Sunday, December 28, 2008

Happy Holidays

As usual, my wishes arrive a few days late :). But I guess better late than never! Happy Holidays everyone, hope you had a safe and wonderful holiday season with your friends and loved ones.

From Happy Holidays


As 2008 comes to a close, I am just beginning to realize what an eventful year it has been for the world and for me personally (that probably deserves a post on its own). I've spent the past few days on a break from all things related to photos and just relaxed, doing different things - ok ok, mainly just going back to video games for a little bit :). Finally got to finish Eternal Sonata - a Japanese RPG about Chopin and this fantastic dream world he enters while on his deathbed. The game had some of the best video game music ever (not to mention a few pieces from Chopin), amazing visuals and some of the most creative character designs I've seen in awhile (oh and a very interesting battle mechanism). At first I mistook this game as something for kids with the art style, characters, and premise but I decided to give it a try based on some very positive reviews. While it's not a perfect game I loved just about every second of it... I mean just the music and visuals alone was worth the 40 some odd hours I spent on the game. I'm also starting back on Ys Origin, another Japanese RPG (one of the more recent Ys games which also has amazing music ;)).

Anyways, I did get to go out for a quick photo shoot the day after Christmas. With recent storm in Southern California, there has been a lot of snow up in the nearby mountains so my family decided to take a quick day trip out to Lake Arrowhead. After all, we wanted to experience a white Christmas too :). We got there kind of late in the afternoon and wanted to leave before nightfall since we didn't have snow chains or anything so I only got a few shots in. Here are some of my favorites from the day (full album here: http://picasaweb.google.com/pingc315/LakeArrowhead?feat=directlink)










Happy New Years everyone, hope 2009 will bring happiness and many new experiences (as well as many wonderful photos) for you!

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

New Zealand Day 3

Sorry the long delay in between posts, a lot of stuff has been happening both at work (you know, like the launch) and outside of work. Personally I've been trying to take a short break from photography (and processing photos) so I can attend to other areas of interest and hopefully come back to photos with a lot more passion and creativity. I actually had day 3 photos almost fully processed 2 weeks ago but I got side tracked by a personal photo calendar project I was doing... Thanks to everyone who helped with that and provided valuable input.

Day 3 in New Zealand to me was one of those turning point type day where the number of potentially interesting photos grew sharply from the previous day. It was also a major turning point for the weather as the day started out completely overcast (and even slight drizzle to light rain) which completely dashed any hopes of taking a helicopter flight up to the glaciers. I was actually really looking forward to taking that helicopter, getting some aerial photos and being able to walk on the glaciers... but I guess I'll have to just setting for the view from the base. After the short visit to Fox Glacier, we drove along the west coast of the South Island before heading in land towards Queenstown (our destination for the day). Along the drive, we passed by two gorgeous lakes (Lake Wanaka and Lake Hawea) and this was right about when the weather started clearing up revealing some of the "classic" New Zealand landscapes... The full album can be viewed here: http://picasaweb.google.com/pingc315/NZTripDay3GlacierAndQueenstown# 

Here is a photo taken at the base of Fox Glacier... The original photo (left) was really kind of boring with the featureless overcast sky which also made the colors feel really muted. My friend Alex happened to send me a post of a technique he recently learned in Lightroom to make foggy landscapes look even more interesting (post here: http://blog.alex-kunz.de/2008/12/glow-effect-in-lightroom.html). What better way to learn a new technique than to try it out on a photo immediately? So I basically lowered the clarity of the photo overall to about -70, bumped up recovery to about 90 to try to bring back some of the blown details. This made the whole image kind of glowy bright feel which was cool, but really killed the detail on the glacier so I took the brush tool to bring back the details in the foreground (graduated filter would work just as well I think): +100 clarity, 22 sharpness, 35 saturation, 20 contrast). Finally I fiddled with the settings on the image over all by increasing the contrast and saturation a bit more but really bumped up the saturation of the blue (with a small hue shift) to emphasize the clean blue color of the glacier. While still not a great photo, it is certainly better than the original I think :).








Here is a photo from Lake Hawea, to me this really feels like "New Zealand"... the expansive blue lakes set against snow-capped mountains with a thin string of clouds. In fact, the native Maori's name for New Zealand is 'Aotearoa' which translates to 'the land of the long white cloud'. While this photo is an HDR composite of 3 images, the actual vista wasn't too different. In fact the main difference between the HDR and the non-HDR version of the image is that you see a bit more detail in the sky (and has more gray) and the lake water is a bight brighter more like turquoise rather than a darker emerald color.



