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Red Cliff by John Woo is a movie dramatization of the famous Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel and to kick off the movie’s launch in Singapore, some of the cast made an appearance at, of all places, Plaza Singapura. Great news for me as my office is just next door!!!

So the event started at 7pm, and I got there at 6.15pm (couldn’t leave the office too early!), and to my dismay there was already a bunch of people who had set up their cameras right in the middle of the area in front of the stage. And they had big cameras and flashes. And ladders. I could’ve sworn that I’ve seen them before at another celebrity/fashion shoot in which they campled right in the middle with big cameras and flashes and stood on ladders. Rumour has it that they are known as the ladder gang. I ended up at the left side of the stage with a very poor angle, but I remained in good spirits!

The event kicked off with two emcees (Jiafa 93.3FM and Cai Li Lian from 97.2FM) doing their usual thing to get the crowd excited by playing some games and talking a lot. In Mandarin. I kept myself entertained by snapping photos (and stupidly draining my flash battery in the process!).

Cai Li Lian, Love 97.2FM radio deejay and livewire emcee.

This dude admitted that he was really perspiring beneath his armour!

And this dude looked a bit like Jay Chou.

This dude just enjoyed posing for the camera. He actually held that pose for me to take a photo. Twice!

Finally, after 30 long minutes of entertaining myself and wasting batteries, the cast appeared!

From left to right - Chang Chen, Lin Chiling, Zhang Fengyi.

However, the real star of the night, judging by the number of flashes going off, was none other than Lin Chiling (or Lín Zhì Líng). Apart from being one of Asia’s top models, Lin Chiling also holds a double major from the University of Toronto and the title for sexiest legs in Taiwan. Tall on beauty and high on IQ, some people just have em all! For those of you closer to me, you’d have known that I wanted Ashley’s chinese name to be Zhi Ling. Didn’t happen though due to wifey protesting that it sounded too much like hers (does Zhiyi and Zhiling really sound alike?).

At 1.74m, man, she is tall.

Behold - Taiwan’s sexiest legs!

Unlike her tall and leggy western model counterparts, Chiling has a very saccharine sweet look.

Genuinely making an effort to pose and smile for all her fans and the masses of photographers in front of her. Even the ladder gang didn’t faze her!

Whoa, I think she looked right at me!

My flash batteries were sputtering at this point thought I think it was really starting to feel the onset of diabetes.

Alway carry a super zoom lens like the 70-200mm with you to these type of events. It is heavy, but gets you these type of close-ups.

As a big thank you from the people of Singapore, the cast is presented with teddy bears from the Build-a-Bear Workshop.

Photography notes:

1. As mentioned in a previous celebrity shoot post, the key to getting good pictures at these kind of events is to arrive early.
2. When stage lighting is poor, flash is a must. All photos above were taken in Manual Mode, f/2.8 - f/4, 1/100s, ISO 400. SB800 was set to TTL mode with a compensation of -2/3EV (that’s two thirds of a stop down).
3. A useful tip I learnt is that it is ok to use a higher ISO even when using flash in order to ensure that there is a good balance of ambient light captured. Of course, I could’ve used a slower shutter speed instead like 1/60s but I didn’t want blurry photos due to hand shake.

Popularity: 13% [?]

This is me taking a break from editing my Hawaii photos and having a go at some newly acquired studio lights and backdrop.

This photo session actually came about in a very strange way. Ashley and I were lying in bed with mummy who was already fast asleep (I think it was 9.30pm?) and Ashley was still making lots of noise. Or rather, talking to herself. She obviously wasn’t sleepy at all and when I asked her what she wanted to do, she said “Take picture.” When your two year old says she wants to take pictures, you take pictures! And, did I say mummy was already fast asleep? Heh heh…

This series is Ashley wearing a princess dress from Tom & Stephanie and a tiara from a Barbie princess toy set.

We started session with Ashley doing some classic show-off-my-dress-and-look-at-how-cute-I-am poses.

Swaying with the dress.

A very long 5 minutes later, Ashley was bored of standing at the same spot so she took off her tiara and started dancing around. This is where the musical piano comes in (to keep the tempo) and lots of patience (stay in the frame, stay in the frame!). This was also a good opportunity to practice photographing dynamic poses. Dynamic posing refers to the style of adding movement, or implying movement, through gestures.

Turning around and looking at the lights.

I want to be a ballerina!

