IHSAN KHAIRIR

Isn’t it funny when your equipment starts to fail exactly after their warranty period ended?

It’s as if they were programmed to fail or break at that exact moment in time when you are no longer eligible for that free-of-charge repair / replacement. The products served their purpose and they served it well. No, not for the consumer by performing flawlessly for the past [insert warranty period here]. For the seller and the producer for being sold and setting themselves ready for repair / service / replacement once the free period ends. Which maximizes the revenue for the manufacturers, sellers and service providers. They’re cons doing piracy. Conspiracy!

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Last Saturday my SB-600 Speedlight failed on me. I was asked to take photos of my ex-roommate’s engagement and just when I was about to start shooting the flash failed. I was sure it wasn’t because of the lack of battery power because I just put in a fresh set. It was the speedlight that refused to work.

I was stricken but I didn’t panic. The popup flash on the D60 can still provide artificial lighting. Problem is, it’s harsh, and I lose control over the direction of the light and having bounce light from the ceiling. I don’t want my shots to look too amateurish. I had to improvise.

I attached a torn piece of white paper in front of the popup to diffuse and soften the light. I set the power to manual 1/2, and took control over the exposure manually by setting the ISO, aperture and shutter speed for each shot and lighting conditions.

It wasn’t easy.

With the SB-600 I can just use Aperture-priority and bounce the light of the ceiling and the pictures would turn out fine. With popup this wasn’t an option. I had to punch in the controls for every shot. In some ways, the experience taught me a lot about setting exposures on-the-fly. Before this I only relied on the camera to set the correct exposure every time. This time I had to do it on my own. And fast.

Improvisation, coupled with some post-production in Adobe Lightroom, managed to produce some decent photos that I can safely present to my friends who got engaged that day. I was worried that they won’t like the photos because of the bad lighting and all, but after I put the photos up in Facebook I got a call from my friend and he said they both liked the photos I put up, so I felt relieved.

Here are some of the photos I shot that day with a popup flash and a torn piece of white paper.

Either I get another flash (maybe a Nissin or a Metz) or have the broken one serviced. Either way, I’ll be losing munny over this, but I really want to be able to be in control of the artificial lighting, and I can only do that with a dedicated external speedlight. Replace or repair, I haven’t made my decision yet. I shall seek counsel with my wallet and bank account first.

P/S: I kept getting asked “when’s it your turn?”. I feel indifferent to such queries already, having been asked questions of the like for the past 5 years.

Our last day was spent in Universal Studios Florida. Since we got to have whole day here we decided to not rush things and just enjoy the moment.

Woody Woodpecker. I remember enjoying Woody Woodpecker cartoons when I was little. I think he’s like Bugs Bunny. All he does is just annoy people around him and still he comes out on top at the end of each episode. And I loved it. Especially his ‘taunt’ or laugh, I can’t quite represent them in typed words.

Anyway, I guess nowadays you can’t create a cartoon character for kids with a name like that. Woody Woodpecker. Hah.

Lining up for the Shrek 4D show. I love the promotional posters that spoofs real-life movies. Like Pinnochio being the star of Liar Liar. 

 
The Mummy ride was awesome. We waited in line for like 45 minutes for this one, but it was worth it. The pyrotechs in there, you can really feel the heat on your skin. If the waiting wasn’t so long you can be sure I’d go for a second ride.

That ‘Pharaoh’ on stilts… he was in character the whole time. Never smiled at all, even when a bunch of girls tried to tease him. One girl got so scared she ran… and the ‘Pharaoh’ chased after her… into one of the shops. It was so funny… her friends was laughing the whole time. I wonder if she’d find it funny. I wonder if she was actually genuinely terrified. 

 
The MIB ride, we decided to take the Single rider line, which only cost us 2 minutes of waiting. This is the smarter way to do it I think. You might not get to ride the same car as your friends, but you exit the ride about the same time and you get to share the same experience anyways, so what’s the difference? It’s not like you’re going to be talking to them in the car, you’d be too busy trying to shoot all the aliens around you.

I got to be on the ‘disabled’ car and since there were no disabled person on the ride, the seat next to mine was empty. Every rider gets his/her own gun, but I got to dual-wield 2 guns, which was awesome, made me feel like a badass ambidextrous super-agent. I was shooting different targets in different directions the whole time, which was totally exhilirating. I got around 100 as my score, another 2 riders in my car got about 150 each, but a young 8-yr old girl got only 9 points, so it brought down our average greatly. It was fun though, coz the group we were up against have 6 people in their car (we had only 4) and they got only a below 90 average. So we were declared winners. 
    
