I admit it. I have downgraded to become a mobile phone photographer.
Against the chilled "cool toy" of the iPhone, I bought the Korean LG's beauty product - the Viewty, on eve of the eve of chinese new year. It was my CNY present to myself. It had been almost a year since I bought my last phone - the Sony Ericsson K800. The K800 used to be the cool toy - 3MP camera, and an extremely good buy - it had never broken down in my entire use of it.
Then I started noticing that everyone had the K800 - from my manager to my staff to my contractor. At one point in time, when I sat down in a working table and put my handphone on the table, I could not even differentiate which was mine.
Why the Viewty? Firstly the name is a lousy "chinaman" name - viewty, beauty ... heheh, very corny. The camera has its share of difficult usage - the sms is not really easy, and a keypad-less phone gets using to. However, after a weekend, it got better and i got used to the phone with the mascara (it had a mascara like stylus attached in a little dangling stick)
But I guess when I got used to it, I kind of liked playing with the 5MP camera. Imagine, about 8 years ago, I bought my first digital camera it was 1MP, Kodak. I have since upgraded to a 3MP camera three years later, and then another three years later a Nikon D70s DSLR 6MP and a Sony Cybershot T10 7MP for my family members.
Imagine, this phone now has a 5MP camera... how times has changed. It can even do ISO setting, exposure adjustment, focus, and an online edit and upload to YouTube. Wow....
Times have changed.
I am now a mobile phone photog.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Gongxi Fa Cai Ad Insights
A belated Gongxi Gongxi Fa Cai to all who celebrates Chinese New Year!
Bu Bu Gao Xing
Nian Nian Jun Bu
Not sure if my pinyin is still working after all these lack of learning - in actual fact, I never did learnt Hanyu Pinyin, the romanised version of mandarin translation. The phrase above means
May you achieve greater success with every step,
May you achieve greater progress with every year...!
The Chinese have fantastic ways and means of having these four letter (or rather four characters!!!) phrases which sounds very good and auspicious. Every year, during Chinese New Year, I would watch Astro Wah Lai Toi, and listen to all those HK or Malaysian TV stars wishing everyone a happy chinese new year.
This year, I saw a few cool ads, all expressing the New Year's best wishes in the most elegant form. The most notable one is of course the great sense of humanity and togetherness in the Petronas ad where a chinese boy orphan was asked to draw the reunion dinner affair and he was naively clueless to what to draw. As it turns out later, he is taken home my an indian lady to a orphanage, and with a message to the audience to cherish the family and spend time with the family back home for reunion dinner. Well said.
The TM ad was also muhibbah in its own kind. TM chose this year to emulate Tenaga (who did it last year and revived it again this year the same theme) - to get their senior execs to come on TV to wish happy new year in their own way. And so the group of company CEOs for TM, VADS, Fibrerail, Celcom, all came together to do their own gongxi, and also an added bonus to them was that they were all nicely clad in traditional Chinese clothings, and a clever mix of male, female, and all races too. A big thumbs up for TM, and Dato Shazali's CEO of Celcom trying of the chinese pronounciation of the four character phrases on national TV!!
Maxis did not do a TV ad this year (cutting costs?) but had a print ad with a traditional chinese meaning as well, with a single character Man, which means abundance. I suppose it has deep rooted meanings of providing for all, also it was indirectly romanised as "man" and also one with a cultural connotation of having always extra during the festive season. Maybe it should've gone about to tie in with a charity message. I would say that though stylish, the rest of the words was really too tough for me to read in the ad- the chinese was too difficult to the half educated reader of my calibre, so I suppose I missed some of the secondary messages from the phrases it was accompanied with.
The one single ad which I loved the most, and is most simple was the Pepsi ad. It starts with a silly man and large words depicting things to do this chinese new year 1. Clean House 2. Wash Hair and 3. Buy Pepsi...! and the last scene had the silly man with shampoo'ed hair down the aisle lining up for pepsi, and dusting the cashier as he was going off!! You really have to watch this to have a real laugh. The best joke was that, after that, everytime I went to the shopping center before CNY, I remembered to buy Pepsi!
