The eyes of the sky.

Directly translated from Chinese words, “Tian1You3Yen3” means “the sky has eyes“. The meaning behind is actually telling us that everything that we had done, have been doing, are doing, thinking of doing , will be doing would be taken into account and we will get the effects later. The sky is above us and always watching us. This is a Chinese belief that always remind us not to do bad things / behave immorally which however we always forget or don’t even want to believe it.

Let’s forget about any religions or believes, but we must always know that there is a law of cause and effect. It is as simple as “we eat therefore we are not hungry.”

Dare you to do illegal things again? :p You may tell me that you will do it when you can’t see the sky or you may even do it undergroundly or under-tablely where you hide yourself from the sky but what I can tell you is that the sky is the air around us. It is watching us from beside us as well. Hehe… Where else do you want to hide?

I’m not trying to scare you or force you to believe in a belief, but I would like to remind you that you will be held responsible for what you have done because everything has its effect and consequences.

We are in Ipoh now and I wake up early again, the sky reminds me this morning and I would like to share this idea with you. It’s Monday again, and I wish you have an excellent week ahead by having a clear mind on everything you are doing and will be expecting their consiquences accurately.

 
Light of the Night Series - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Gallery.

A visitor asked me the following questions.  Thanks to the questions because it’s a good time for me to tell the scene behind the making of the “Light in the Night” series.  I hope that she doen’t mind that I share her questions with our readers.

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What inspired you to create the light in the night images?
Years ago, before I had my first camera, I read about long time exposure technique on a magazine, and I wanted to try but I haven’t got a camera yet. After I have got my first camera with manual setting available, I found that I can do more with that technique. Camera shake is my major problem until now because I don’t like to carry my bulky and heavy tripod everywhere. Instead of bluring it, why not I paint it.

Which photographers if any have inspired or influenced you?
I did come across some light trail photos from various photographers, but I don’t know / forgotten who they are. They took standard car trail photos on static tripod, but not as crazy as me where I intentionally moved the camera. Later I found that others has done similar work as mine, google it and you will find that.

What do you want your images to portray?
Random trails can mean nothing, although the exact outcome is unknown before the photos is taken, and the lines / shapes may be meaningless to those who doesn’t accept it, but when the randomness is captured and made permanent, it is the records of the combination of our mind and our surounding at a very short moment when the shutter release is pressed. It gives random effect because our mind and the surounding are totally random and have endless of possibility. If we have the ability to analyse the pictures, we can use it as a emotion detector or even fortune teller. It depends on how deep we can look into it. The conclusion is the pictures express our mind.

I’m not the first one who make this type of photo nor the best, but I strongly believe that the outcome is affected by our mind where it includes emotions, feeling, and many thing more. I suggest that you try your own with different emotion such as happy, angry, sad, calm etc. I’m sure you get different effects.

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Well, this is something crazy that I have done, but if you want to know more about the craziest thing I have done in photography, please read here.  Photography and Me - Part 2.

I also have a question to everyone, did you notice if the movements was too fast, it recorded dots instead of a line. Can someone explain?

Our friend got this while she was selling CNY items in the market, she said that someone had given her this.

It looked cute and we quickly took the picture of it.  It was made of 3 different colours balloon.  On the face, eyes, ears and mouth of the puppy, it was drawn using a permanent marker pen.  The puppy’s eyes looked sleepy.

This is a catogory of art called balloon modeling / balloon twisting which usually used to make balloon in animal figures.  We can always see clowns making animal balloons.  They usually use long-shaped balloons to make anything.

Can you use balloons to make something?

It is amazing that everyone of us on the Earth have the right to vote using our light switch. The way to vote the Earth is as simple as switch off our light for 60 minutes on Earth Hour on Saturday, 28 March 2009, 8:30-9:30pm.

If you ask why to vote? The following is the answer.

[WWF are urging the world to VOTE EARTH and reach the target of 1 billion votes, which will be presented to world leaders at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009. This meeting will determine official government policies to take action against global warming, which will replace the Kyoto Protocol. It is the chance for the people of the world to make their voice heard.] - Quoted from voteearth2009.org

ColinJong.com supports this campaign by adding the Vote Earth Banner. The Banner fit our theme perfectly.

Here comes an important issue !!!

First, if you are willing to take part? If not, you don’t have to continue reading the following.

If you are going to Vote Earth by switch off your light, will you light up candles? If yes, you generate CO2 and it won’t help in solving global warming. Therefore, we should act wisely in the dark.

SiewPeng and I have a chat with a Doctor and his wife, and as I mention to him about Earth Hour, he asked me a question, “What if everybody light up candle? Doesn’t it help in generating heat for global warming?” He has pointed out an important issue and I wish to remind everyone here. I agree that in many religions, candle means brighness or anything good, but for Earth hour personally I think that it is inappropiate.

You may ask, “What should we be doing in the dark?” Yes, that day will be a special day that only happen once a year. Therefore we should do special things right? I have a few suggestion:-

1. Pray.
2. Close you eyes, dig your mind and create a poem about our Earth and Mother Nature.
3. Have a chat with your family and neighbours by putting some chairs outside your house under the moon light.