The Back to the Future ride has no Single rider line, so we waited in line for about 30 minutes I think. I especially like this one because we got to ride in a ‘DeLorean’ and the screen was so big it was actually a whole sphere-shaped theatre screen (I dunno what to call em). I know that this ride has been there for quite a while, so the ‘movie’ wasn’t in high def so it felt less real than I hoped it was, but still I enjoyed the experience enough to come out of it satisfied. Most of my friends say that the ride made them a bit dizzy but not me, I was pumped up and high after that one.

    

After that we just walked around being silly and take pictures… a lot of em.

   
    
I especially like this one… where I got to pretend to pry open the jaws of the shark called Jaws. That thing was huge, I think hanging by its tails it was about 25-30 feet tall. Maybe even more. I’m not really good at feet and yards. I’d say it was like 10 meters perhaps.

I think it was safe to say that we took one picture every 45 seconds of walking…

Then we headed to the Hard Rock Cafe Orlando, said to be largest Hard Rock Cafe in the world.

Next to Hard Rock Cafe was an NBA store, so I went there and got myself this….

I am in no way comparable to Billups… but I do like to play the way he plays.

  
A couple of pictures before we left for the day…

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The next morning we left Orlando for Ann Arbor after 5 days and 5 parks – Animal Kingdom, Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney MGM and Universal Studios. I wish we’d stayed a little longer so we’d get to get on more rides in each park, but we knew that time wasn’t a luxury anyone had, and you had to choose the ones you really want and not regret not taking the ones you didn’t so that you’d enjoy the day more. Which I think was the smart thing to do.

Ah, it was fun. 

After Epcot we returned to Magic Kingdom because some of us did not get the chance to go there last time, so we took the monorail and headed to Magic Kingdom.

This time I made sure I took some pictures with the castle.

 
If you look closely it says ‘Hong Kong Disneyland’ (look at where we’re pointing). That panel and the picture above it changes every few seconds… basically shows the history of Disney parks for the past 50 years.

 
Finally got a picture of me, the castle, Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse. You won’t believe how long I waited until this spot clears for me to have a photo of myself taken.

We only spent a couple of hours in Epcot, because we planned to return to Magic Kingdom again later in the day…

One thing I regret… I didn’t buy any EPCOT souvenirs… darn. I wanted a replica that durian-like sphere on my desk because I know that it would possibly be quite a couple of years (decades?) before I would get a chance to come to this place again…

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Durian, the king of tropical fruits… I love em!

Picture of the durian is taken from invisibleelephant.net

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Next: back to Magic Kingdom

The first of our 2-day Park Hopper quest… Disney’s Animal Kingdom. We took the 9am shuttle from our hotel near Downtown Disney and arrived at Animal Kingdom about 20 minutes after.

Park Hopper is one of the Disney Park packages offered that allows you to go to any of the Disney Parks in Orlando (Magic Kingdom, Disney MGM, Animal Kingdom) for unlimited number of times within the span of 48 hours. It is much cheaper than buying day passes at each park, especially if you plan to go to more than one Disney Park in a day.

It wasn’t even 10 am yet and Animal Kingdom was full of people. Unless you’ve waited at the gates since before the park was opened early in the morning, you would always see hundreds of people around — tourists, families, field trip groups, and of course the park staff.

A picture before entering the park. There were 3 signboards for Animal Kingdom… one with an elephant’s head, one with a dragon’s head, and other one I can’t remember (someone help me on this, please). We chose the elephant’s head. No particular reason though. Maybe because it was the middle one.

      
We saw the enormous Tree of Life from afar. One look and one might think it’s a real tree, but in fact it’s man-made. Inside the tree is a theatre where we got to see a Bug’s Life 3D presentation, which was definitely a lot of fun.

The Tree of Life’s bark is full of animal motifs… we can spot a few obvious ones from afar, but for some they are so small or hidden you really have to search.

A cute set of statues of Huey, Dewey and Louie with Daisy hiking along a small  stream. It looked like Daisy was really waving at us.

