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Showing posts from November, 2015

Reverse Ruin

I love exploring abandoned buildings, especially old derelict houses.  Stepping into them is like walking through a time portal. The furniture, books and personal belongings that lie covered in dust, half eaten by insects, and strewn across the floor as if a tornado ripped through the house fuels the imagination of what it felt like living in that house during its most prosperous era.  Those very same items also left an unanswered question to explorers, and perhaps the same question asked by the house, towards its forgotten owners - why did they abandoned the place? Properties are always considered as investments and a property owner would not abandon such huge investments without making a profit out of it first. There a a many reasons why buildings are abandoned, but to make a relevant connection to the local environment, it could be narrowed down to a few reasons such as, eviction due to bankruptcy, death of the remaining occupant, and migration of the occupants to a diffe

Time for a new lens?

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that I would upload some photographs of the cosplays that would have been the attraction of the recent hobby fest - so here they are. One thing I realized when I uploaded them was that the deep depth of field in most of the photographs (a.k.a. no bokeh, no life) and in the realm of photography, these would be considered amateurish and/or bad.  The reason why I did not notice this earlier when I took these photographs was because I was not really interested in portrait photography. Now that I know the concept of portrait photography and the awesome street portrait photographs on some blogs and flickr, my appreciation towards this certain set of skills and lens for this field of photography has increased greatly. This has strengthen my decision to pick up an Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 45mm f1.8 lens as an alternative to the Canon 50mm lens that I have now. As much as I love the Canon 60D, I believe that the OMD E-M10 can be as good, perhaps

Big Yellow Taxi

Every five years, our highways, main trunk or artery roads, and if you're lucky, collector roads that run in front of your house, are re-sealed in order to please the hearts and cars of thousands of motorists in Sarawak. This is not a unique culture in Sarawak per se, but it is a "cultural" norm throughout Malaysia every time election season draws near.  It makes me wonder, for the same amount spent on fixing roads, that did not really need any major repair works in the first place, could the money be spent on some much needed public amenities such as community halls, or better parks, or perhaps better landscaping along the roads.  I took this photograph during my morning rush. Seeing how this roller parked next to the park reminded me of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi"and how relevant that song is still today, I played with the idea of this photo opportunity for a couple of days before I decided to take this photo while they were still doing ro