The other favourite of mine was the Astro ad. It had a young man calling his dad asking him what he wants, and the dad saying, nothing, and then the viewer sees the dad in a small town, bored, riding his bike, drinking coffee alone, staring at old newspapers, and finally the son asked if the dad wants an astro, and then pause, flashes the empty house before, pans over to the astro promo and ends with a flashy and bright loud house with the astro tv on! Again, it is better seen than read. This ad was quite spot on!
Well, it just goes about to show the creative industry is still very much alive in Malaysia!
Bu Bu Gao Xing
Nian Nian Jun Bu
Not sure if my pinyin is still working after all these lack of learning - in actual fact, I never did learnt Hanyu Pinyin, the romanised version of mandarin translation. The phrase above means
May you achieve greater success with every step,
May you achieve greater progress with every year...!
The Chinese have fantastic ways and means of having these four letter (or rather four characters!!!) phrases which sounds very good and auspicious. Every year, during Chinese New Year, I would watch Astro Wah Lai Toi, and listen to all those HK or Malaysian TV stars wishing everyone a happy chinese new year.
This year, I saw a few cool ads, all expressing the New Year's best wishes in the most elegant form. The most notable one is of course the great sense of humanity and togetherness in the Petronas ad where a chinese boy orphan was asked to draw the reunion dinner affair and he was naively clueless to what to draw. As it turns out later, he is taken home my an indian lady to a orphanage, and with a message to the audience to cherish the family and spend time with the family back home for reunion dinner. Well said.
The TM ad was also muhibbah in its own kind. TM chose this year to emulate Tenaga (who did it last year and revived it again this year the same theme) - to get their senior execs to come on TV to wish happy new year in their own way. And so the group of company CEOs for TM, VADS, Fibrerail, Celcom, all came together to do their own gongxi, and also an added bonus to them was that they were all nicely clad in traditional Chinese clothings, and a clever mix of male, female, and all races too. A big thumbs up for TM, and Dato Shazali's CEO of Celcom trying of the chinese pronounciation of the four character phrases on national TV!!
Maxis did not do a TV ad this year (cutting costs?) but had a print ad with a traditional chinese meaning as well, with a single character Man, which means abundance. I suppose it has deep rooted meanings of providing for all, also it was indirectly romanised as "man" and also one with a cultural connotation of having always extra during the festive season. Maybe it should've gone about to tie in with a charity message. I would say that though stylish, the rest of the words was really too tough for me to read in the ad- the chinese was too difficult to the half educated reader of my calibre, so I suppose I missed some of the secondary messages from the phrases it was accompanied with.
The one single ad which I loved the most, and is most simple was the Pepsi ad. It starts with a silly man and large words depicting things to do this chinese new year 1. Clean House 2. Wash Hair and 3. Buy Pepsi...! and the last scene had the silly man with shampoo'ed hair down the aisle lining up for pepsi, and dusting the cashier as he was going off!! You really have to watch this to have a real laugh. The best joke was that, after that, everytime I went to the shopping center before CNY, I remembered to buy Pepsi!
The other favourite of mine was the Astro ad. It had a young man calling his dad asking him what he wants, and the dad saying, nothing, and then the viewer sees the dad in a small town, bored, riding his bike, drinking coffee alone, staring at old newspapers, and finally the son asked if the dad wants an astro, and then pause, flashes the empty house before, pans over to the astro promo and ends with a flashy and bright loud house with the astro tv on! Again, it is better seen than read. This ad was quite spot on!
Well, it just goes about to show the creative industry is still very much alive in Malaysia!
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Great Eastern 30km/20km Race
I waited for this - this was a picture of my first race of the year, the Great Eastern Pacesetters 30/20km race. I ran in the 20km category, once again, slightly unfit, but definitely better after we had a few good practice runs with the slew of holidays, the practice run on the Double Hills were very encouraging for morale.
I definitely need more practice for my next race, the next big one will be KLIM 2008.
If you were to ask me, I look shagged, and definitely need to lose some pounds. Imagine my knees carrying all that weight :-)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
