Alexis Bistro @ Great Eastern Mall, Ampang

The Alexis Bistro is sort of like the more upmarket version of Delicious. Dad took me to Alexis for dinner once and it was really good! I have fond memories of their wild mushroom risotto. I think that I have this affinity for Asian/Western fusion restaurants. Sometimes one might have a particularly difficult Sunday deciding on where to eat; and some of your family members are feeling a little western and some a little asian. This solves that problem instantly.

The dishes that appealed to me were the western ones like the mentioned risotto and their pizzas. Their variety of pizzas have thin bases which gives you more crunch and a little bite at the same time. We had the seafood one which had prawns, mussels and squid. Digging into this was just so comforting, its hard to explain but the term 'comfortable' seems strangely appropriate for this situation.

KTJ Yearbook Photoshoots: 6th Form Committee

These are the people in charge of torturing the poor souls that walk through the fiery gates of Kolej Tuanku Jaafar. Why do I have to hunt for my senior's signatures? Why do I have to perform in front of the whole 6th Form? Why do you have to wet me with water? Well, its all because of this group of people.

Basically, the 6th Form Committee conduct orientation to help the new 6th form students settle in and make sure that they don't spend their first week in school holed up in their rooms and take care of other matters pertaining to the 6th form.. The other day I was helping them to take some yearbook pictures. Decided to try out the new remote flash system on real humans now! Enough practicing with the Ikea doll, time for the real thing. Really liked how the photos turned out. Would be great to have a little more time but we literally had a little over 10 minutes to quickly shoot everything during social hour (which ironically actually lasts for only half an hour).

I might have just been convinced to change my mind about flash photography. Its pretty good actually but the technicality of it can get annoying at times. Never knew that firing the flash at different positions and angles would be such an improvement from the straight on in-your-face flash that is notoriously blamed for making people look horrible. Will be doing more experimenting if I can find the time to pull myself away from the textbooks. Trials in two weeks!

Pesawat: Some black and whites

School has been crazily hectic for the past week and it does not seem to be slowing down. I have this to do list that seems to be stretching for over a mile. So for now, here's something quick on a local Malaysian band that helped play a gig for a fund raising event at school.

Ikea Model Shots

Just a few shots for experimenting with the trigger flash. Found some use for the Ikea doll after all haha.

Eyes that Pierce

"The eye speaks with an eloquence and truthfulness surpassing speech. It is the window out of which the winged thoughts often fly unwittingly. It is the tiny magic mirror on whose crystal surface the moods of feeling fitfully play, like the sunlight and shadow on a still stream." 

Henry Theodore Tuckerman

Photo shoot with the sister: Part 2

Its true that the best lighting happens during the first and last hour of sunlight. Thing is you only have so much time to work with but it was fun. No one would ever thought that the lalang field next to my house would make such a nice spot to take photographs. I really like this batch of photographs. You can't imagine the joy of shooting in daylight! Lately most of the stuff that I've been shooting are school events that happen at night. Working with the lack of light can get pretty technical and there's so many limitation.  Hopefully I'll get to take pictures in this kind of situation again. Good light is hard to come by!

Photo shoot with the sister: Part 1

The lighting at this particular part of the shoot is a little harsh for my liking. I blame the extremely unpredictable weather. One minute its cloudy, the next its burning hot. But well, we adapted. I tried playing with the remote trigger flash but that was a big fail. *sigh* Need to do more homework in that area before I can take editorial type pictures.

Nothing much to add here, hope you enjoy the pictures. By the way I visited the Nikon Centre at Berjaya Times Square today. Got to play around with the D700 and the 24mm 1.4 lens. The combination is crazy! Ahhhh, I want! Its really nice to have a centre like that where you can just go to and test camera equipment. They don't sell stuff so there's no sales pressure. Pretty awesome. You get to play with camera gear that you can only dream of laying your hands on.

Sneak Peak: Photo shoot with the sister

Its been a long while since I had a photo shoot with my sister. The last time was probably more than a year ago. She's always been my willing guinea pig to test out new techniques on the camera. Plus its nice to have some brother sister bonding time.

On another note, Chinese New Year celebrations have been going well so far. Mom cooked a feast for the four of us back home! Home cooked food is so comforting and I miss it so much. Even more now that I live on cafeteria food in school. Things like that make you appreciate little things that you have in life. We balik kampung today for a day trip to see some relatives and collect some ang pows. Despite my incompetence in the Chinese language it was still nice to see everyone again, all grown up. And once again we got to taste that oh-so-familiar curry and rojak me at that Indian restaurant we go to every year. This might be my last time visiting this restaurant with the whole university thing around the corner. Sigh.

I've also been on a Grey's Anatomy marathon. I started watching about a little more than a week ago. Currently I'm on season 3. So yeah, perhaps I'm spending a little too much time there. Its really entertaining although I reckon the life as a doctor would be less dramatic, in retrospect to television and its tendencies to sensationalise things. Certain episode were written so well it sucks you in emotionally to the story and you can't help but feel extremely sorry for those fictional characters.

Enough about that. Do check it out, I think its worth watching if you got time on your hands. Random thought. I am still itching to have my first Yee Sang! The only time when you have everyone on the table playing with their food.

Take care and Happy Chinese New Year =)

Pork Fest @Dave's, One Utama

This was one heck of a lunch. There's no better way to kick off the Chinese New Year celebrations with good food and good company. I think we can call ourselves the 'Pork Gang'; Daryl, Qi Hui, Chris, Grace and Pedro. A few days before school ended I was chatting with Daryl about pork and the good restaurants we encountered. Four days after that, we have six very hungry people with lots of porky food on the table.

We had a full slab of pork ribs, pork knuckles, a half meter pork pizza (though I thought that it looked like a whole meter), pork spaghetti, apple crumble, brownie with ice cream, and tiramisu. We wanted to order the suckling pig but they only serve it for dinner. Such a pity but this gives us a reason to revisit this place in the future.

I was trying out the new flash system and kept them waiting for quite a while because I was busy tinkering with camera settings. Flash photography is hard! Still have so much to learn in photography. I think after a while someone was saying something along the lines of "Can we eat already??".