click image to jump to fleinair

Kamen Rider Kabuto ( teh best Kamen Rider for this era, yeah ) figurine. Quite disappointing because the final product is not as nice as the previous figurine although it was taken during the same session. Sigh.

PS: I’m still waiting for that Fauna. >:)

I’ve wanted to “shoot” Khurshid’s figurines for a very long time, and finally I had the chance.

So, he suggested to me that he’ll bring his figurines and desk lamps to my house… only that I have to pick him up and send him back later. His house is NOT stone throw away.

So basically, this is house we set up the lighting. Yeah, we’re bunch of amateurs playing around with lighting. There was absolutely no diffusers, because I just can’t find any good material in the house at that time ( mom’s not around, she’s in Melbourne ). Oh, the room wasn’t dark though it’s just that the lights were TOO bright ( which explains some overblown highlights in the pictures )

Can you see Khurshid at the lower left corner?

He asked me what figurine he should bring. I said “something with awesome hair and clothes physics”. I was secretly hoping he’ll bring his Fauna ( so that we can all treasure the feminine physique, if.. ya know wat I mean. Heh heh heh ). But damn, he brought his Golden Darkness Yami and.. his bro’s Kamen Rider ( which is kinda awesome though… in a manly way ).

Here’s one of the processed photos. You can check other photos at fleinair.

Not the first time taking figurines, I took pictures of Yuhi’s Xenosaga figurines before. But this is the first time with this kind of lighting though. Also, since no diffusers, no proper background cloth, no this and no that, the session was quite cincai also, lol.

not so mobile photography

Oh, since there’s already some awesome lighting right in front of me, why not test out my phone’s camera capabilities too. I’ve heard of Sony Ericsson phone’s awesome capabilities but it’s time for me to fully explore my phone’s ability. Can it take awesome pictures?

Taken with Nokia N95

Obviously with that amount of lighting, it will come out good. What a stupid test. I wonder how it will look like with my old Nokia N90 phone though.

Oh, I did not only take pictures of his figurines. I also took some “other” pics too. I don’t collect figurines, I only have one small figurine that I put on top on my monitor ( pictured above ). But, I DO collect teddy bears though.. But that would be just plain weird…

This is just SO wrong

I’ve uploaded some of the processed photos to fleinair. But I haven’t processed any of the Kamen Rider pictures. Will upload it later.

PS: I’ll be waiting for your Fauna.. patiently…

Oh silly me. I totally forgotten about this. It was published for nearly a month and I didn’t posted it here. LOL.

The first video was publish as a celebration of GACC2009′s new website at www.whatisgacc.com. Second video was one of the many promo videos planned to be released before the event.

PS: No. Christian Bale is not coming for GACC2009. T_T

Done within 3 hours for EMiNA Cyber’s event : DaiCon. It’s a re-imagined teaser trailer for their teaser trailer. Their own version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFQNt0sQmzE

PS: Rally the horde… TONIGHT

Nothing gay here. Srsly.

Bored and felt like playing around with my camera. Oh, time machine required. Not great ( I’ve seen something more epic than this ), but not bad for a 30 minutes work.

Experience photographers might notice the flaws, especially the weird chromatic aberration. Shadows are bitches too.

Click the image for a bigger view.

PS: Ok, time to get back to work.

Oh, silly me. How can I forget about this? It’s the GACClite Opening Video.

It wasn’t completed in time, heck it wasn’t supposed to be that video for the opening. This video supposed to be one of the many promo videos for GACC2009. The original music was “Melt” by Hatsune Miku, but later it was replaced with “Plastic Girl” by capsule when I’ve decided to turn it into GACClite’s opening.

Oh well, a silly event gets a silly video, lol.

The challenge was to use ONLY my phone to capture all the footage. Yep, what you saw what I get with my “phone”. The secondary objective was to complete the whole video in one day ( obviously, I failed this part because I don’t have enough actors. Some of the committees weren’t that sporting, and being assholes when I invite em out for a video shooting ). Nokia N95 have serious aperture problem in video mode, I can only focus at least 1m away from the phone. Anything nearer will become very blurry.