After our brief stop at Lake Hawea, we stopped by the town of Cromwell to buy some fresh fruits... of course my mom and I completely ignored the fruit stand and instead started taking pictures... The places just had the largest field of Sakura (Cherry blossom) trees I've ever seen and almost made me feel like I was in Japan... BTW, in case you don't know, I'm totally obsessed about sakuras but have always struggled to take good photos of them...


I think the reason why I really like this photo is because it feels like a post card, you know one of those photos looking down a long path under the blossoming sakura trees. Just like one of those images you would find in the random "inspirational" PowerPoint you'd get in the mail.


While I didn't really need to use HDR (there is a similar non-HDR shot in the album) on this shot, I thought having the darker angrier looking cloud made the image feel a bit more dramatic. In the end, I think I just really liked the sun shining through creating the long shadows on the ground.



We arrived at Queenstown just before sunset and took the gondola up the nearby mountain for a great buffet dinner overlooking Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu. I managed to be one of the first ones up the gondola to get myself a bit more time shooting the sunset. While the sunset itself wasn't that great, the view from the top overlooking Lake Wakatipu was just amazing, offering a nice reflection of the nearby mountains basked in the warm light.



This is one of my favorite shots from the day... I just love sweeping vista... I mean you can see all of Queenstown, the mountains nearby, Lake Wakatipu and just see it extend all the way out to the horizon.


This is by far my favorite photo from the day... but there is a reason for this. In my home in Taiwan, my step mom has a laminated aerial photo of Hokkaido (at least that's what I think it is...) during twilight... I mean this image had it all, huge city with bustling city lights, large bodies of water... and this deep blue sky. For some reason that image just connected with me and I really liked the royal blue color of the image (white balance trick I believe) and the city lights against the darker water surrounding the city which really made it stand out. So when I saw this scene earlier in the day, I knew I just had to come back during twilight just after the sun has set but leaving enough ambient light for me to get some detail out of the mountains in the distance. Well, the sun set just half way through dinner so I had to just stuff myself with as much food as I could (only had time for 1 plate at the buffet and gave up on seconds or the wonderful desserts they had... I mean they had some amazing desserts) and just grabbed my tripod and ran outside. I think for this image, it was well worth giving up dinner and dessert... I ended up eating cup noodles back in the hotel room. OH well, such is the life of a photographer :).


Before getting to New Zealand, I knew I wanted to try taking more star trail shots and also try to capture the Milky Way. Day two actually was the perfect opportunity given the low light pollution of the area, but rain killed any chances of seeing stars. While Queenstown sill is a pretty large town with decent amount of light pollution, I was able to find a quiet corner along the coast of Lake Wakatipu during the walk back from dinner. I quickly set up my tripod and took a few test shots. This particular shot was taken at f/5.6 over an 8 minute exposure. I was actually really surprised you can capture that much of the star trails that clearly...

Friday, December 5, 2008

Improved Sharing, new album mode for picasaweb

So on Wednesday Picasaweb launched another set of new features to the public (full post: http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2008/12/improved-sharing-international-name.html). The most noticeable was probably the new gallery layout and icons. Personally I think this new layout is much more slick instead of the old dated 90's look to the gallery page. Another major enhancement is the integration with Google Translate for all the comments. Ever since we launched the Explore page, I've noticed that picasaweb actually has a fairly large (and very international) active user base! All the people started leaving comments in their native languages and I've personally made a few friends in Europe and other parts of the world. I started to get very curious as to what some of these comments were saying. For example: http://picasaweb.google.com/antonione67/Paesaggi#5268845901768672626 has a comment: "bellissima foto...simile alla toscana , ma profondamente diversa. Ottimo inquadratura. Brava" And now thanks to Google Translate... I now know that means "beautiful picture ... similar to Tuscany, but profoundly different. Excellent shot. Brava". While the translation is rarely perfect, it does help to get the point across, not to mention some of the failed attempts are pretty darn funny :) (case in point: "可惜好像故意照他掉頭髮的樣子" => "It is a pity as he seemed to intentionally look like the hair" when I really was trying to say that it was pity that it seemed as if I was intentionally taking picture the fact that he was balding - from  http://picasaweb.google.com/pingc315/NZTripDay2WestCoast#5272120541813486914). Either way, I love this feature and I hope it'll spur more comment activity and help people overcome the language barrier.