Another 5 minutes, and Ashley was off to bed, this time exhausted and quite ready to hit the sack. She was definitely seeing stars at this point! (Did’ya get the joke? :P)

Photography Notes:

1. Both the main/key light and accent light were set to F8 (measured using an incident meter at 1/200s)
2. A 12-degree honeycomb grid was placed in front of the accent light to focus a nice outline of light on Ashley’s left. On hindsight, a smaller grid might have worked better (i.e. bigger spread of light) because Ashley couldn’t stay at one spot.
3. Music is a must to keep the rhythm or tempo of the shoot and to keep Ashley entertained! This is certainly a useful tip when shooting studio portraits in general.

Popularity: 16% [?]

There are so many things I miss about Hawaii - the cool weather (hot but not humid), beaches (white sand and turquoise water), food (everything is served twice the portion of what we have in Singapore), friendly people (aloha and mahalo!) and shopping (everyone thinks I’m a Jap tourist) among others. But what I really miss is being able to end the day looking into the golden sunset with not a ship in sight along the horizon. I can’t remember when I last saw a good sunset in Singapore…

These pictures were taken along the beach at the Hilton Waikola on Big Island (Hawai’i).

Popularity: 42% [?]

[20 Apr 2008] Did a simple shoot for an internal company photography contest a few weeks ago using my new humble home studio and here is how it turned out. The theme was “Communicate”, and for lack of better ideas, I went for the good ol’ toddler doing something cute routine. Quite pleased with the results considering everything was set up and done in less than half an hour, i.e. about the average length of time it takes Ashley to get bored!

Hey, the phone is ringing! I think it’s for you!

Hayo hayo wooish dish?

Some other shots of Ashley warming up taken from mummy’s camera:

Hip rotation

Touch your toes

Photography Notes:

1. One shoot-through umbrella with SB800 at 1/8 power placed 1.5m away from Ashley’s right acted as the key light and to produce nice catchlights (that nice big sparkly white dot in the eyes).
2. White reflector placed 0.5m away from Ashley’s left provided the fill light.
3. White foam board placed underneath Ashley diagonally pointing towards her to balance out shadows under her neck.
4. One SB800 placed <0.5m behind a white cloth background firing at 1/16 power towards it provided the high key lighting effect.
5. Camera settings: Manual, f/8, 1/80s, ISO200.

Popularity: 64% [?]

[9 Feb 2008] The Singapore Botanic Gardens has undergone a bit of a spruce-up and there are more amenities now like a food court at the entrance near Gleneagles. This is where we had lunch after Ashley’s weekly morning class at Julia Gabriel and the food there was not too bad. A bit pricey, not much variety, but at least it tasted ok.

We also decided to take some pictures of Ashley at the National Orchid Garden and the only thing working against us was the harsh mid-day sun. Good thing Ashley was in good spirits and after a quick after-lunch nap, we were all raring to go!

The Orchid Garden is about a 10-15 minute walk from the food court and costs about $5 for adults to enter. It’s FOC for kids of course!

Taken in front of Burkill Hall.

Somewhere behind Burkill Hall under a staircase.

Another one from the same spot with Ashley doing a pose!

This was taken at the VIP Orchid Garden.

Another one at the VIP Orchid Garden. We’re starting to feel special!

Sad to say that I think at somewhere between this point, I dropped Zhiyi’s Canon IXUS 860IS compact camera. We only realised it was missing after getting home and the National Parks Board didn’t get anything in their lost and found when we checked later. Must really be more careful in the future and pay attention to who is carrying what!

At the flight of steps between Burkill Hall and the Tan Hoon Siang Mist House.

Inside the Tan Hoon Siang Mist House.

Photography Notes:

1. Used a reflector to control shadows although it wasn’t necessary at points when the sky was overcast. To explore using this and an off camera flash to produce bigger catchlights.
2. Bringing a portable toy piano was a good idea as Ashley had more mood to pose when there was music playing.
3. Ashley gets tired after a while so need to try to focus on just 2 attractions in the future and not spend more than 5-10 minutes at each point.
4. When mummy is tired, the shoot is effectively OVER!

Popularity: 69% [?]

Whenever I see Ashley doing this…

Bliss!

Popularity: 62% [?]

As part of a campaign to promote Taiwan, the Taiwan Tourism Bureau (TTB) held a tourism fair at IMM on Saturday and invited mandopop singer Jolin Tsai and director Wu Nien-Jen down to say a few nice things about the place. Naturally, it was a good opportunity for me to practice a bit of event photography so I was down there with my 70-200mm trying to take some good stage shots. Other than having lots of fun taking photos, it was a real pity I didn’t understand a word as the whole event was in Mandarin!

She’s got a huge goodie bag/prize with her! So, who will be The One to win it?

