And the Editing

On my count, I snapped around 800 frames during the four days I was in Kyoto. I decided to only bring the X100, and I think it was the better choice.

Before anybody argue that the level of the snaps won't be of dSLR quality, you'd better think again. The jpg coming out of the camera were things of beauty, and combined that with the size of the body, it made for a great little travel camera.

Good thing that I brought the charger along since I had to charge the batteries twice. Reaching home, there was the little matter of sifting through the whole collection and doing some post-editing. I only managed to rummage through half of them so far. I've already geotagged and added the keywords onto the metadata. Next would be the grading and selecting which ones should be picked for post-editing, the actual editing itself, captioning then exporting into jpg with watermarking. Then came the uploading to my SmugMug server and Flickr. And of course at some stage, Facebook.

That would take me to the weekend I thought at the rate I was going. So, for the moment, Happy Editing!

Atlanta Street Slideshow

Since I had been mulling over where to post the slideshows, I might as well mirror it directly into the blog. This would make navigation more straightforward and motivate me to get the captions in as well.

More on the Atlanta trip here.

Zoo Negara Part 2

From Part 1

Yes, there were plenty of constructions going on around there. But the operative word here is "around". There were plenty of housing projects going on white close to the Zoo compound. Ironically they were called Zoo View. At the rate they were going, there would hardly be any zoo left to view ......

The animals looked thin and unhealthy. The giraffe looked malnourished. Even the elephant looked gaunt. The sheds looked in need of repair. In fact the whole place needed a facelift. They need a new management. They don't need to look abroad. Even the Bird Park in town was in a better state. I was sure they could learn a thing or two from there.

The place was depressing. It seemed that the management lost focus of what their strengths were and trailed to capitalise on it. They should consider giving away most of their exhibits as clearly they were not able to look after them and concentrate on a few star attractions. They have a great number of flamingo there and the lions and tigers were a big hit with the children.

The amphibians and reptile exhibits were maintained very well, and it was great that my boys spotted it and spent some time there. The penguin house was also great fun, and clearly the animal show was organised quite well. Quite rightly the staffs pointed this out as a must see. Shame that space was limited and the weather was too hot. They should make more coverings as I was sure the place would be soaked through in heavy downpour.

The cafe was not bad, although rather run down. We didn't have to go to the toilet - Thank God. The drink machines were mostly broken, or did not accept paper money - more kiosk needed, run by actual staff. There should also invest in children guides with organised activities. This should be done by professional rangers. I seemed to be guided by buggy drivers as we were taken around by the tram. Even my children pointed out that there were hardly any information they could read about the displays. There wanted to learn more, but there was just nowhere for them to turn to. A missed opportunity here.

We left right after the animal show. The boys only caught some of it as there were just to big a crowd there to be comfortable. We left after having some ice-cream and looking at penguin house. They were too exhausted even to enter the children area. They wished that they had spent more time at the reptiles and amphibians exhibit. They wanted to see more snakes and camouflaging frogs.

Will we be recommending the visit to anyone? As much as we want to support Zoo Negara, we found that the management had missed the boast for far too long. Something needed to be done as very soon, nobody would miss it should it be moved. The location seemed to be prime land to be converted into residential zone, and soon that may be a serious consideration. This is a serious problem and should be addressed professionally, but it doesn't seemed to be a priority. Going to zoo Negara when I was a child used to be a treat. Now, it was just a sight for sore eyes ......... Shamefully mismanaged and soon would be run to the ground.

Foto by Haris

Since beginning of the year, I had been doing beta testing for my blog engine, SquareSpace. It was mainly for the need iteration, SquareSpace version 6. Certainly it was a departure from the software behind harisrahman.com, which ran on version 5. I was offered to upgrade but decided otherwise. The current blog was already week customised, I couldn't be asked to spend the extra time doing the updating. The current routine works OK as far as I was concerned.

As a reward, I was given a free account. One of the thing I noticed about the new version was, it was platform agnostic. The website more or less looked the same no matter what device you use. It looked the same on the laptop, the iPad and even the iPhone. It also optimises itself for viewing on the Nexus 7. A sister website, fotobyharis.com was born.

The new version also has an excellent gallery feature for photographs. So, I decided to use that for a new gallery. I used to use another account for this but I found it to be rather cumbersome. With the new engine, I just upload it straight up and the website optimised itself. Less headache. I still use SmugMug for my repositories, and that would remain so for some time.

I actually starting to like the new version. It still took a bit of time to get used to things. Updating on the fly was still not possible as I used to do it. But the site definitely has potential .......

Spyder4

The moment I reached home from the KL Photography Festival, my boys wanted to go out. To Marche we went. I have to leave the screen calibrating until later in the evening.

But it was won the wait. I unpacked the unit, read the simple instructions and downloaded the latest software from the Net. Program installed and I was soon calibrating.

I just followed the clear instruction from the software. Since I have a couple of screens, it detected them both and asked which screen I wanted to calibrate first. Each screen took about 10 minutes and when I was done, I was more than impressed with the new setting.

I did not realise how cold my colour temperature on the screen were before the calibration. Now, the photos came to life, and the colour were much more pleasing, not to mention that the skin tones were much more life-like. What was more important was both the screen now looked comparable. The Samsung screen used to have a light blue tinge to it before.

I then calibrated my laptops, and certainly the LCD screen looked much better since. Definitely worth the investment ......