.net, - an Indonesian photographer forum - by Yadi Yasin who appears to be a professional landscape photographer. He post a link to his slide show, which present his works all around the world. So I download it and watch it, and astonished right afterward. His work really inspires me and show me how a landscape photography should be like, and it amaze me even more that those pictures were not edited in Photoshop or any kind of digital darkroom. So I request his permission via the forum, and he granted that I share his works from this blog. Here it is:



And here is the link to download the file and watch it natively on your computer:

http://www.fotografer.net/isi/forum/topik.php?id=3194213309&p=1

Enjoy :D

PS: Note that landscape photography is one of my interest on photography, but not the only one. I also have some interest in Human Portrait, Human interest, and Wildlife photography, so that means, I will need a Canon 10 - 22 mm, a fast mid-zoom or short telephoto lens, and a fast long telephoto lens in the future :D

Rabbits, With Canon 18-55mm II

This images were taken before I have my 55-250mm is, I happen to have this two naughty rabbit who loves to jump around like crazy, so I have a plenty of chance learn some about living creature snapshot.

Sweet huh, looks like two best friend, even a little gay perhaps - Yes, both are males. But don't let them fool you, they were friends back there when they were still teenagers until testosterone takes over and the vicious Darwin law play the game. And rabbits happen to be a little sadistic in their rivalry on sex - they castrate each other - yes, you heard me well. I've seen the gold one chase the brown white one like crazy, trying to sniff his testicles, and bite it. I thought its a natural process, until the two colours loose one of his testicle and they are separated since then. Kinda spooky species huh, never thought it would occur to this cuddly mammal.

Anyway, please gives some commentary on this picture. These are not shown straight out of the camera. I use photoshop and ACDsee Pro3 to tweak the saturation and warmth, as I personally love warm and over saturated colours. My next post will still be about rabbit, but using my 55-250mm is, or my old lens but with wide focal length - 18mm.

And Thou Who Never Stop Searching Shall Find The Way to Him

I have finally bought my English Holy Bible about a couple of weeks ago. Why bible? Because I am a learner, and I have always been searching for meaning. If I have to tell the story of my spiritual journey, it could be dozens of posts and might still not complete, let alone understood by the reader, so I‘ll just write a quick summary.

I was an inherently frustrate man – or boy perhaps – about the way I was, and the way I should had been; I never feel comfortable in the way of people in general, and even in the way I was or still am now; I never quite satisfy with the common answer about the purpose of all thing, and about how things should be, for the world, people, and me, anything, you name it. Well of course, many shares my frustration at some certain level, but trust me when I say that it is very different in my case. Many choose to shut their eyes and deny the frustration, or do nothing about it, some even don’t realize that they are frustrated and carry on with their lives. But for me the frustration never stops and it was like “I can’t go on living like this”.

So there came the start of my journey of self-discovery. It had brought me a long way and start from life-enhancing novel like Paulo Coelho’s (particularly The Alchemist) and Mitch Albom’s books, which are good, but once I get their main idea – seriously – there aren’t much left for me to learn from them anymore, but those still offer good reading tough. I scour through martial arts philosophies, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, histories of great men, self-assessed psychiatry – a little bit of a lunatic I guess – ,and finally Awareness – Which by far is the most influential reading of mine – and other Anthony De Melo’s books, and some long discussions with colleagues who share about the same level of frustration. And in the end my search has brought me right to the one that I have always avoid, Catholic Christianity. Why was I avoiding it? Because at that point, I thought that religion acts like doctrines which truth can’t be questioned, and to have questioned it, is considered infidelity – Which I think are the most fucked-up opinion of many religious fanatics. And those years of searching are the one that helps me shaping my spiritual maturity so that I am ready to finally learn about the religion that had been fated to me since the day I born without the same prejudice that I once had, and also thanks to it, I will not fall into some religious fanatics – which in my opinion have hampered the beauty of the sacred teaching and successfully mislead many devotees into shallow and false theological understanding by manipulating their insecurities.

Now why English? Because in learning something, I always tend to be an idealist. I think that a source of translation is always less tainted and unbiased compare to the translation itself. And since I will never be able to speak in Greek or Hebrew-Aramaic, the closest I can get is the direct translation from it, which is an English bible, and even our local Indonesian Holy Bible is a translation from the English one. And the other reason is because I simply love English. I think as a language, English is at a whole new level compare to Bahasa, so expect me to post some new-learned vocabulary from the Holy Bible.

