Wednesday, October 23, 2013

The Real Fisheye Lens

Fisheye lens is pretty much like salt and pepper you'll find on the restaurant table. You can enjoy your dish as prepared or you can add some salt and pepper just to get that extra taste to your dish. It is all up to your own taste.

The same goes to fisheye lens. A fisheye lens is considered to be one of the specialty lens and could cost you from RM1000 to RM4500 (about $300-$1500) or perhaps even more. That distortion (extreme curve near the edges of the picture) is the main characteristic of a picture taken with fisheye lens. Some people like it but some find it weird and not up to their liking. However, if used correctly, a fisheye lens can always be a very creative tool of art.

Here are some real life examples of my works with fisheye lens:

1. Landscape. Fisheye lens is a powerful tool to capture the landscape in a way that your eyes can never see it (assuming that your field of vision is normal).

 A shot taken early in the morning in Lumut, Perak, Malaysia. No transformation were done on the picture. The distortion is what I exactly saw on my LCD right after I took this picture.

 Chonggyecheon (청계천) stream, Seoul, South Korea during the midday sun. Some transformations and croppings were done in Photoshop to tone down the fisheye effect a little bit but you can still see it there. I also played around with the shadows and contrast.


 Hadley Village, University at Buffalo NY. Light transformations and color retouching were done on the picture in Photoshop.

2. People. Unless you place your subject at the center of the frame, it's going to have that weird look where half of their face seems longer than the other half. The more you place your subject near to the edges of the frame, the distortion becomes stronger. You can always fix it in Photoshop but it's time consuming to do it for every picture and not that practical especially if you're a pro and have limited amount of time.

 Aizat stood proud next to the UB Buffalo statue. No transformations were done. 

 Another transform-free image of Rachel at Colonie Apartments.

At Izzati and Aizam's reception. Picture was transformed and cropped in Photoshop .

I never thought having a fisheye can be as useful as it was on that day. For the whole ceremony I had to get pictures of everyone sitting around the bride and bridegroom and my biggest challenge was (in case I didn't have a fisheye lens), there was a pole less than two meters away from where everyone was sitting. However, my 8mm fisheye lens was the star of the show! I was able to stand in front of the pole and still get everyone in the picture.

Here's an example of how I use my fisheye lens to capture the bigger picture of a special day.

Now it's time for some pictures of the superb Rokinon (or Samyang as you'll find it here) 8mm fisheye lens: 

 The aperture blades which control how much light gets into your camera. 

 Aspherical lens. Basically it's a lens designed with a special element to produce higher-quality images.

Another special characteristic of this lens is the bulging front element seen above.

Aperture and a huge focus ring. This is a manual lens so setting aperture and focus are all done by you, not your camera. Well not bad since it doesn't cost me an arm and a leg.

Well in case you're wondering, all the pictures of the lens above were taken with my 50mm 1.8 lens with Canon extension tube EF12 II attached. I'm getting a 85mm 1.8 lens from Canon pretty soon (and I'll be posting pictures taken with the lens too here!) but this fisheye lens will always be among my favorites!

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Coffee Break

Well today I had the chance to meet up with a friend of mine who also runs his own photography business to discuss some of the important things related the job. Taking on a wedding job means shooting during the ceremony, choosing the best photos, arranging, retouching them, working on the album or photo book, and shipping out all the products. The process takes a huge amount of time (the fastest wedding DVD I delivered to a customer so far took about 8 days) and a lot of things need to be carefully considered in order to deliver the best end product to our customer. That was what the meeting was all about. Well, we love taking photos and we always love to give the best to our customer ;)

I don't have much photos to show but here are some shots of the day:






Three or four weddings coming up in the next few months and I'm really looking forward to be there (with a new camera body and lens hopefully!).

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Muaz and Wana

I have to say this couple is where I started off doing a paid photo shoot. Back in Malaysia and after a period of not taking as many pictures as I did back in Buffalo, I was only planning to work for fun but then they decided to give me some 'tip' for the photos. May He blesses your kindness!













I had two awesome sessions shooting with them and I'm always looking forward for more. The first session was done just around my house. Yes, it's pretty close to where I live. The second one was done a little bit further (around 40 mins by car from my house) at Setia City Mall. Let me know in the comment section below if you have any idea of a cool place worth visiting for a photo shoot!

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Kuala Lumpur Photography Festival 2013 (KLPF 2013)

I was lucky enough to finally attend the festival on the very last day at Mid Valley Megamall (I was just simply too tired on Friday and Saturday). The festival is open to everyone no matter what kind of camera you are using, whether you are a beginner looking to learn a little bit about what "photographing a subject" actually means or a professional photographer looking to join some discussions with pros alike. It is a festival for all photo lovers out there!

Now it's time for the shots of the day! 


Still not a good place to buy a new camera. It's a festival not a stock-clearance event.

 This is how things look like inside a zoom lens.

Another cross section view of a lens.

 This picture was taken with the fruits placed inside a lightbox. Now that's a proper way to take pictures for ads!

These colorful Pentax cameras remind me of macaroons.

Next destination: Canon 70D. ETA: Pretty soon! Canon are selling it for RM 3,899. Travel a little further from Mid Valley and it could be yours for RM 3200. That is a huge savings! 

Hmm that's more than RM20,000 (~$6500) inside that glass.

In case you couldn't make it this year, all you have to do is wait for another 11 months! The next event is gonna be from 19.9.2014 till 21.9.2014. I've signed up for some promotions on photo products and I'll be working to revise my  packages and pricing really soon!



Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Seoul 2013

So before I left United States for good, I did one thing to prepare myself for unemployment (while looking for job of course) : save enough money to travel somewhere. I was lucky to get a very cheap round trip ticket from Kuala Lumpur to Incheon for about RM800 (about $230), stayed at my friend's place and spent less than RM1200 (~$400) in a week. Here are some of the pictures of Seoul taken during the day and also at night, because big cities always look more awesome after sunset.

Tadaa:























So long!