Right to Photograph

After lunch at Mal's house, we stayed and chatted for a good few hours about various topics from photography to environmental issues :) Apparently there was a protest in Sydney yesterday about the right for photographers. Details of the protest can be found here.

How ridiculous it would be if you are required to purchase a license/permit to photograph at any of the public location/building! I know these "restrictions" mainly apply to commercial photographers but how are they going to police it? How are they going to know if I am not a commercial photographer or does it mean if someone wants to buy a right to one of my photo, it would be illegal for me to sell my work because I am not commercially motivated?

Here is a quote from the article itself:

"The Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority requires commercial photographers to pay a minimum $150 AUD ($141 Cdn) per session if more than 10 crew are involved. That's in addition to $65 an hour for a site co-ordinator, $65 an hour for security and an additional $65 an hour for cleaning. Each of those services must be paid a minimum four hours."

Seriously, if you were going to shoot a wedding at outside of the Opera House, do you need a site co-ordinator just in case you lost your mind or a security guard just in case if you were attacked by a mad dog. And, $65 an hour for cleaning? You cannot be serious!

Stop making photographers feel like criminals!!

Inception

Inception is a rather long and complicated movie to watch and digest.

I said long because it did feel that way to me unfortunately. Don't get me wrong though, it is really not a bad movie to watch but does it worth the movie ticket you pay for? You will have to decide it yourself I am afraid. May be because there is no real villains or heroes in this movie and because of that, I failed to figure out which character to get behind.

Basically the plot takes place in a world where a person can enter another person's dream by mean of "injection" containing powerful chemicals and sedatives. It is just like entering the "Matrix" except without the fuss of super computers and cellphones! Even better, unlike Matrix, if you die in your dream, you simply just wake up to reality! Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) has a special ability to enter people's dream to extract and steal their secret. He was being wrongly accused of killing his wife and hence, unable to return to US to see his two children. Saito (Ken Watanabe), a rich Japanese businessman asked Cobb to plant (termed "inception") instead of stealing, an idea into his biggest business competitor's heir Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). The idea was so Fischer would breakdown and destroy his own company, and in return, Saito promised to see Cobb back to his children. Inception was considered impossible but Cobb has done it before, he did it to his wife which subsequently lead to her demise.

Jin was complaining of a headache after watching the movie simply because she had to concentrate so hard to understand the movie. While I did enjoy the spectacular CGI and the fast action, the movie did leave me with lots of questions to ponder.

Will I watch it again? I don't think so but the movie will sure make a great discussion topic with those of your friends who have watched it as well!

Toy Story 3

I couldn't believe 11 years have gone by since the release of the Toy Story 2! Usually the reason for releasing sequels to a successful movie is to capitalise on the success of the original movie and more often that not, sequels are usually, to put it simply, bad. Of course there are a few exceptions and certainly Toy Story 3 is one of them. In fact, out of the 3 "stories", the last one could be simply the best of them all!

If there is a Noble price for consistently putting out brilliant computer animated movies, it has got to go to the folks at Pixar. It's witty, inventive, creative, funny and choked full of emotions! It can make you laugh and it can put tears in your eyes too. The show simply glued me to the seat and kept me begging for more like a little child!

I am not going to go into the detail of the movie, but if you haven't already watch it, you don't know what you are missing out this year guys! I love Pixar!

Sienna Lodge

We went for a short trip down to Yallingup for a couple of nights last weekend and it was fantastic. We stayed at the Sienna Lodge, situated at the corner of Cave Road and Canal Rock Road, nestled amongst the wine growing region of Margaret River. The accommodation was surprisingly good and, I might add, different but in a good way. It was so rustic and beautiful! Talking about good taste, the room even came with a bottle of complimentary wine produced right here at the Sienna Estate. That Momentum Semillon Sauvignon Blanc 07 by the way was pretty easy to drink and very fruity, great for novice wine drinkers like us :)

Unfortunately, both Sienna Restaurant and Cellar were closed until further notice (I really hope they will reopen again), and it's a fairly long drive to basically anyway, I strongly recommend anyone who decided to stay at the lodge to prepare plenty of food before hand or load yourself with tons of instant cup noodle, like us just in case you feel like munching away in the middle of night lol! Apart from that, it's a great place to relax even for a weekend and it's only a short drive to Canal Rock where you can enjoy spectacular sunset every evening!

