Just about Photography

Temporary inactive about one month because I need to spend more time to learn and readjust my photography & editing skill (especially using Photoshop CS4) ~ I’ll be back on March 2009. Due to inactivity, I hope I can learn something new and share it to everyone. Thanks for visiting this blog, if you have any question ~ don’t hesitate to ask ~  I still have time to reply it.

Update (2009/02/13): inactive conditions are limited only for tutorial in this blog – for some articles about special events I still can spend my time to write it.  After this month I will share some tutorials or tricks that maybe useful for people who loves photography and photo editing.

This album is my first album which I use fisheye lens. There are many problems using fisheye lens. When using fisheye lens, I must move as close as possible to the model. The reason that I should move close to the model because there are many photographers who also participate in this session. It means those photographers can appear in the photo – sometimes I don’t want other people appear in my photograph. But for some cases the subject isn’t the model but the situation which many photographers busy to take photo. It looked like a documentary photo but with special effect.

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I just finished make new portrait album after one week editing the photos, seems I did faster editing than my previous portrait album “The Exceptional”. These photos are taken on January 11th, 2009 – I used EOS 5d attached with EF 35mm/f1.4L. Actually I also used EOS Kiss Digital Kiss X attached with EF 50mm f/1.8 II – to take close up portrait but unfortunately almost 95% of all photos taken by it are miss focus. This problem actually also happen when I took photos for “The Exceptional” album. I am still not sure what’s the real problem – about 3 months ago it still okey, I just hope it’s not Kiss Digital X problem. In the future I won’t use EF 50mm f/1.8 II for impotant moment (maybe I’ll use it stacking with EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro 1:1, this technique quite advanced but someday I’ll try on it).  I can’t blame my EF 50mm f/1.8 II since the price is very cheap and I feel satisfied using it before I found this problem. I think “real” photographer should not blame the tools – whatever the result, instead of blame your tools it’s better to solve the problem.

I realized this album maybe a little bit different than my previous album since most of photos in this album aren’t like portrait. In this album I took photo (model with the environment), composition is important for this kind of photography. Not only the model but also how to arrange the model and the environment in order to produce good composition. I also not sure about these photos composition – but whatever the result I am happy with it because I learn how to produce better composition. That’s why I named this album “Whatever”.

Album Title: Whatever – Model:雙雙 (read: shuang shuang) – Photographer: Edwin (me) – Photo Editor: Edwin (me) – Place: 228 公園 (read: gong yuan). Sorry for resizing the photos, I hope it still looked nice .

Photo 1:

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This is my second portrait album after Sunny Winter Day. Title about this album is “The Exceptional” – there are some reasons why I named it “The Exceptional”. From Wordweb dictionary, exceptional means “far beyond what is usual in magnitude or degree” and “surpassing what is common or usual or expected”. Actually I expect that I could finish this album in the end of year 2008 – but I postpone finishing this album because I am busy for new year party. Since it surpassing my plan and crossing the years (2008 and 2009) so I named this album “The Exceptional”.  Second reason is many photos in this album actually a little bit miss focus because I use 2 cameras (5D attached with EF 35mm f/1.4L  and Kiss Digital X attached with EF 50mm f/1.8).  I just think that 5D + EF 35mm f/1.4L good for taking general portrait (model include the environment) and Kiss Digital X + EF 50mm f/1.8 good for taking portrait (only model). I don’t know why my Kiss Digital X and my EF 50mm f/1.8 give an unexpected result. I checked that some photos taken by Kiss Digital X have a little miss focus problem. I like some photos taken by Kiss Digital X but most of them are miss focus. So in this album I took longer time to edit miss focus photos and also correcting skin color for some photos. Since I edit this specially (some photos also edit with fisheye effect, you can see here for the tutorial) – different than my previous album and the result after post processing also very nice so I think it will be nice if I named this album “The Exceptional”.

Album Title: The Exceptional – Model:水凌 (read: shui ling) – Place: 西門町,台北,台灣 (read: xi men ding, tai bei, tai wan) – Photographer: Edwin Setiawan – Image Editor: Edwin Setiawan. I just upload some photos in this album  that I think it’s interesting. I resized the photos – hope the quality still good.

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This is my first photoshop tutorial (not the first article) in year 2009. In this tutorial I try to explain how to remove reflection because it’s important in photography. In photography sometimes moment is important than photo quality – I ever see someone still use his/her photo although the photo have many noises and sometimes the photo also not clear. For me, both (moment and quality) are important so I don’t want leave my photo unedited – sometimes I spend my time to correct some photos.

Photo that I use here comes from Retouchpro website. Someone ask to correct this photo – sorry I forget to bookmark the link.

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This article is the first article (in my blog) in year 2009. I hope this year 2009 better than 2008 – for me year 2008 is an unforgetful year since almost all of my plan  in 2008 has been accomplished. I will tell you some of my plan/hope  that already accomplished, first  I graduated from NTUST (National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, in Chinese: 國立台灣科技大學 – read: guo li taiwan ke ji da xue).  Second plan was I want to work in Taiwan and fortunately this plan also accomplished. I said “fortunately” because only 1 company that accept me work in Taiwan – If  I graduate now, I don’t think I can find job here  because of  the world economic crisis. I am very thankful to God for all that I have done – a good quote from Saint Augustine “Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.” – so do your best and let GOD do the rest.

31st December we (me and friends) have 2 plans to celebrate new year: eat dinner together and watch Taipei 101’s firework. After work, we go to have dinner together in Tasty Restaurant. Food in this restaurant is very delicious especially roasted duck and cheese cake – you can see this link for the detail. I took some photos there, hope you like it.

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