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Malaysia International Fashion Week 2008

Posted by narrowband - 30/11/08 at 12:11:05 am

Today marked the first time I shoot at a fashion show, although the quality of the show was just so-so. I heard that the quality of models and designs on previous days were better. To be fair, that particular show I attended was actually a showcase of young talents. For their effort, it was commendable.

Continue reading Malaysia International Fashion Week 2008…

Shutter Speed in Lumix Digicams

Posted by narrowband - 22/11/08 at 11:11:19 pm

I realized that I’ve actually been more active on Facebook compared to the blogosphere. I still read my favorite blogs but because these days I don’t feel like sitting down and writing a blog entry, I resorted to uploading photos and updating my status messages in Facebook instead. Anyway, I wanna share with you a photo taken with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX07 compact point-and-shoot digital camera (belonged to a friend!).

(1-sec exposure, ISO100, camera braced against a hand-rail for a steady shot. Burst-mode was used to get the sharpest image)

That’s the KLCC Park seen from The Apartment Downtown at Suria KLCC, during one of its Acoustic Hearing sessions which are being held throughout November. Many Lumix owners do not know that they can actually vary the shutter speed of their cameras (under Normal mode, just go to Menu and scroll til you see “Slow Shutter”). There’re four speeds to choose from: 1/8s, 1/4s, 1/2s, 1s. Of course by convention 1/8s will be less prone to shakes and blurry photos but for night scenes like above, slower speeds are desirable (find a way to keep your camera steady during shooting).

Furthermore, under Scenery mode you can find Starry Sky and then you can select between 15s, 30s or even 60s exposure. These are fixed values for you to shoot stars (you obviously need a tripod!). But who says you can only shoot stars – you can use this long exposure to take other types of photos too. Technical note: If you don’t want to be limited to only these three available (fixed) options, you can use a black cardboard to control the exposure manually (place cardboard in front of camera lens during capture). I’ll leave it to you to think what type of photos you can produce with long exposures.

Shorttalk: Do you think the only way to achieve a ‘balanced’ upbringing in children is by having their father staying at home with them everyday? Does that mean men who travel or are often outstation/overseas will more likely to have ‘screwed up’ (just a figure of speech) kids? My dad worked in another state throughout my growing years and my sisters and I turned out fine!

Malaysian Education

Posted by narrowband - 08/11/08 at 10:11:13 am

For those of you whose siblings or relatives are no longer in school, I bet you couldn’t care less if it was the SPM season, PMR season, last day of school, or first day of a public exam, etc. I wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t for sis, who had just sat for her PMR exam recently – the last among my siblings to do so. And yesterday was her last day of school for academic year 2008. We were discussing about what subjects for her to take when she enters Form 4.

She’s going to do what her kor kor and jie jie used to do (and more) – study Accounting on her own and sit for the paper as an extra subject. Apart from that, she’ll also be taking some extra subjects which we think will be helpful in scoring more As. This made me think. As much as I like to say that scoring a string of As doesn’t mean you’re smart, both sis (the one graduating from her bachelor’s soon) and I are still advising her to go for as many as possible. “Take that one lah, free A wor!” I heard myself said.

That’s the reality of the education system in our country. Everybody’s doing it, you cannot afford to not join in. Furthermore, sis is much luckier. She can turn to me or my other sis for help. In fact I have prepared a whole stack of used (printed on one side) A4 papers to be re-used for teaching purposes. The papers are about knee-level high. We also like to use the whiteboards we have in our rooms. At the end of the day, what matters most is not the As that she scores, but whether she understands what, why and how things happen. The As will then come automatically (this theory is applicable up to STPM level only I think!).

Sadly, a certain group of people in Malaysia have begun to work the other way around – Target the As, nevermind if the students don’t really understand the subject. And a large number of these students have landed on my blog in recent months (since the UPSR week), no thanks to my commentary on spotting questions and distributing them in public. Since I did not agree to the idea, some of these hopefuls left lousy comments in that entry – some suggesting that I closed down my site. I have since removed those comments and closed the comment box.

I realized that although there’re differences in the way these students get (or try to get) their As, they have one thing in common – they’re all victims of our age-old education system that hardly promotes thinking in students, but kiasuism. When I told sis to take a particular subject simply because it’s easy to score an A, that’s kiasuism. Because a large number of students are turning to question-spotting tuition centers for help, many others decide to do the same because they just don’t want to lose out to their peers. That’s kiasuism. It’s the system that’s made us this way.

Sad but true. Can we not bow to peer pressure? Despite telling these students that what’s most important in life is attitude rather than As, are you prepared to let your siblings and children lose out on the rat race? I’m not…

Footer: Narrowband has two younger sisters and he believes that the Malaysian education system has much room for improvement. That said, he’s very impressed with the severe punishment in place for students who cheat, because recently one of his sister’s schoolmates was caught cheating during a PMR paper and has since been barred from taking public exams for three years! Also, despite having left school almost 8 years ago, he still looks forward to the scrapping of Moral Education from the SPM subjects line up for non-Muslim students.

Canon Photomarathon Asia 2008

Posted by narrowband - 03/11/08 at 10:11:31 pm

At least 500 people dressed in striking red Canon shirts thronged the streets of KL the whole of last Saturday. I actually got up at 5:50am for this event, which was supposed to last a good 12 hours, from 7am all the way to 7pm. It was the Malaysian edition of Canon Photomarathon Asia 2008.

Continue reading Canon Photomarathon Asia 2008…

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