Xinhui in Slides....

Brought along a roll of Fuji Sensia and shot girl girl on my last trip.. Here are some of the scanned results.

Films still beats digital over skin tones.. And not to mention the original slides... if only there is a way to display the original slides over the net.... :P

Surise at East Coast

I bought some slide films and want to try them out. Never really seriously shoot slides before but I plan to take a few rolls back to Thailand to get some nice landscapes. So I decided to practice a bit before my trip.

I bought various but decided to try the cheapest. Kodak Elite Chrome. Not really that cheap ($7 per roll leh). I packed my Dynax 7 and my A900 (digital) with 2 lenses. The Zeiss 24-70mm and 135mm. Woke up this morning at 5am and cycled to the "6 pipes" at East Coast Park. Reached there a bit early and it was totally dark. Quite surprised to see there were some people fishing at the other end though as its was a weekday.

Waited and was a bit disappointed with the overcast. I was planning to pack my bags when I noticed the sun breaking the cloudy sky. Immediately took a few test shots with my a900 (slides need to be correctly exposed as its latitude is very thin) and fired away with my film camera on a tripod. Took almost 20 shots on the scene before me (mostly brackets to get the exposure correct). After that while cycling back. Saw some pretty flowers at the roofless garden and shot some closeups with the 135mm.

Finished my roll and went home to rest a bit before hitting out to develop the slides. Bloody $20 for developing and 16 Base scan (and dun even have mounting!). Wat lau. Slides really expensive. Waited until 6pm and was blasted by the results. Just plain gorgeous!! You have to see it to believe it. It seems that the lens really plays a big roll in getting good colours in slides. (My old slides were shot with 28-85mm and the 50mm 1.4). The contrast and sharpness of Zeiss is truly astounding!! Above is just the scan of the slide and it cannot compare to the richness in colour of the original slide.

Expensive, Yes. Will I shoot again? Definitely since now I got the lens to do the correct job! :)

Trashy Transformers

I watched the highly anticipated and over-hyped Transformers the action movie last night at Tampines. Before I even decide to watch this flick, I already prepared myself by lowering my expectation of this movie. Director Michael Bay is infamous for creating something shallow and meaningless. Nevertheless, watching cars transforming into robots in CGIs should be cool right?

How wrong. After the first 2 transformation of the machines to robots, I find the CGI missed the point. Instead of showing a still frame of how a car transforms into a robot, the stupid camera rotates and pans while the transformation is in progress. Its like trying hard to "morph" rather than transform. Also missing is the traditional transformation sound that I used to get in the G1 cartoon(think I only heard it twice). Sucks big time. Prime also looks stupid with a mouth. Bumble Bee can't speak for the whole movie until the end where suddenly he could speak for no apparent reasons. I don't even want to talk about Megatron...

Well, at least it should be at least "entertaining" to watch all the action and mayhem right? Wrong again, the action is pretty boring with a lot of "you can guess" what will happen sequences. Nothing new. (Think Die Hard 4.0 might be better). My friend actually felt like sleeping at the ending action sequence. Trust me, its "that" predictable.

Final score 2/5 stars. 2 stars because they did hire Peter Cullen (orginal voice actor of Prime in G1) for the voice of Optimus Prime. Other than that, nothing nostalgic is worth mentioning in this trash.

Takeshi Kitano

My favourite Japanese director is coming up with a new movie again. Its called Kantoku Banzai which literally means Hurrah for the director. You could check out the trailer here. Looks promising.

I really like his old films like Hana-bi, Getting Any and Kikujiro. Not to mention his slash flick Zatohichi. Basically most of his films are black comedies and I love black comedies (beside Hana-bi which is more dreamy and surreal).

Star Wars Xiao

Stumble this clip from Stage6. Pretty impressive for an amateur film maker. Anyway, here's a youtube link



You may wish to go to their website www.ryanvsdorkman.com for the High Quality DivX video (400+ MB) or check out who this xiao (fanatic) people are.

El Laberinto del fauno

I recently went to my Ang Mo friend house and borrowed some DVDs to watch. To my surprise he has a copy of this Mexican movie, El Laberinto del fauno (in Spanish). It's called the Pan's Labyrinth in the International English and is a film by Guillermo Del Toro(Hellboy). The visuals effects are fantastic and the story very compelling.

Although supposed to look and sound like a children's film, the film is definitely only for adults. A lot of blood and gore yes, but behind all of these, there is a hidden moral behind the story which I comply greatly to. I am not going to spoil the film by talking about too much about it. I heard this film was already shown on Singapore's Cinema (R21). So I guess you could try to get a copy of the DVD if possible. Highly graded for those into cult films. 4.5 out of 5 stars for my taste. :)