We've also just launched the new album privacy mode called "sign in required" which will really locked down the album to the people you've shared with via the "Share" button on the page. Personally I find unlisted just fine, but I guess it's perfect for those wild bachelor party pics.... er I mean photos of your sweet kids to share with the grandparents... If you share the album with a friend who does not have a Google account to login with, we'll generate a special invite for him to create an account with (or he can log into any existing account to tie the invite to him). Keep in mind that you can also add non-gmail address to your Google account on the my account page so you can add your yahoo, hotmail or whatever address all to your Google account so when people share with you, it will all just work regardless of the email they use. One extra benefit of using the share button is for us to be able to track who you've shared with but also to create customized gallery views. This means that when you go to http://picasaweb.google.com/pingc315 you will simply see ALL the albums you can view including unlisted and sign in required albums if the owner has invited you. This way if you don't have to worry if you deleted or lost the original share email... we'll remember all this for you to make it easier. Just make sure you share things with people using the "share" button or else we won't know about it... Hope you all enjoy these new features and start sharing all those photos during the holidays!

Monday, December 1, 2008

Happy Thanksgiving

So here is a late "Happy Thanksgiving" post... I've been fairly busy the past couple days stuffing myself full of great food (there goes that diet I was working on...) and working through all the HDRs I took in NZ (after 80 some HDRs, I can't even tell what looks real or fake anymore). But given the economic uncertainties (by uncertainty I mean the hell hole that we are in...) and suffering in the world (think Iraq, Mumbai, China... the list goes on), I had to stop for a moment and really count my blessings. I am really thankful of so many things in my life... For one, I have my health (I mean, I've sleep-driven myself to Santa Monica on numerous occasion and survived - please don't tell my van poolers that... But really, thank you God for watching over me.  This point hit even closer to home with Joe McNally's recent post.), the world's best mom that constantly watches out for me (even though I'd probably prefer she didn't), great group of friends that I can count on for support (no matter how stupid I am), a beautiful house to come back to every night, and a great job that I enjoy (yes, even on the days that I want to pull my hair out), what more can I ask for? Heck, even the Lakers are at 14 and 1... 

A few weeks ago at my brother's fellowship, he asked everyone to take a moment and think of things they would complain to God about (it's ok to complain, but one should try to think positive). I thought long and hard but really could not come up with anything, sure I could complain about how busy work is, how exhausted I am coming back from Santa Monica every night, or how I'd love to meet the "right one" sometime soon (these seems to be the most common complaints people had)... but honestly, I have no right (and no reason) to complain. All these things are so minor in the grand scheme of things. I really don't know what I did to deserve the life I have. Whether you believe in Buddhist view of reincarnation (and karma) or not, I can't help but feel as if I'm wasting away the good karma that I must have built up in previous life times... that I'm not doing enough to give back to the people around me, to the world. I could be doing so much more, like my cousin and actually going out to third world countries and helping out, making a difference.

Anyways, I digress, I just want to take a moment and thank all the people that have touched my life, supported me through tough times, put up with me when I'm being unreasonable, and watched over me. And especially thank God for giving me everything that I have in life, even though I deserve none of it. Thank you all.  Hope you have a great and most importantly, safe, holiday season.  Happy Holidays.



Monday, November 24, 2008

New Zealand, Day 2

Day two proved to be an even more interesting (and at the same time, disappointing) day than day one. Day one was spent all in Auckland (well, and the plane... and Hong Kong airport...) but to be honest, there was nothing special about Auckland... think of it like say... Irvine or San Francisco, except with lots of grass... So arguably day two was the real start of our New Zealand trip.

We got up real early... at some ungodly hour (even tho we checked into the hotel at like 1 AM the night before) just to catch the 8 AM Tranz Scenic (TranzAlpine line) train to go from the east coast (Christchurch) to the west coast of the south island. The train takes you through the beautiful country sides all the way to the gorgeous alpines of the south island. In fact, it takes you right through one of the places where they filmed Chronicles of Narnia, though I don't think I got a photo of it.... oh well. I spent most of the time on the observation car (just a shell of a car with a few railings, and a ceiling... and... really strong winds. Wind strong enough to knock you silly). By the time I got off the train, I probably looked like I've been working in the engine room shuffling coal all day and being the photo geek that I am... the first thing that I thought was NOT "oh my face.... gotta go wash all this off :(" but instead "oh my poor lens.... how am I gonna clean it!". Yeah, it's like that. Anyways, some photos from the day two album below...

