Spent the previous night at friends’ place for a birthday party with only 1 hour of sleep, I head down to Circuit@Tuas straight away with YG in the morning.

The circuit there is new, with no permenant shelters yet. The event organizers set up a row of temporary tents for activities. 7-11 and Shell, the major sponsors of the event had their own booths, showgirls were there too.

Despite the early downpour from 8 to 9am, the sun is extraordinary close to Earth yesterday. And he had an clear view of what’s going on at the circuit and my exposed skin.

For safety reasons, we were asked to wear a bright yellow vest before positioning ourselves inside the circuit for photoshoots.

Shooting in progress, photo courtesy of YG

Race in progress

During the demo session, professional drivers brought in their own vehicles and they even made me feeling like a professional photographer shooting a F1, hearing the engines booming, smelling the tyres burning, totally new experience.

Professional driver

I noticed a teenager among all the adults in the professional demo. His small size didn’t affect his drive skill at all.

Young driver in action

The organizer was very kind to add in a test drive for media, and we photographers get to try go karting as well! Although there is a speed limiter behind the accelerator pedal, I believe the top speed is fast enough for me, a first timer. The tyres have rather good grip on the track, thank to the seatbelt I was not swung out of the kart while cutting sharp corners.

No pain no gain, I ended up receiving a ‘Certificate of Participation’ on my right arm by the red hot engine while trying to unbuclke my seatbelt at the end of the race, unvoluntarily. Ouch.

Here is the complete photo collection of event photos. For original size photos, please click on image or go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/azcy/sets/72157605369100014/show/

Terminal 3, Singapore Changi Airport.

location and time: 7pm, here -

who took this photo by the way? i dare not to put my watermark. (ok i found out it’s taken by hendri.)

weather: hot -

krisandro fanning himself and chaodingo drinking cool beer (left to right)

people?

juzzywuzzy

wenderella and uray

and mr. wenderella (keith)

xinyun and  anthony

arzhou

ntt

CHAOsdingo

ridz84

and his friend loren (jasmine? (huh?))

malmaestro

hendri

daphnemaia and taitaitan

xizor2000

claudia

and adamzhang! (<-that’s me (duh…))

wondering why is claudia’s face so bright? she’s editing and uploading the yum-seng video she just recorded!

not to forget, uzyn (lao ban) and sekling (lao ban niang)

two more candid shots

and that’s all for tonight! click on photos for larger view (640 x 427)

people who came but not in the photos either because they are shy or the camera is shy: foxtwo and gennette

ok, time for my macdonald supper which is already cold~~~

ping—–~~~~~===== PONG!

Seriously, I think it is time to redesign the pedestrain traffic light located on Vistoria Street outside Bugis Junction. The crowd during peak hour have way exceeded its design limit.

People are stuck at the narrow passage way in the middle of the road and the bottle neck sets limit to the moving speed of the whole crowd.

Looks like an accident is waiting to happen.

Olympic flame lantent was brought up to the attack camp located at 8300m on 7 May 2008. Early this morning, mountaineers start to reach for the peak.

Attack camp at 8300m

Mountaineers getting close to the peak

The Beijing Olympic torch was ignited by Norbu Zhamdu at 9:12 am local time on Mt. Qomolangma on Thursday.

Featured model is my beloved Mont Blanc Starwalker again. This time with Starwalker Junior - the 5ml travelling pack.

Yes, this photo is taken by a camera phone. Don’t believe? Let me share with you few key factors on taking great photos using your camera phone.

1. Focus.

It’s better to have a camera phone which you are able to adjust the focus distance either through auto-focus or manually (using the macro switch).

While taking the photo above, my phone was around 5cm away from the main object. A camera phone without macro function will not be able to focus clearly at this distance. Even if you can focus on the object from a further distance, the perspective will be different.

2. Exposure (Brightness)

It is alway very necessary to be able to adjust exposure of photos in the phone itself. Because normal camera phone meters the brightness of photos using averagebrightness of the whole picture, the exact area of interest might not be exposed correctly. For example, street lights are often too bright in night shots, and during day time your faces are always dark while the background is bright.

By manually adjusting the brightness of pictures before shooting (with sense of photography of course), you may be able to produce much more desirable photos.

3. Post-processing

Digital cameras or camera phones has a smaller dynamic range (or exposure range) compare to traditional film cameras due to the limitation of electronic sensors. Hence within its ability, camera sensor try to keep as much info as it has captured and store in the JPEG file. That’s why photos taken using digital cameras are always very ‘grey’, or low in contrast. This in fact provide user a wide range of choices on which details are to be kept, the bright ones or the dark ones.

So it is always necessary to adjust the brightness and contrast of digital photos, and present to audience the essential parts of an image.

There are, of course, other factors which will potentially affect photo quality such as lens quality, sensor size and pixel quantity. But for now, managing the 3 points I have just mentioned will be good enough to impress you audience.

There two kinds of apples were put on the shelf next to each other. Having such a strong contrast in colour made me wanna shoot something interesting. So I migrated one from the red platoon over.

I didn’t shoot for free. Ended up buying 5 of the red ones. They taste good, but the skin is a bit thick though.

My friend saw the picture and wanted to do something funny, so he photoshoped away the red apple and posted this photo online.

Now it looks like I am the one who put a fake apple in the first picture. Shaite.

I felt so touched to see a list of names full of red hearts. Even 3 of my foreign friends added *heart* China in their MSN names. It is also one of the few times recently that such a large number of Chinese unite and react to a certain incident together.