Simple, but still I couldn’t finish the video in time. It’s not finished as in the credits were filled with random placeholder names. It wasn’t intentional, that is just my way of putting “lorem ipsum” for my personal entertainment during the editing. Also, the videos weren’t optimized properly ( white balance, color level, image sharpening, bla bla bla bla bla bla, excuses excuses ).

Still, I played it during the event day and the reaction was good. The random placeholder was indeed very amusing. Lol.

The original opening video plan was supposed to be a anime mash-up video clip using “Hero Comes Back” song from Naruto Shippuden. Since I don’t have enough time, I used that video instead. Seems like this is more interesting than the original plan, lol.

PS: Now.. I shall use “Melt” for something else ~
PPS: Anyone can guess how many Totoros were in there?

Edo and his April Fool attempts this year.

GACC2009

Carrot Loves You ~ Yeah

GACC’s April Fool joke this year was “NINJIN”. The site is still up here: http://ninjinnews.com.

The idea was to make fun of GACC and DaiCon at the same time. The rough idea was around even before DaiCon official announcement were made. If Cyberjaya have DaiCon ( literally means “White Radish” in Japanese ), then we Melakans have NinJin ( literally means “Carrots” ). Originally, the plan was to buy “ninjinnews.com” ( parodying “daiconnews.com” ) and put a poster only. But hours before 1st April, I’ve decided to add more stuff to make the domain purchase more worth it…

Surprisingly, it did fooled a lot of people. More than I expected, although the reaction was a bit different than I expected : people has been wondering what the hell EMiNA Cyber has been up to. Lol. Some had no idea it was Melaka’s work ( when it was OBVIOUSLY posted in GACC thread ). Totally didn’t expect that. LOL.

One of my friend came to me and said:

Friend: Edo, have you heard about NinJin?
Me: Um, yeah.
Friend: I think that’s the weirdest event that Cyber can come out with.
Me: …. ehh? O_O;;

Wow. I have very blur friends.

Comic Fiesta Forums

I wasn’t planning anything for the forums until few hours before 1st April. I attempted to change the forum’s language to “German”. Yes, that would be awesome. BMJ suggested something even cooler – change it to Russian. Heh, it would be funny to see everything in Cyrillic. Muahahaha.

Sadly, due to additional plug-ins installed it can’t be done with errors popping up.

So, I decided to do something less exciting: Added the word “boring” everywhere I can. So “Announcement and Rules” becomes “Boring Announcement and Rules”, “Chit Chat” becomes “Boring Chit Chats” and so on. I forgot to take any screenshots. It’s not that interesting anyway.

This is more like “fun” than “fooling” anyone. Oh well, at least the forumers find it interesting. Some however, thought the forum was hacked. I’ll prepare something… more “devastating” next year, if I’m still part of the committee.

Oh, Tokiya added Cosplay Competition Rules, a very elitist one. Lol.

My Blog

I just had to write something… very damaging to my reputation, lol. And I did.

I can explain.. I can explain.. I can explain...

I put up a post saying I’m gay… and until now, they keep on pressing my “uke-ness” everytime I meet these.. “yaoi” fans. It was so good that random people that I don’t know came up to me and greet me with “Hai Edo. Are you seme or uke?”. O_O;; ( It’s scary sometimes to know that a lot of people actually reads this nonsense packed blog ).

Oh well, happy to know that readers enjoyed it. Lol. I’m straight, and 5 breaks up did not stop me from being straight. STRAIGHT!

PS: Boring Sunday is Boring

Umm.. yeah. Have fun celebrating this heavily commercialized event. Have a NICE VALENTINES.

PS: Oh Gawd, only an otaku would understand this. What was I thinking?

Making it Nice-er

Wow, I haven’t made any guides for a very long time now. Been optimizing a lot of my photos ever since I relaunched Fleinair. I’m going to leak one of my tricks this time.