From NZ Trip Day 2 - West Coast

This photo is NOT one of the photos I got from the observation car, unfortunately none of those photos really turned out all that well. This was instead taken from inside the nice, comfortable, air conditioned passenger cars.. with champagne and pâté. I really like two things in this shot, the power pole (yes I'm crazy) and the blurred sheep. I guess I like the motion blur caused by the train. And the power pole just serves as a nice anchoring point. The beautiful green grass set against the even more beautiful blue sky doesn't hurt of course. Oh, here is a bit of trivia, you see the sheet metal wrapped around the power pole? That is to prevent small animals from climbing up the pole and damaging it (specifically, possums I believe).

And the next two photos are taken at Shantytown, a old gold rush mining town that's now just a tourist destination (this is where we had lunch)...


When I saw the old antique steam train getting ready to move, I knew I had my shot. I mean, seriously, how often do you get to see steam trains this close any more (ok, it's not that uncommon, but set against this nice green grass and that perfect blue sky with clouds? It's once in a life time!). Most things are NOT meant to be photographed at eye level so I got down on my knees next to the train track and pointed my camera up. It made the small train look more impressive and helped bring in lots of that nice sky. The post processing was pretty simple. Bumped up the saturation a bit, and shifted hue towards more green (yellow -> green, and a bit more on the green hue itself). Increased contrast and lowered the luminosity on the blue to darken the sky a bit. But overall, pretty simple stuff.



When you have an antique train, in an old mining town... it is natural to take photos that have the old faded nostalgic look right :). Post processed in LR2, bumped the saturation down (I mean way down), warmed up the temperature (+59 and +27 tint). Adjusted the brightness, exposure, contrast and the like until I got enough contrast, really bright steam coming out of the train with really dark shadows everywhere else. Added a bit of vignetting for kicks. This probably is my favorite image from the day and pretty high up there on my list of favorites from the trip.

I'll start working on the photos from Day 3 soon. This is just the beginning... I haven't even gotten to the good stuff yet...

Saturday, November 15, 2008

New Zealand... Day 1

So I've finally gotten around to processing my NZ photos... starting with the crappiest set of NZ photos - day in Auckland. As nice of a city as Auckland is, it's just not very photogenic, at least I didn't find it very interesting. We got to Auckland in the morning after a long flight from HK/TPE. Our flight to Hong Kong was delayed by about 1 hour + another 1.5 hours of circling in the air due to typhoon passing through which meant that we completely missed our connecting flight to Auckland. We basically spent the better part of the day at Hong Kong airport. Not a great start to our trip, but at least we got to see everything we were suppose to and it all worked out in the end. Anyways, some photos from Auckland (album: http://picasaweb.google.com/pingc315/NZTripDay1Auckland#):

From NZ Trip Day 1 - Auckland

This was taken at the Mt. Eden volcano crater. Mt. Eden is the highest point in Auckland (natural one at least) which offers great view of the city. The crater was huge so I decided to swap over to using my 10-22 super wide lens. While I'm not thrilled about the tourist walking, I like having the path there to kind of make it more interesting (I do have a version without the path and tourists).

From NZ Trip Day 1 - Auckland




After Mt. Eden, we stopped by Auckland war memorial museum and the botanical garden next to it. These 2 photos were really bland originally, no colors in the sky (cloudy) and just lacked anything interesting (no colors to really jump out at you, etc). I decided to desaturated it a bit, made the over all photo warmer/reddish to give it the old sepia feel (but not actually sepia). I rather like the result, much more than the original anyways (another example of how lightroom saved my photo). Hope you like it too.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Mt. Rainier, a place of endless wonders (and dramatically different weather patterns)

Sorry for the incredibly late post (or not if you don't know when I went to Mt. Rainier). But I've finally finished process all my Seattle trip photos, this includes the final batch of photos taken at Mt. Rainier (which is the first time I shot more RAW than JPEG). This is also marks the second time I've used Lightroom to process photos almost exclusively. While my poor laptop definitely cannot keep up with Lightroom, I am finally able to get through 200 photos in a reasonable amount of time (roughly half a week) which is much faster than the amount of time I spent on the portraits. This is partly because landscapes are easier to batch process, and also there are less things I can do, it's pretty standard... I mean I do want my landscape photos to still look like photos... so I kept most processing light. The biggest advantage Lightroom has over Picasa is the ability to adjust each color channels independently. For example, if I find a forest photo too "yellow", I can easily shift the yellow hue towards the green. Or if I find the sky too bright, I can easily darken just the blues in the photo. This fine-grained control allows me to have far more control over what "pops" and get rid of the distractions in a photo... I'm finally able to bring out key elements that I want in a way that Picasa could never let me do.