I will post more photos at my PhotoBlog.

Good Bye Joey

Our dear pet rabbit, Joey died yesterday. It was indeed a truly sad moment for us...rest in peace our dear companion :(

Kick Ass

It's been a while since I have watched such a hilarious and crass movie as Kick Ass. The movie centered around Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), a regular high school teenager who has nothing much going on in life. He has only a couple of good friends and his high school sweetheart thinks he is gay. Dave wants to spice up his life by being a superhero like Spiderman or Batman, the only trouble is he has no superpower at all, not even one single piece of fancy weapon. He is only armed with a green dive suit which he bought online and a great deal of courage/stupidity. Lucky for him, there are two others who have the same idea but actually know what they are doing.

Damon Macready a k a Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and his even more violent and dangerous daughter Mindy Macready a k a Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) are vigilantes who work hard to stamp out Frank D’Amico Frank D’Amic, the top criminal boss in town.

I reckon it is a fairly good movie which will give you plenty to laugh about!

FlexTT5 x2

I couldn't believe how fast this shipment actually arrived from Hong Kong, thumbs up to those guys at DigitalRev, they are indeed the best in the game!

At the moment, I can't really write anything about these PocketWizards because I haven't got a chance to try them out yet. But at first glance, these are indeed serious toys (tools) that are very well constructed. I can't wait to try them out soon!

Poppo Korean & Japanese Restaurant

Well, as expected, we didn't go to the ANZAC dawn service as previously planned because we just couldn't bring ourselves out of bed that early in the morning :P As a matter of fact, we woke up around 10am in the morning, that means we also missed the ANZAC parade in the city this morning! In the end, we decided to head down to city anyway to find something to eat. First we decided on dimsum but as we found out later, most dimsum places had literally queues long enough to put Saturday nightclubs to shame! Actually, we were surprised that most of the shops and cafes in Perth were shut today??! Anyway, we ended up in a tiny Korean/Japanese restaurant on Barrack Street called Poppo. We ordered a fried tofu (tempura tofu) as starter followed by our mains. Jin ordered a sashimi rice (something like seafood bibimbap) and I had a tempuro prawn don. Overall, the serving size was very reasonable and the food standard was on par with those of more expensive restaurants. But the most importantly, the total bill only came to under $30!

Meet Joel Salom

Went to Fremantle on last Friday to check out the street events during the Fremantle Arts Festival 2010 but it proved to be a rather futile effort as I got the dates all messed up. It turned out that the event was actually scheduled for the next three days! We were going to go yesterday but we ran out of time (woke up too late to be precise). Fortunately, we managed to get our act together and made it back down to Fremantle this afternoon. It was a very family orientated event and we had a fantastic time down there. There were so many great shows by so many talented local and international artists, performers and comedians. However, I dare to say the show by Joel Salom was the best out of the lots. He is a great comedian, musician and a brilliant juggler, and his little robot dog (Erik) act is hilarious. Here are some of the shots I took during his performance, more photos to come on my photoblog soon!

Playing with lights

I am not really a big fan of flash photography, the reason I am saying that is probably because I totally suck at it, and I am. Last night I decided to get two of my flash guns and experimented on Jin in our lounge room. The first one was placed slightly to the right about a meter behind Jin and the second one was pointed towards a wall on her left. I quite like the results :) The three shots below were taken with 3 different flash ratios. I think I am starting to like it! Time to hunt for a bunch of PocketWizards lol!