Small and Insignificant

A little prologue: Sorry ah for the massive pictures diarrhoea. Haha. Since my internet is running at 4mb, all the pictures are loaded spontaneously with no lag whatsoever. My humble apologies if it lags for you. d;-p

As you can guess from the tittle, Facebook really has made me lazy. Haha. it's so easy to just upload all the pics and not blog about them. To be fair, I kinda love the pictures more than the words anyway. So it's a double whammy against blogging. Hence, I've decided from now on that all the pictures would be uploaded into FB and the pictures that I need to elaborate or 'show off' would be placed here. Oh yeah, of course I will still use the blog to vent off steam. Hehe. As evident by the last two posts (which has sorted itself out).

Moving on... Because of the accursed thing that happened, all the pictures seems to have piled up on me as well as blogging about them. Going to just breeze through these past 2.5/3 weeks.

Notts

Attended the Notts Games 2008 primarily because I was forced to by Siti. Lucky I did though. Managed to have a good time- aside from the boring a couple of hours when we had nothing to do. It was so boring in fact that I actually slept amidst the games. Haha (Shit man. Debbi has infected me with the 'Haha'. Roarrrr). No no, actually it was eat nasi lemak, slept and then went in search of you guess it- another nasi lemak. Another thing worth of note is actually seeing all the IMU peeps. Was brilliant seeing all of us together again. It was like a mini IMU gathering. Sweet. I was also just so freaking pissed at myself because of the lost opportunity. If only I told Wei Chun I was going, we could have met there. Damn Min and his lousy communications. Didnt even thought of telling him. Stupid stupid stupid.... *sigh*

Oh yeah, met Kevin my high school friend there. Isn't it just amazing when you bump into your friend and just picked up a conversation like nothing has happened? 

Mike's and Katie's Dinner

It was Mike's and Katie's turn to cook for us. Mike was actually quite excited on trying to cook with a Halal chicken. I think his exact words were "I always wanted to try Halal chicken". Aw, bless him. I have no idea what he expects from a halal chicken though. More flavours or something? Since he did go to all the effort of actually procuring one- decided to gloss over that fact.

It's actually quite hard to explain the concept of halal chicken to the ang moh's. In most cases when I just gave up on explaining for the umpteenth time or to a new person (who I'll never meet again), I just resign myself and say I'm a vegetarian. That has saved me hours...Oh yeah, note to self: take pictures of the food. Mike's chicken was just brilliant and Katie's fudge cake is just to die for. English food is definitely different from all those places like Tony Roma's, Friday's  and TGIF... 

Preston

Dindn't know whether it was the incident that happened or something else, but I just had this overwhelming urge to get out of Manchester. Contemplated going up North to see papa Chun, but walauweh, the train tickets was around 40 pounds *gulp*. Needed to save money for that first. The nearest countryside and cheapest trip was actually Preston. Packed my bags and left pronto. Seriously man, need to thank Fleur, JJ, Wilfred, Ushank and Roch who made the unexpected trip awesome. Muackz.

Christmas 2008 Fair

Might as well attend since I have pretty much nothing to do on the weekend. ;-D Good opportunity to take pics. Another thing I realized that is that the ang mohs here is extremely embarassed by the act of picture taking. Literally had to pull them by the ear to get them in the shot. Hmph! Miss Malaysian's cam whoring skills.

Went for a dinner afterwards at a South-East Asian cuisine restaurant. Really disappointed at what pass as 'authentic' SE Asian food. Maha's Beef Rendang turned out to be a soup, and my curry laksa was a thick paste served ontop of rice. Laksa and rice? Have you ever heard a more ridiculous thing?

Katie's

Katie is one heck of a character. I have no idea how to describe her. She's just one of those rare people that's bubbling and bursting at the seams. She's just so full of joy that I swear to god if I were to actually use her for a piñata, she'll virtually ooze joy. Anyway, thanks dear for the lovely dinner. Especially the extra mile you put into it to make it halal. The tuna cheese thingy was awesome. Oh, her housemates were also fantastic people. Glad to have met everyone. 

Yay. Finally had a relaxing day of doing nothing whatsoever. What a bliss. Haha. Been  a while since I actually photoshopped something... 

Anyway, always wanted to try making a movie poster. Haha. So I guess this is attempt number 1.

Tried, but to no avail. I simply cannot forgive. A valuable lesson learned; a grudge forever nutured; and an enemy unearthed.

I guess all is as it should be. At least now I can sleep...

My god! The second time? How can I be so freaking stupid? Was I born without intelligence, without the ability to learn? This just proves that the entire Homo sapiens are assholes by nature. You should never ever trust anyone. Full stop. Arghh, haven't I learned anything the first time around? WTF Min!!

So full of rage. Some one's gonna f***ing pay for screwing with me like this. Two can play at this game. I DO NOT forgive.

Almost gave up hope trying to sort out all the Notts picture. Luckily found one good picture worth making an entire entry about and therefore restoring all faith.

This post is actually dedicated to Caryn and Yau who refuses to take their pictures in RAW- although their camera supports it. One of the most crucial aspect for me when buying my DSLR was whether it can handle RAW. Let's try a HDR technique to show and somewhat exaggerate the effect.

First, take five pictures in RAW using five different exposures.

+2 Exposure

+1 Exposure

+0 Exposure

-1 Exposure

-2 Exposure

Then compress them into one file- use photoshop or other software out there.

Final compressed file

Tweak the setting to choose which part of the 5 different exposure shows up on the final picture i.e use the sky on the -2 exposure and the highlights on the tress with the +1 or +2 exposure.

Selecting the area

Run it through PS to add some contrast, minor colour adjustments here and there, crop as needed and voila!

Tada!!

To exaggerate it even further. Increase a lil' bit of contrast and change it to a pseudopanaromic shot to draw the eyes towards the park gate and the people feeding the ducks.