My Birthday Wish-item

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If I can only get one birthday present this year, it would be this:





Nikkor AF-S 35mm f/1.8G

(A short snippet by Peter Tan here)

Seeing as lots of others got their birthday wishes this year, I wonder if I deserve to get mine this time...

...

And someone deserves my apology. It seems that I have been quite a nuisance to her. Every essence of my presence seems to have struck her like an unbearable stench. I will stay away now. I'm sorry for having been too much of a bother to your life. Please forgive me for being a thorn in your side all this time.

I Heart Photography #2 - My history of photography

One thing I can tell you is that I never thought I'd be so interested in photography. I didn't know way back then that of all the hobbies I've tried - stamp and/or sticker collecting, model making, buffet eating, etc. - photography would be the most enjoyable and fulfilling. I didn't have the passion for this hobby until recently. It used to be that I like having pictures taken, then it evolved into enjoying taking other people's pictures, and consequently just random stuff around that people tend not to notice (which paved the way to my increasing interest in closeup, macro and still life).

I procured my first camera when I was 16, in 1999. I won the camera in the National Space Science Quiz competition held at the National Planetarium, Kuala Lumpur. It was an APS film camera, the Minolta Vectis GX-2.

photo taken from flickr

It was touted to be splashproof and durable, and I used it several times for my family excursions to the beach. The APS film format was supposedly next-gen towards the end of the nineties, but by early 2000s the format slowly dies out; phased out by the emerging market of digital photography.

The first camera that I bought by myself using my own money was a Sony Cybershot DSC-P71. It was large, heavy, noisy, and consumes battery power like a thirsty camel. I bought it sometime summer  2003, a few months after I got to the States for college.

photo credit: dpreview.com

For a 3.2 megapixel camera with limited features, it served me well for all my 4.5 years in the United States. Most of the pictures I took while I was in Michigan came from this trusty old camera. In fact, I used to be the pseudo-official photographer for the Muslim Students Association in the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and all of the photos were from this camera. You can see the photos I took by going to this site:

http://www.muslims.studentorgs.umich.edu/

Go to About MSA > Gallery and it will take you to a Picasa web album site. The lower 50% of all the albums on the site (basically oldest photos on the site) were taken by me, between 2005 - 2006, using the clunky old P71.

Some of the pics I took back then. Photo credits: ihsankhairir

Alas, the old camera served me for a full five years before it died its slow death, finally one day refusing to turn on even after I served it with a set of fully charged double-As. The day it died, I felt a small pang of sadness, for I have had and made tons of memories with this camera, and the fact that I may never use it again for taking photos brought an end to a very meaningful and fulfilling run.

The death of the Sony DSC-P71 came shortly after I procured from a friend the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX12.

photo credit: digital-cameras-review.org

I took quite a number of pictures using this very compact and easy to use camera. I used it especially to explore my growing interest in closeup and macrophotography (of bugs, especially), as evidenced by the photos below.

photo credits: ihsankhairir

The Lumix was stolen at a McDonald's restaurant in Shah Alam, which to me was a devastating blow. During its short service it had helped me explore and produce some of my favorite closeups of bugs and insects, of which are all amateur-ish but passable in my book. Losing the camera meant I was without my shooting gear for a few months, until I procured my latest camera.

photo credit: kenrockwell.com

The Nikon D60. My first and only DSLR. I bought it a few days before leaving for a family vacation to Sabah in December 2008. For those who have been around my site, you have seen most of the photos I took using this camera, so there's no need to provide sample photos here. You know where to look. Most of the latest photos, in fact, most of my posts here feature at least one photo taken using this camera.

I guess that's a brief history of my involvement in photography as a hobby. It's a short insight into all the cameras I used to own and use and maybe a little bit of what I used to shoot back in the days before the D60.

For all my posts concerning photography, you can go here or click the label 'photography' found in the sidebar.

Before I go, I'd like to invite you, especially the photography hobbyists / amateurs / professionals, to give us an insight into your history of photography. I'm sure it would be enjoyable to share and learn each other's passions and inspirations as well as journey in preserving memories onto film / digital images.

"I heart photography!"

Cape of Monkeys

Last weekend, after the customary Mee Bandung Muar breakfast with the grandparents, we stopped by Tanjung Ketapang (Cape Ketapang) to go see the troops of monkeys there.





It was late morning and the sun in the east was shining brightly westward towards the west coast, so the faces of the monkeys were brightly lit by the golden rays of the morning sun.




Although it may be possible that feeding the monkeys is prohibited, we threw caution to the wind and decided to hand some snacks to the monkeys. My dad gave some of the groundnuts he bought at the roadside stall to some of the younger monkeys, because the larger more mature ones were more aggressive and might scratch or bite the hand that feeds them.




I noticed some mothering macaques sitting on the mangrove branches below. Early on they only looked at the other monkeys being fed, but after a while they joined in the feeding festivities.




This mother monkey had just finished eating a banana, with its newborn clinging on to her and occasionally suckling her teats. We figured that the baby monkey was newborn because the mother's bottom was wet with blood, possibly from giving birth.




A young one managed to snatch a pack of spicy chili peanuts and was opening the plastic packaging using its teeth. The monkeys here have seemed to take a liking to human food; evident from them not refusing even the spiced or processed ones.




The young macaques tend to gather together and fight over food that was thrown at them, and they gobble the food quickly and keep them in a pouch under their jaws (like chipmunks) before an adult male comes. Once an adult male approaches, the young ones disperse, either out of respect or fear.




After the young monkeys dispersed, this large male got to enjoy a large piece of sugarcane all to himself.




The female monkeys, especially the mothering ones, were not so aggressive. My sister Kim felt no hesitation taking a photo close to a mothering monkey eating a starfruit.




The young ones even know how to beg.






Either their mothers didn't teach them table manners, or they're afraid of the larger ones hogging all the food, so they stuff their faces with whatever was presented to them, not even taking the time to chew. You can see the pouch under their jaws filling up with unchewed food as they grabbed and gobbled the snack from the palm of the feeder.




As we walked to our van to go home, we passed by this large male 'drunkard' having a can of drink all to himself. The monkeys are so accustomed to the food and beverage we humans consume that I came to realize that their mannerisms have started to resemble some of our own (opening a plastic packaging, drinking from a can, etc).


I left Tanjung Ketapang with hopes that someday I'd have procured a longer lens before coming to shoot (photographically) these wonderful (not so) wild primates of the southwest mangrove beach of the Malay Peninsula.

...

P/S: You can go here to see all my other monkey posts.
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