ROBIN WONG

I had a visitor from Finland this morning joining me for shutter therapy, Matti Sulanto. I think this is probably the first time I have met anyone from Finland! Matti has got quite a story to tell in his photography journey, he has started decades ago in professional photography in the film era, moving on to the digital age, using many different formats. Previously he was using Nikon full frame system which he has since then switched fully to Olympus. The turning point was the introduction of electronic viewfinder that worked so well, changing the way he shoots, having the "what you see is what you get capabilities". He has never looked back, while he still flirted with other brands such as Fuji (which he did for a year), he found himself coming back to the Olympus OM-D system. His reasons: the camera that is so reliable, and yet small and light, producing image output that is more than good enough for everything that he does. Also, he commented that the current OM-D E-M1 is a camera that can do anything! 

It was such a breath of fresh air, listening to testinomies about the Olympus OM-D system from a real professional photographer! I have written lengthily from a photography enthusiast's point of view, but I dare not represent the voice of professionals. Nonetheless, it was clear that more and more prominent photographers are switching to OM-D and it is very clear that mirrorless is the future.

I brought Matti to my favourite street hunting ground, Chow Kit. I sure hope he liked the place, and found some nice shots there as well!

On another note, my M.Zuiko 25mm F1.8 has been missing from me for the past 2 months, I loaned it to a friend who travelled to Japan and Australia for holidays. The 25mm F1.8 was returned to me just a few days ago, and boy, did I miss the lens so much! I decided to just use this one lens for today's session. It was a short session, as I did have something occupying me in the afternoon. It was great to have the lens back and I foresee myself using it more and more.

Last weekend, on stage for the #Ohhsome Festival, one of the act I was looking forward to, besides WongFu Productions and David Choi was our local star, Darren Ashley. Halfway through Dash's performance, John Oommen, the lead singer from another band, Paperplane Pursuit came up and did a duet to their now very popular song on the radiowave, "Beat of Your Love". When John went on stage, the crowd went on the overdrive frenzy mode! I joined in the cheer and I personally that this was the best performance for the whole night at #Ohhsome Festival. 

Do check out their cool stuff at the official Youtube Channels:

Darren Ashley (DASH)

Paperplane Pursuit

All images were taken with OM-D E-M1 and M.Zuiko 40-150mm F2.8 Pro Lens

I am loving the good old OM lens, Zuiko 55mm F1.2 the more I use it. I have forced myself to just use this one lens on an Olympus OM-D E-M1 this time, shooting people that I get the opportunity to meet over the weekend. Using the 55mm F1.2 on the E-M1 is a lot easier in comparison to the E-M5, mainly due to the much larger, brighter and higher resolution electronic viewfinder in the E-M1, allowing much faster and easier manual focusing. Although the E-M1 has built in focus peaking to assist manual focusing, I still find it rather difficult to use for critically sharp photographs, and I resorted to the slower magnify the area to focus method, for better accuracy. What is the point of shooting if you cannot even get the images in focus in the first place? Accuracy is almost always more important than speed. 

All images were taken with Olympus Zuiko OM 55mm F1.2 lens, mounted on OM-D E-M1

I have been a huge fan of Wong Fu Productions for many years. I followed Wong Fu even when I was in my university days, since they first released their Yellow Fever (I saw the video some time in 2007 I think). Wong Fu Productions is perhaps, one of the biggest motivations to me, to pursue what I love doing, and dare myself to go the distance. I can relate to Wong Fu very well, considering two of the core members Philip Wang and Wesley Chan share the same age as me, but look at how far they have come and all their huge accomplishments! They started from filming just for fun in college, and as the Youtube age hit the internet, they took advantage of that and over time, they have improved in their film productions in every single possible angle, from script writing to cinematography. Their passion to go further, dedication to their art and surely, pure determination have brought them far..They made it, and they made it HUGE, turned their passion into a living dream, and have inspired millions of people around the world. 

When I heard Wong Fu was coming to Malaysia, I MUST go and see them. I managed to do that earlier this evening, at #Ohhsome Festival happening at Avenue K, Kuala Lumpur. They travelled halfway across the globe to Malaysia, and I must snap a frame or two of their photographs!

Oohsome Festival was a celebration of the power of social media, including Youtube, Instagram and Facebook. Many social media experts or celebrities, both internationally and locally were invited to perform, or deliver talks to inspire the general crowd. The headliner was surely Wong Fu Productions, and along with them also appearing on stage the same evening was David Choi, whom happened to be one of my favourite non-mainstream artists. Seeing both David Choi and Wong Fu, my Saturday night could not have been spent better. It was a night to remember, though my feet hurt so much from standing for more than 5 hours securing the standing spot before the final appearance of Wong Fu on stage. It was all worth it. 

DAVID CHOI

David Choi performed about 5 songs on stage, and totally melted the hearts of all the girls there. 

So Christmas is near, so is my birthday and I decided that I deserve something to pamper myself with. I decided to splurge (OMG) and bought something which I do not really need, but I do desire to have, an F1.2 lens. Unfortunately the Panasonic 42.5mm is just too far a stretch out of my affordability. Hence I settled with something low key and more wallet friendly, the old OM Zuiko 55mm F1.2 lens. 

I know the lens is an old one, and it comes with a bagful of imperfections. I totally understand that at F1.2 the image is soft and I do need to stop down to at least F2 to obtain reasonably useful and sharp results. I also understand that such lens will exhibit plenty of other flaws such as chromatic abberation, and well, I think many of you can fill in the blanks better than I do. The main point is not enough obtaining a perfect lens or the best lens, if I wanted that, I would have gotten so many other amazing digital lenses from both Olympus and Panasonic. The idea of using an old lens, was purely just for the fun of it. Who cares if my images are not exactly that sharp, who cares if they were all technically flawed? This is probably one of the cheapest F1.2 lens I can ever get (the CCTV lens does not count) and I am loving it so far!

Of course I went to the streets with my trusty OM-D and PEN cameras but some scenes compelled me to take out the Oneplus One and shoot. 

After all the heavy shooting in Vietnam, I suddenly felt the urge to use something simpler and more down to earth for this weekend's shutter therapy session. I wanted to use the Stylus 1 but I could not find one in the drawer hence I took a quick look around and found this baby, the Olympus Stylus SH-1. It caught my attention mainly because of the PEN styled classic design, and as I inspected the camera further, I realized the one important fact about this camera which not many people know: this is probably one of the very few compact cameras (well, that Panasonic FZ1000, which is not exactly a compact, due to the SLR-sized body) with built in 5-Axis Image Stabilization. The SH-1 has a 24x zoom range, which is massive for a camera of such small size, sporting focal length of 25mm wide angle to the farthest tele end of 600mm. Typically most people would shrug off superzoom cameras in a compact body, since anything beyond 8-10x zoom is deemed useless when the camera is shot hand-held. Nonetheless, the inclusion of 5-Axis IS changed that, and I was eager to see how much the 5-Axis IS benefited the long zoom of SH-1. 

This is not a review of the SH-1, think of this blog entry as me having fun with the camera, bringing it out for one full day, coming home with some quick snapshots.