This time, I’m going to show you how to make an object in the picture to give more impact, or “focused”. I used a flower for this example doesn’t mean it’s limited to flowers only. You can use it on anything that you think is suitable. Your taste, you’ll be the judge.

This trick requires Adobe Photoshop CS3 since it uses the non-destructive Adjustment Layers. Similar functions are available in pre-CS3 versions but.. it does changes directly to the images which is not so good.

It's good, but it can be better

I don’t remember where I took the photo but I knew it was quite recent. The picture above looks ok, but it can be better. Open it in Photoshop.

Masking

At times, you don’t wanna enhance the whole picture using the same setting. You will want to apply specific enhancements at specific parts if you wanna go for the best results. Well, if you don’t care and wanna go for a quick enhance, you can skip this part and move on to the next part.

Make sure you selected the Image layer. Now, click the Quick Mask button.

The Quick Mask Button. Click it!

Select the brush tool, make sure the foreground colour is black while the background is white. Now, start painting the part where you wanna select. It should appear like this:

Yep, it's red

Take your time. I know it’s quite hard using a mouse that’s why I use my graphic tablet ^_^;;

Now, click the Quick Mask button again. You’ll start to see the ‘marching ants’ showing part of the image has been selected. Here’s how it should look like:

Selected

The part where you paint just now are unselected. To select the part where you painted just now, choose the ‘Selection’ tool, right click on the image and choose ‘Select Inverse’. Since I wanna work with the background instead of the flower, I’ll leave it that way.

Adjustment Layers

While the selection is still active, go to the Layers panel and click on the ‘Create new Adjustment Layers’. From here, you can make non-destructive changes to your images because it acts as a filter and has it’s own layers. For pre-CS3 version, you need to use the Image > Adjustment option. :(

Create new Adjustment Layer

I like my images saturated, so I’ll add Hue/Saturation filter.

Saturation Settings

I choose Green channel and added it’s saturation level. Yeah, i know it’s TOO saturated lol. But it like it that way ^_^.

Results so far...

So far so good. Remember, set it to the way you wanted.

Now.. let’s make the flower more “outstanding”. Click the adjustment layer’s mask, right click and select ‘Add Layer Mask to Selection’ if you wanna use the same selected part as previous adjustments. Add another Adjustment layer and this time, choose ‘Curves’.

Curves

That might look ‘complicated’ but don’t worry, try to play around with it and you’ll do fine. I set my curves to make my flower background looks dark.

Darker Background

After that, I selected my flower and played around with curves again, but this time I intend to give the flower’s texture a bit more contrast. You can learn more about curves from here.

Vignetting

Vignetting gives your image a shadow border ( it gave the impression that the light didn’t fully fall on your camera’s sensor ). It can give the focus effect if done properly. While selecting your Image layer, Go to Filter > Distort > Lens Correction.

Find the Lens Correction Filter here

You’ll get a big dialog box. Just look for Vignetting controls and ignore the rest. Set the settings to your liking…

Vignetting Controls

..and you should be done!

Here’s my final image. It looks better than the original, right? Well, it looks better to me. There’s are lot of Adjustment Layer tools you can play around with to get more powerful results. Go ahead and experiment, get your desired results ^_^.

Final Image

Comment or ask any questions, I’ll try to answer:

PS: DAMN! Forgot to save the image. Now I have to do it all over again before uploading it to Fleinair. T_T
PS2: Noticed I liek taking pictures of flower? XD

Friend: GIMME DAT LINK NAO. I’LL KILL J00!

WHAT!? DEATH THREATS!?

FINE! After reconsideration, I find it quite stupid not to show my FYP while talking about it. Here’s the link. It’s crappy, you have been warned.

FYP Remote Test Site Link

Do kill the background music once it’s loaded. We hate it, I know. I just had to put it in because it’s in the requirements.

The site is PicLens enabled, it would be great if you have PicLens plugin installed. Oh, don’t worry, I didn’t claim to create PicLens. I told em PicLens is readily available like Flash and all I need to do is implement it into my work. Lying is bad! The site will still work without PicLens.

PS: Yes, I know. It’s too blardy simple