A must-do for anyone visiting a Disney park… photo sessions with the main Disney characters. We lined up for about 15-20 minutes to meet and greet Mickey and Donald. One of my friends remarked that all of us seemed too old to be doing this, but everybody does it anyways regardless of age, so we waited in line, being the only bunch of twenty-somethings without a kid in the group taking pictures with Mickey and Donald. I didn’t think it was childish at all. Someone’s that insecure, I guess. Anyway I had fun shaking hands with them, Donald even tried scanning the barcode on one of my friend’s t-shirt, which I found amusingly hilarious.

Then we went to a Lion King’s musical theatre presentation… which was awesome. Being the only Disney fan in the group, I was the only one among my friends who was able to sing along to the all the Disney songs they sang in the musical, even though my singing voice some would prefer not to hear at all. A lot of singing, a lot of dancing, awesome choreography. One performance I found most entertaining was a group of acrobatic ‘monkeys’— they were really good at doing flips and jumps and balancing acts, it seemed more like a themed circus show to me at times. Definitely an entertaining presentation I must say, the performers have really done an awesome job, no doubt.

    
Then there was the African safari ride, the Everest ride that we didn’t have time to go to, and the dinosaur show that we didn’t see. All because of time constraint and the weather, which seemed like it was about to rain, and it did, for a couple of minutes, which caused a lot of the outdoor rides to be closed, but then afterwards the sky cleared. I feel bad for the people who lined up for 90 minutes for the Everest ride only to find out that it was closed because of the lightning, thunder and rain. I was glad that I abandoned my waiting in line for Everest, otherwise it would’ve been a waste of one hour of my time.

        
 
The sky cleared in time for the 4 pm parade. The main ‘streets’ were closed, thousands of people lined up the sides of the streets to watch the colorful parade. We were fortunate enough to find a good spot to sit and watch without having to stand for hours.

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After the parade, we left Animal Kingdom via shuttle to our next destination – Disney’s Magic Kingdom.

Last week a few friends of mine from back in college decided to have a small picnic together by the beach in Bagan Lalang.

Of course, for me it’s another excuse to take more pictures.

The evening sky that day was not too bright with lots of thick clouds and the sun peering in through random patches of sky. Occasionally some sprinkles of rain came down, no more than mere 5 to 10 minutes of light sprays, and the weather was nice again. Perfect for an evening picnic.

The tide was ebbing that day so there were no waves or deep water for almost half a mile out. Close to sunset we walked out to the water to get our feet wet and take some pics. I was more interested in the silhouette figure I saw standing in the shallow water just looking at people, as if he was guarding something precious in between his feet.

Later when it got a bit darker I set my camera for CLS shots. I took a couple shots of my friends just talking and drinking before Zul asked me to take a picture of him being the ‘model’ for Seasons’ canned soy drink.

Hisham was our guest of the day. He flew back to Malaysia from the States for three weeks just to visit family and friends. It’s been a while since we hung out with him so any chance we got to chill out together with him was indeed treasured.

And of course, Hisham was ecstatic to get to see us too!

We decided to do some jumping shots before it got too dark. Being an amateur, it wasn’t easy for me to set up the shot with off-camera flash synchronized with ten people jumping at the same time. This shot was taken with the flash not firing, resulting in a very dark underexposed photo. Using Adobe Lightroom, I turned it into a black-and-white photo with grains not removed to get that ‘vintage’ feel. There are advantages to not delete failed shots. There are certainly ways to salvage them and turn them into something wonderful.

Finally after quite a few tries, the flash fired in-synch, and I was able to capture this photo of everyone having a wonderful time, albeit some shadows falling on some of their faces.

We finally separated and went our own ways after having some ghost stories and lame jokes told around an imaginary (read: non-existant) campfire.

This is a quick and short pictureless update.  

Right now I am still feeling tired from yesterday’s wedding road trip. 

For one whole day I drove alone to three different weddings in three different districts.  

In the morning, Norbaya and Sharifuddin’s solemnization in Segamat, Johor.  

Noon, Zulfadhly and Lily’s reception in Sungai Mati, Muar.  


Evening, Lailatul Nadia’s reception in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan. 


I had to cancel going to Faizal Tahir and Siti Munirah’s reception in Batu Pahat, because it was too far away and I would’ve taken two hours to get there, and another two to get to the next wedding venue.  


Also had to forgo the intention of going to Sarah and Shamin’s reception in Bangi because I was too tired.  


Anyways.  


My well wishes and congratulations to all my friends who recently tied the knot. May your lives be blessed by Allah always.