According to wifey, Jolin is really famous and warned me to expect a big crowd. To be honest, I’ve never heard any of her songs before but I can see why she’s so popular among teeny-boppers.

And, if they had really wanted to bring someone famous from Taiwan down, they should have invited Lin Chi Ling instead! I mean, who is this director Wu guy anyway. Haha…

Can some kind soul translate what’s on the card for me? Click on the image below for a larger version.

Gracefully answering tons of questions from the emcee.

And from the audience too.

Come Visit Taiwan, OK? ><

Photography notes:

1. Event was held outdoors at 3.30pm in overcast weather. Stage was under a big tentage.
2. Ideal settings seem to be around f/2.8-f/4, 1/60-1/125, ISO200-400.
3. Made a mistake of using ISO800 to get a fast shutter speed (> 1/250) to freeze movement on stage. In retrospect, this wasn’t necessary as Jolin wasn’t moving much, lens had VR and resultant photos had much noise (though bearable) after sharpening.
4. Used Continuous-servo AF with Dynamic Area AF (9-pt) which resulted in 80% out-of-focus pictures as the Dynamic Area AF seemed to keep refocusing on other moving people instead of Jolin who was quite still. To try Continuous-servo AF with Single-point AF in the future if subjects on stage aren’t moving much.
5. GET THERE EARLY! Reached 10 mins before the event started and there was already a row of photographers in front of me camped at all the good spots. Using a 70-200mm when standing 50m away from the stage is a bad idea as photos have to be cropped almost 80% to get reasonable pics. And, I suspect focusing doesn’t work well when the subject is so far away. Need to test this more.

Popularity: 73% [?]

It’s been awhile since my last blog update adventure and while I was expecting a smooth upgrade from version 2.2.2 to 2.5, things turned out quite differently. It’s also worth noting that I was on Brinkster’s Windows Pro hosting plan which means IIS and PHP 5.2.3.

Part 1

The first sign of something broken were the few lines of cryptic error messages appearing at the top and bottom of the upgrade.php page.

"Undefined index: PATH_INFO" in wp-settings.php

The simple fix was to comment out the lines of code in wp-settings.php (lines 71-74 if I remember correctly) that tried accessing the PATH_INFO server variable.

Now after proceeding to upgrade the database, which was successful, more cryptic error messages appeared at the top and bottom of the page:

Undefined index: REQUEST_URI in wp-settings.php

After much Googling, it finally dawned on me that Brinkster might not actually be using the PATH_INFO server variable that is used to populate the REQUEST_URI server variable. Instead, they were using ORIG_PATH_INFO, so the simple fix this time was to apply the following code over lines 71-74 of the wp-settings.php file.

I’ve also posted a solution here, which would be helpful if you want to follow a discussion on the issue and check out solutions for non-Brinkster related hosts.

Part 2

Ok, so now it seemed like everything was up and running smoothly and I was about to bask in the satisfaction of another successful, albeit long overdue, upgrade. Clicked on a link to a post, and I was hit with a 404 error. What? Clicked on some other posts, 404. My pages, 404. Categories, 404. Calendar, 404. Not only were all my permalinks were broken, everything else was too! Except, of course, the link to the Site Admin page which didn’t require any special URL rewrites.

After mucking around with permalinks and more Googling for a good 2 hours plus, it finally dawned on me that only the default yucky http://www.pagesofink.com/?p=123 style links would work. Not good, considering a lot of links to other posts in my blog and from other blogs use the http://www.pagesofink.com/index.php/archies/post-name format. No other code hacks like this one here worked and I was getting desperate to the point of considering other hosting providers like Dreamhost.

In a final last-chance attempt, I contacted Brinkster Live Support to ask if I could have my subscription migrated to an equivalent Linux package. Surprise surprise, they were very obliging and had it all done within the hour. Now, I’ve been using Brinkster for a long time now, and if there’s anything good about them, it’s their Live Support. Live Support is cool because you get to chat real-time with an operator online and they are usually very helpful and responsive. As much as I complain about Brinkster, I must admit their Live Support have pulled me out of a couple of jams in the past. Plus, it sure beats e-mail as you never know when the next response is coming.

Part 3

Now that I’m on Linux and having been given the assurances that the Linux Apache webserver comes with the necessary mod_rewrite plugin for pretty permalinks to work properly, I was full of anticipation that I would be out of the woods soon enough.

So I give my .htaccess file proper write rights using the chmod (777) command in my FTP client and browsed to the permalinks settings page (wp-admin/options-permalink.php) hoping to put my permalink misery out for good, when all of a sudden I’m faced with 500 errors. Everywhere. Even the Site Admin pages.