Anyways, back to the trip. Our second day at Mt. Rainier was dramatically different from the first day, the difference was night and day...  Our first day there was mostly raining, overcast, and even snowing. But the second day the sun really came out for a beautiful sunrise and kept clear for at least the most important parts of the day (when my camera was out).

Day One:
From Mt. Rainier National Park Day 1

This is now the Not-quite-1000-dollar photo :). It was for this photo that I swapped out my 24-105 lens (for a wider 10-22 so I can get more of the stream) and then immediately after this photo... proceeded to drop said lens. The original photo is gray, colorless and dull. At the time I didn't have Lightroom so I asked for Joe's help in post processing it. He added some graduated tint, brought up the green saturation and some hue shifts to make the greens come to life. While it's not $1000 (cost of the 24-105 lens) in my mind it is certainly worth $158 (the cost of repair) :).


I like the moodiness of the photo, and the natural frame created by the trees on either side. You see the valley in the middle? Yep, that's where I dropped my lens :).

One of the few highlights of the first day... gorgeous field of wild flowers. I'm a sucker for these kinds of prairie shots, just too bad the sun didn't come out otherwise it'd look amazing :).

Day Two (sorry for the number of photos...):
From Mt. Rainier National Park day 2

First Light. We got up around 5 AM and raced towards Sunrise Camp to catch first light on Mt. Rainier. The clouds started rolling in just as we reached it but I was lucky to get off a few snaps. Unfortunately I didn't really have time to explore and find a better position so I have to live with the trees in the foreground. This shot actually reminds of me post cards from Mt. Rainier, the beautiful pink/purple morning light hitting the fresh snow on Mt. Rainier, set against a deep dark blue sky...


This is now one of my favorite pictures from the day (one of many :p). It reminds me so much of traditional Chinese brush paintings (國畫). I love how the ridges just peak above the clouds, especially that line of mist in the foreground.


This was taken along an easy hike next to Sunrise Camp. It's only about 10-15 mins away from the parking lot where I took the first light photo. If only I had know, I would have ran up here as fast as I could... Oh well (it was icy, I probably would have slipped and broke my camera or something).


One of the stories from Joe McNally's The Moment It Clicks is "Don't pack up your camera until you've left the location". This is certainly true for this shot... I was already heading back to the car (after about 30 mins photographing Mt. Rainier in the cold -- I lost feeling in my hands about 15 mins ago at this point and was basically freezing to death). About half way down, the sun suddenly broke through the clouds lighting the entire scene, the grassy field and Mt. Rainier evenly. Luckily I still had my camera out and got 4 or 5 snaps in before the sun ducked back behind thick clouds and the shot was gone. This is now my favorite shot from the entire trip. Don't pack up until you are in the car, you'll have plenty of time anyways (and much much warmer).


Growing up in Southern California certainly has it's benefits. Getting beautiful morning dew plant shots is not one of them. This was shot in a very overcast day, I popped the flash to give it more light and "pop". In post I shifted the originally yellow hue over to the green and brought out the reds to make this photo feel more peaceful and tranquil.








The above series of photos was taken at Snow Lake. Ironically we were originally going to skip Snow Lake due to limited time (and bad weather, it has been overcast the whole day since sunrise). About half way to Snow Lake is Bench Lake so the plan was to simply stop at Bench Lake and head back. Because JC and I were too busy taking photos along the way, his family and my mom walked ahead and for some reason went on to Snow Lake without waiting for us at Bench Lake (disappointing sight really). A bit confused, JC and I decided to keep going hoping to catch up to them. Another 20 mins or so later we bumped into my mom who has been to Snow lake and decided to walk back saying "Snow lake is so so, not very pretty" but JC's family is still there so we decided to continue on. As fate would have it, as soon as JC and I reached Snow Lake, the skies cleared up (really. like within 2 minutes) and it really felt like discovering paradise that is hidden in some remote location... That sense of wonder, amazement, joy... Since snow lake is hidden away in a valley, there was very little winds creating stunning reflections on its beautiful emerald surface. As if possessed, JC and I immediately picked up our camera and didn't dare take our eyes off the view finder. Click click click, shot after shot, we just couldn't take our fingers off the shutter, afraid the magic would disappear if we stopped (ok ok, we did hike around to see the different angles).  I double stacked 2 filters, 1 graduated ND (to darken the sky a bit) and 1 CPL (to add more saturation to the sky and lake or to increase the strength of the reflections). Within 30 mins, the clouds rolled back in, the sun disappeared along with the emerald color... the moment has passed. Thinking back, if we had walked any faster, we would be like my mom, missing this magical moment... the beauty, the peacefulness, the tranquility at Snow Lake was the most memorable thing for me. As we were leaving, I knew I got the shot, I got what I wanted out of this entire trip, but most importantly, I was happy.