Please comment and tell us more your “ideas in the dark”.

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To Kuching Citizens who plays fire crackers:
You can burn your money by playing fire crackers on 12am midnight on Chinese New Year, you did not care that it is illegal nor aware that it is dangerous, and most importantly caused pollution to the air, generate poisonous gas, which directly cause global warming. I have the evidens here. Don’t you feel guilty by having fun and kill the Earth?

To Kuching Police:
Have you done what you should have done to reduce people playing fire crakers or you did something that filled you pocket?

I am only pointing to Kuching because I was in Kuching during Chinese New Year. If possible, I will create a vote. Please vote for no fire crackers in Chinese New Year. I suggest that WWF records the fire cracker sound track and distribute it to Chinese so that we can play the sound track loudly during Chinese New Year instead of the real fire cracker. :p I don’t want to cause offence to Kuching Chinese or any Chinese, I am also Chinese from Kuching, but if you think wisely and logically, you can feel that our Earth is sick now and what you have been doing is wrong. And remember my word, “If nobody tells us that we ourselves are wrong, we will be very unlikely to have an opportunity to know that we are wrong without self awareness.”

You can give any comments, but they will be moderated first before the comments appear.

What do you think it is? Is it a leopard? Does it look like a leopard? Hmm… His face looks long and his chin looks sharp however he doesn’t look like a leopard because leopard ususlly has spots on their body. He is actually one of our Siamese twin posing lazily one day and being caught in the act on camera. He looked really surprised and shocked too.

Let me tell you a secret: The picture above was photoshoped. My brother took these pictures, and when I first looked at the unedited picture, the word “Leopard” appeared in my mind because of the angle of taking this photo made the cat’s face turned long and fierce. I wanted to post the original photo, but I found that it will be more “persuasive” if I make his face even longer. :p

My brother was pratising using his camera. This is the moment when the cat opened his mouth at the maximum width. The Burst / Continuous Shooting mode in the camera helped my brother to take more than 1 shots per second and select the widest-opened-mouth of the cat. He has taken good photos, and thanks to him for giving me the pictures and I can share them here. If our old camera has a good continuous shooting mode, I think I can take more action of the romantic bird couple (a previous post in Aug 2008).

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Need for Speed

“Need for Speed” is a computerised car racing game where the player need to speed the car on the computer monitor. I played similar game - “Carmageddon” and it made me drive faster for real car. Luckily I have not played this game since I stopped using Windows 98.

It’s Monday again, it’s the time to shift into gear # 1 and speed again. DO NOT SPEED ON VIHECLE, BUT SPEED ON WHAT WE SHOULD BE DOING.

There are two elements in this post that are related to speed. Can you identify them? First, The leopard. It has the ability to run at 60kmps. Cheetah, an animal that looks similar to leopard can even accelerate from static to 110kmps in 3 second, which is only a bit slower than F1. Second, the Burst / Continuous Shooting mode of the camera. Nowaday, camera performance getting faster and faster. My brother’s camera (Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ28) can shoot up to 13fps in lower resolution. Canon PowerShot SX1 IS can even shoot up to 4fps at full resolution of 10Megapixels.

What is so important about speed? It allows you to reach your destination in short time efficiently. While I was studying in Australia, I learned to walk faster, because Australian walk faster compare to Malaysian. I have also trained myself to have the ability of running down the staircase 2 steps at one time in very fast speed and never fall down (:p touch wood, it’s not a good habit and please do no learn it, very risky). In computer world, I always teach my clients to use the keyboard shortcuts or other efficient methods because if you save 2 seconds in one command such as Blod, Italic etc, you will save countless of time on thousands of command.

If you know how to drive a car, you will know that gear #1 gives highest acceleration to push a car from static to gain momentum and reaching top speed. Since today is the beginning of the week, we need gear #1 to move us from weekend mood to working mood, unless you were working yesterday then you may still maintain gear #5. But before we press hard on the accelerator, we need to know where is our destination. Do you know that what are you going to accomplish this week? After you have a clear vision on the path that you are going to take, now you can go ahead in full swing mode.

Reminder #1: Speeding is useless if the destination is unknown. If we move in the wrong direction, we will need to redo the work again and it waste our effort and not effiecient at all. However sometime we cannot wait until the direction is 100% clear, because it may never happen and we will stay still forever. This is the both side that we need to take care of. And this process is called the process of “Obtaining Experience”. For an experienced job, where you can close your eyes and do it, ths process is not necessary.

Reminder #2: Speeding is not worth it if you need to sacrify important things in your life. For example: Safety - Driving too fast and time extra time we gain cannot compensate any regret that happen. Health - Eating too fast won’t give you any extra nutrition, but will cause problem to our body digestion system.

Reminder #3: Speeding on the wrong thing will make you get nothing.

It’s lunch time now, let pump our petrol now and we will be able press the accelerator hard later.