Argh

Now, sparing the painful details of how I narrowed this down, it appears that Brinkster does not like you to play around with the .htaccess file. Period. Contrary to what Wordpress tells you, do not go and manually put the following settings into the file:

# BEGIN WordPress
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</ifmodule>
# END WordPress

The Brinkster default .htaccess file looks like this:

# -FrontPage-

#IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*

<limit GET POST>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all
</limit>
<limit PUT DELETE>
order deny,allow
deny from all
</limit>
AuthName inkyneil.brinkster.net
AuthUserFile /sites/blah/inkyneil/home/public_html/_vti_pvt/blah.pwd
AuthGroupFile /sites/blah/inkyneil/home/public_html/_vti_pvt/blah.grp

You simply need to change it to:

# -FrontPage-

#IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*

<limit GET POST>
order deny,allow
#deny from all
allow from all
</limit>
<limit PUT DELETE>
order deny,allow
#deny from all
allow from all
</limit>
AuthName inkyneil.brinkster.net
AuthUserFile /sites/blah/inkyneil/home/public_html/_vti_pvt/blah.pwd
AuthGroupFile /sites/blah/inkyneil/home/public_html/_vti_pvt/blah.grp

So, it’s one last trip back to the permalink admin page to update the permalink structure. Lo-and-behold, everything finally works and is back to normal.

Seriously, that was way too much work just to upgrade Wordlress. Now, to get email working (Brinkster has got certain restrictions with phpmailer), upgrade my plug-ins, find a new theme, and I’m all set!

Popularity: 66% [?]

Touted as the largest observation wheel (can I still call it ferris wheel?) in the world at 165m high, the Singapore Flyer is certainly a sight to behold especially if you’re standing underneath it. Today marked the official opening of the Flyer although it has been in operation since Chinese New Year.

Little did anyone realise (I certainly didn’t), that there would be fireworks during the event. Just as I was setting up my tripod to capture the wheel, the fireworks started; and miracle of miracles, I managed to press the shutter in time to capture the first burst. All in all, the whole display lasted only a couple of minutes, but I felt that it was much better than the NDP07 fireworks show.

It begins!

It’s almost a full moon.

I love those blue streaks shooting inwards towards the spoke.

Plus the beautiful showers of light shooting out from the capsules.

After shooting the fireworks, we proceeded to have dinner at Popeye’s, where they serve pretty nice burgers and fries. Price per set meal is between $6 to $8 and is probably the most affordable eatery at the place. Today, we also made an amazing discovery that Ashley knows how to dip her fries into tomato sauce before eating them!

Not only that, she is also turning out to be quite a budding photographer as we took turns taking pictures underneath the Flyer after dinner. Granted everything was nicely set up on a tripod, but it was still cute watching her peep into the view finder while she repeatedly pressed the shutter release button.

This one was taken by Ashley!

The night ended on a bit of a damper because when we finally got around to buying tickets, we were told that the next available ride was only at 11pm. That put a spanner in our plans but I guess we’ll return another day when the crowd is smaller.

See if you can spot the long queue.

When all else fails, there’s always the toy store.

Build-A-Bear Workshop

Popularity: 92% [?]

Nothing to do with a locally produced movie of almost the same name, this is actually the number on my soccer jersey for the Hope Premier League. I chose the number 88 because read in Chinese it sounds like pa-pa which is what Ashley always calls me. Neat eh?

Anyway, our current team - TAG United (The Adults Group United) - is currently 3rd from bottom of the 11 team league with a record of 2 defeats and 1 draw. A bit unfortunate coz we’ve played all the strong and young, I repeat YOUNG, teams so far. Not a bad achievement for oldies like me to last a 90 minute match but we’re getting there.

[Update 30 Mar 2008] Our 1st win! We beat Venture 14 FC (another group of adults from the 2nd Sunday service) 3-2. Did what Arsenal did in a match the night before by coming from 2 goals down to score the winning goal minutes from the end.

[Update 13 Apr 2008] Our 2nd win! A more comfortable victory against Northeast with a final scoreline of 5-1. Still waiting to score my second league goal… but at least we’re up to 6th position now.

[Update 20 Apr 2008] Lost to Anonymous FC with a score of 2-3. Remember how we did an Arsenal few weeks ago? This time we were on the receiving end as we conceded 2 goals 5 minutes from time. Sigh!

[Update 05 May 2008] Blew it again! Drew with NYP Benchwarmers 1-1, conceeding a goal from a free kick in virtually the last minute of the game. Siiiigh!

Complete league table

Popularity: 79% [?]