Revival

I have three main interests and from that three sister blogs had spawned over the years. The first of the three was photography, and I had always wanted to aggregate all my photos into one site. Not for hosting - I have SmugMug for that, plus Flickr for the social side - but as a gallery.

As I was a beta tester for Squarespace, I was given a good offer to use their services. I used that opportunity to create photobyharis.com. It has a fantastic interface, but unfortunately, I never had the chance to really tweak around with it. Since I had some time off, I finally had the chance to look things through.

First out was the planning of the site, plus uploading the material. And they were tons of them. Fortunately, with the bandwidth I had at the apartment, that part was easily taken care of.

Next came the finishing touches. And this would be the one which I would struggle with. But hopefully, the site would be ready by the end of the weekend ........

As for my other two interests - tech and Haematology news - that would have to wait. A lot of work ahead then.

Tokyo Street Anniversary

When I was at Pavilion today, I saw a commotion created by throng of photographers on the top floor. Apparently it was the second anniversary of Tokyo Street, and they had some events to mark that. Today, it was an Anime gathering. There were also competitions. But the whole place turned into Cosplay heaven.

And to that, also a photographer's heaven. I only had my hand phone with me instead of a proper camera. So, in just snapped away to what I could. Great fun though.

At one of the stage, there was an Anime character competitions being held. The participants would act their character and explain to the public what the character was about. Rather surreal to see that in Malaysia. I was sure in Tokyo proper, this would be quite a normal weekend activity.

Since I was rushing to get to Pasar Ramadan, I didn't have the time to find out what else would be going on as part of the celebration. Which was a shame. It would've made for a great photo opportunity.

Low Light

During my outing in search for dinner last evening, I managed to test the capability of the HTC One low light performance first hand. The camera was designed with bigger pixels on the sensor, in order to boost the low light capability, while sacrificing the pixel count. A big compromise and something of a gamble for the company, as otherwise the One seemed to be topping out the other specs.

So, I put the 4 mega pixel to task. I'd didn't disappoint, although the snaps seemed to last contrast - something that Aperture or Snapseed could fix easily in post.

I'm already smitten with its daily use especially in street photography setting. With the ultra pixels and optical image stabilisation, it certainly was capable of some stunning shots. Certainly not in the same bracket with the X100 or SLR, but for a camera phone the results were surprising.

I couldn't say if this was the best since I have yet to use the iPhone 5 in this setting - I knew, sad wasn't it. If anybody wanting to lend me their iPhone 5? Anybody? Don't be shy.....

588 Snaps

588 photographs was the total that made my final edit from my Lugano trip. Most taken on my HTC One since my X100 ran out of juice in the middle of one of my walks.

I was just done with geotagging and keyword insertion. Next would be some editing as well as exporting onto their relevant albums.

This should be fun .....

A Country Walk

After breakfast, I had about half an hour before the bus taking me down to the city centre arrived. Not to miss the opportunity, I took a stroll - luckily downhill - towards one of the village down there. It was a nice walk in the cool crisp but sunny morning.

It was a small country lane going up the hotel which I took. That lead me to a small village centre. A couple of hotels, many cute houses, some really nice restaurants and finally settled a couple bus stops down the hill to wait for my ride.

While walking, I cane across many of the town folks and they were ever so charming and nice. All of them, old, young and of course most of them pretty said bongiorno to me, clearly a foreigner. If they thought I wasn't, the camera I was carrying would surely give that away.

Very approachable. One of the English speaking lady - I think she was a kindergarten teacher even striked a conversation with me, asking if I was staying at the hotel up the hill. I said yes, and told her that I was here for the conference and congratulated me for being adventurous.

A welcomed change compared to some of the European who were clearly stuck up the moment they saw a foreigner. Definitely not here in Cademario and Lugano.

A few more snaps. Time was too tight for me to try some coffee, and soon enough the bus arrived. I was met on the bus by a couple of my colleagues. Time to head down to the conference I guess. But I should have at least half an hour to do a bit of a photowalk before the lecture starts. The weather looked gorgeous this morning.

Photos from the walk can be seen here.