So I discuss my options with a friend of mine whose uncle happens to be a Catholic priest and a Holy Bible scholar at the same time about which version of translation that offers both the combination of unbiased translation yet at the same time manage to retain the literary beauty of the language. So here it is, The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) Catholic Edition: Anglicized Text Holy Bible. Now that I finally have got one, and fortunately actually reading it at least until now, hopefully this bible really helps me in understanding His way.

Trivia: It is interesting to me that this version is a result from a team of translator that includes Catholic, Protestant, Judaism, and Orthodox representatives. The difference is that both Catholic and Orthodox Christians agreed to keep the Deuterocanonical – A.K.A Apocryphal, written in Greek instead of Hebrew-Aramaic – books, and try to keep it in its original order – instead of putting it in separated section like Indonesian Holy Bible does –, while the rest, doesn’t. And of course, Judaism will not include the Gospel and the New Testament in their holy bible since they are the one who actually crucify Jesus. Hahaha…

Around the Garden

Just some images that I had taken several weeks ago but all are still objects. I'll upload my rabbits photos in the next post.

Priscilla Ahn - Dream

I heard this song for the first time from my sister's mp3 CD, and fall in love instantly with the melody. And after searching for the lyrics, I fallen even deeper..hehe..

Dream

I was a little girl alone in my little world who dreamed of a little home for me.
I played pretend between the trees, and fed my houseguests bark and leaves, and laughed in my pretty bed of green.

I had a dream
That I could fly from the highest swing.
I had a dream.

Long walks in the dark through woods grown behind the park, I asked God who I'm supposed to be.
The stars smiled down on me, God answered in silent reverie. I said a prayer and fell asleep.

I had a dream
That I could fly from the highest tree.
I had a dream.

Now I'm old and feeling grey. I don't know what's left to say about this life I'm willing to leave.
I lived it full and I lived it well, there's many tales I've lived to tell. I'm ready now, I'm ready now, I'm ready now to fly from the highest wing.

I had a dream

Canon EF-S 55-250 f/4-5.6 IS

Say hi to the newest member of my photographic equipment family, its a Canon telephoto zoom lens 55-25o f/4-5.6 IS. the cheapest Canon telephoto zoom with IS available to date. New item will cost around 2.2-2.3 million rupiah, but I got the used one from bursa.fotograner.net for 1.75 million rupiah, both physical appearance and function is good, no defect detected to date, and adding to my luck, it is still officially guaranteed by Datascript until September 2010.

Why a telephoto zoom lens? Because I like to take a portrait and snapshot, means taking a picture silently from distance without get noticed by the subject so that I can capture the most natural looks, facial expression or behaviour of the subject. And I also happen to love taking picture of my rabbits, which IMO the weirdest but tame rabbits ever known by me. Additional usage will be taking nature photography like my recent trip to TMII where I extensively use this lens to take many portraits of birds from distance.

But this lens still has its disadvantage. First, its quite slow, so adequate lighting is a must, and second, it can't produce an extreme blurred background, the solution will be Canon's EF 70-200mm L lens series which will cost around 7-16 million rupiah depending on its aperture opening and IS, so no, I'm good with my lens thank you. Another disadvantage is that on a holiday trip, I would want to take some picture of me and my spouse or friends with vast background and that means I'll have to change my lens several time with a wider lens, and that is why I also brought my Canon EF-S 18-55 mm II kit lens. the ideal choice would be Canon 18-200 mm is, but it'll cost around 6-7 million rupiah, so again, I'm okay with changing lens at least for the time being.

And here it is.

This is how I keep it, shortest focal length and focus point.

Here it is at maximum focal length 250mm

And here with the focus point extended to infinity

The Hoya UV HMC 58mm filter that I bought to protect the optic, also used, got it for 125 thousand rupiah.

The IS (Image stabilizer)

And I just noticed that taking pictures of a lens from the front using flash will gives you a funny looking reflection depends on the angle of flash light

This is how it looks on my EOS 400D digital. It extends quite long.

And this is what the lens can do, note that this image is taken from 2.5 meter from the object

At 55 mm

At 250 mm