A Grieving Moment

It was such a devastating moment to witness the Tsunami hit Japan, where thousands of lives were taken away just in a snap.

I remember one Haiku by Kobayashi Issa, June 15, 1763 - January 5, 1828 

( yes, he’s Gemini just like me *yay* ) about sadness and hope:

"A world of grief and pain,
Flowers bloom,
Even then."         

(More about Kobayashi Issa and his work, visit here.)

Taman Menteng; Saturday afternoon, 12March 2011

My deepest condolences..

Rudolf

HDR My Way Part Two

So what do you think about this one?
still trying hard to perfecting it, but it's still way far from that :-D

• four layers of the same pic
• one normal exposure, high contrast and unsharp mask,
• one high exposure, gaussian-blurred, transparent
• one low exposure, transparent
• top layer is the copy of the background, transparent, blurred.

  ... and the confusion began...

xoxo
Rudolf 

Sing Wherever Until Whenever

As I mentioned earlier, I'm also a member of  Padjadjaran University Alumni Choir, with friends I've known decades ago.
We've been to many competitions, small and big, which some we won and some we lost.  We've shared many laughters and shed each other's tears ( that we do until now).

And we've performed in many places, as well. But the most prize for me was our 1st concert ever. Long story short, we managed to get some help from  Kinaria GSP and Mas Guruh Soekarnoputra for the show, and the lighting was directed by Mbak Inet Leimena ( I couldn't find any link regarding this famous show director, but who doesn't know her, anyway? ) although we barely had any money back then. The show was huge for that time, and we have all the dancers, props, confetti and all; while at that time a choir concert meant merely stand and sing. Oh, and the music - I almost forget to mention, was arranged by the famous Mr. Purwacaraka

We commissioned several new songs for the concert, and one of it was "Seuntai Manikam" (A Strand of Gems - a nickname for Indonesia) arranged and composed by Mr. Ronald Pohan who happen to have the same birthday as mine! *Yay!* ( and he has a facebook account ^ ^ *another Yay!*) Mr. Pohan is known for his beautiful composition among the music lovers and such, but for us, the mediocre singer, he's notorious for the most difficult compositions to sing, ever!

Seuntai Manikam, however, was one of the most beautiful song about Indonesia we've ever sung. And although I couldn't find the original version, you could still enjoy the composition through the one sang by our successor UNPAD Students Choir.

After quite awhile, we managed to held a small concert in two cities, a reunion, I might say. 

And here's one song that you might like. We really love singing folklores!
Foolish me, I can't copy and paste the video, but here's the address you can click and enjoy.
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1318236969414&subj=1635467627

ps:
these photos and videos were 'stolen' from some friends' collections which I couldn't name,
because I  happen to have forgotten the sources :-)

happy listening!
xoxo

Rudolf

HDR My Way

[ HDR : High Dynamic Range Photography is a post-processing technique that uses multiple images of the same scene shot at different shutter speeds to combine them all into a single photograph. The result is an image with the most amount of detail in both shadow and bright areas of the image, close to what the human eye would see ]

[ Wikipedia: high-dynamic-range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminancebetween the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. This wide dynamic range allows HDR images to more accurately represent the range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight.[1]

The two main sources of HDR imagery are computer renderings and merging of multiple photographs, the latter of which in turn are individually referred to as low-dynamic-range (LDR)[2]or standard-dynamic-range (SDR)[3] photographs 

Yesterday I tried to do HDR photo. And I have to admit that I did it without enough basic knowledge. Basically I took one picture and made three layers out of it, one neutral and another two in higher and lower exposure. I combined all three and gave a little gaussian blur ( all in photoshop  post editing, of course ) and voilà!  Still far from perfect, but will do it better next time :-)


If any of you are interesting to learn more about HDR, here are some interesting links, to name but a few:

• mansurovs.com , a cool photographer web with a lot of tutorial and ( of course ) photos.
• www.stuckincustoms.com , another cool photographer web ( and the photographer himself is gorgeous ^ ^ ) with interesting tutorial and photos, as well.
• tutorialblog.org , clear tutorial, simple to understand. And again, cool photos. 

Goodluck and happy reading!

x o x o

Rudolf

Welcome To My Room!

Welcome to my room. 

Oh, and kindly put off your sandals or shoes outside. Well, it's not because my room is sterile (far from that, in fact), it's just our Indonesian custom to do so :-)

Door that will greet you before you're in

It’s another hot sunny day, and once again, I’m too lazy to go out, so I took some pics around my room, just to sharpen my sore eyes. If this laziness’ persistent, I might end up with taking pictures of myself, which will ruin my almost-gone-reputation.

Books and books and another piles of books: things you'd see once you're in. I can't live without it.

Oh, and music! Lots and lots of CDs. But lately I'd rather download it for free from you-know-where.

But just in case you don't, here's the link. All you need to do is registering your e-mail address and you'd find tons of songs ready for you :-) ( is that piracy? I try not to think of it though.)

And I'm a mad collector of anything! Er... it's usually ethnic stuffs I bought during traveling (now suddenly I miss traveling. Dear God, please give me some more fortune so that I could go somewhere nice and take more pictures to share) Some other are gifts and things found. None are stolen ones, trust me!

“I've seen fire and I've seen rain, 

I've seen sunny days I thought would never end,

I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend, 

but I always thought I'd see you again”

~James Taylor, Singer and Song Writer, Born 1948

( visit Mr. Taylor's official site here )