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Portraits and Lightroom

So recently a friend of mine finally convinced me to try out Lightroom 2.0 to post process my photos. I usually don't like to heavily process my photos just to keep things fast and simple (and real), so I used Picasa 100%. But after doing the wedding photography album and watching my friend's wedding album, I decided to give Lightroom a try. It's not so much about making your photos look fake/unrealistic as it is more about enhancing the elements that are already present in the photos and using post to draw attention to those elements. Recently I had a quick portrait session with a friend from my brother's church, so I figured I'd experiment a bit with Lightroom on those photos. Some photos I went wild with the post, some I was more conservative. Overall I just wanted to explore what I can do with Lightroom, what I like, what looks good, etc. Hope people don't mind :).

The portrait session itself was interesting as well... I haven't done portraits in a very long time, not since my previous victim (I mean model) got married and I did their engagement photo session. So I tried to get comfortable with portraits again, trying out different poses, different angles, etc it certainly helped that the model's sister was also there as an assistant holding the reflector and just helping out (she wanted to learn photography so I've been teaching her what little I know). The session started a bit late in the afternoon which meant I got a few good hours of nice light, then came golden hour which has always been a challenge for me doing portraits (i.e. making sure the skin tone looks flattering instead of really orange). I first started off with the easy shots, tight close ups using the long telephoto lens. Usually this is the easiest thing to start with as you don't have to worry about posing and background nearly as much since you just focus on the face. You just have to make sure your timing is good and she has a good smile on... then just click away! As I got a bit more comfortable, I swapped out to a 10-22 super wide for some environmental portraits which is much much more difficult as I not only have to worry about her pose, exposing for the environment, and controlling the distortion caused by the 10-22. In the end, I got a few shots that I liked, but overall I didn't think it was a great session for me, poor posing and poor interaction with the model, not enough to get her engaged and relaxed. Anyways, a big thanks to both the model and her sister. Here are some shots from the session.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Change is here.

I'm sure many people were glued to the television last night, watching closely as the election results came in. Some were ecstatic, others were probably furious and disappointed. Regardless of which side you are on, no one can deny the fact that history has been made.

During the whole time of the Obama's speech, I couldn't help but wonder the types of photos people were getting, both everyday people taking snapshots their participation, and the professional journalists hired to document history. Have you noticed how the two candidates have been photographed? Or paid attention to the lighting, angle used, etc in the photos published in the news paper? Maybe I'm biased (or just don't understand how to interpret photos)... I often find McCain's photos taken from a low perspective, giving an impression of power and authority; makes him look fearsome. Obama's photos on the other hand seems to be more eye-level, more intimate/personal and emotional. Anyways, the whole time, I wondered what The Big Picture would show for this historic event... and here are their photos: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/11/the_next_president_of_the_unit.html. It is interesting to look at each photo, and try to figure out what the photographer is trying to convey, is it a message of hope? Is it a personal side of Obama, making him feel more like one of us? I wonder what images would have shown up of McCain won. Would it be in the same style? Same types of message?

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Halloween....

So Halloween just passed, and as part of the office tradition... everyone dresses up (well, it is highly encouraged) and we hold a parade with prizes and stuff. For the first time in years, I dressed up for Halloween (for those who knows me... the last time I dressed up was when I put on a suit of cardboard armor with cape and the whole deal. Oh and a 5+ ft long bastard sword made out of wood). I got dragged into this year's Halloween festivities by a few coworkers, while I wasn't able to help them with the making the costumes (mostly due to my vanpool and work schedule), I really appreciated their insistence on including me in the fun :).
I know they've put a lot of effort, heart and soul into making each outfit... here are some photos:




Yep! They made sushi costumes! Uni, Tako, Tamago, Salmon, Salmon Roe... made from pillows, and fabrics... they even made cute little wasabi hats with ginger!


Then there was me...



as the sushi chef! 

Together our group won the best group costume and got a nice restaurant gift certificate as reward. It was great fun I just wish I had more time to participate in it. Oh well, maybe next year :). Happy (belated) Halloweens everyone. Hope you had a safe fun weekend.