Luminance HDR 2.3.0

Since a new version of Luminance came out it’s not hard to resist giving it a spin since Photomatix costs well a lot more.

I quite like the new alignment using Hugins seemed a bit more improved than usual.

Some sample images that I did:

Civilian War Memorial

Marina Bay Sands Shopping Arcade

Some notable improvements:

1. Export to TIFF actually works now
2. Less noise in the final export.
3. Alignment seems better
4. UI makes a little more sense
5. Seems quicker but loading big RAW files probably could do with some improvements.

Give it a spin if you’re into HDR.

Afternoon in Sepang

Was a pretty dull weekend so I decided I’d take the camera out for a spin on the beach waiting for the sunset. You know the closest one to USJ is Sepang Goldcoast and I have to say that’s a pretty untidy beach. There’s too many people and they’re all having barbecues over there. Yeah seriously people pick up your own mess.

Anyhoo I saw a couple having their wedding shots taken and you know if you have a telephoto you can’t resists taking a few on your own candidly.

 

I thought she was pretty photogenic and sporting.

Full set of pictures on flickr!

Anyway it rained during the golden hour so I guess the photos above make up for the sad sunset excursion. Maybe next time sunset!

Chef Diary Pre-Christmas Dinner

Went to Chef Diary for pre-christmas  dinner meal with the makan gang.

They had a couple of good things on hand:

Duck foie gras

Smoked duck breast

Ceasers Salad

For the main course:

Lobster Pasta with Caviar sauce

and some thing we haven’t tried before:

Beef Wagyu

I especially liked the beef wagyu, they seasoned it just right!

Dessert was a little something we’ve tried before:

Cheese Pudding

And chocolate flour-less cake:

Chocolate flour-less cake

Quite a filling meal even though we shared it!

Two Happy Diners

Find Chef Diary here!

Duck Noodles in Kota Kemuning

Never had good duck noodles in a long time like 5 years. The ones I’ve eaten during that time really sucked. This noodle house Pun Chun seems pretty decent. It’s just a corner shop like most Chinese noodle house and serves more than duck noodles. If you like you can have char-siew wanton mee as well. Surprisingly quite filling and I ain’t complaining right now of being hungry.

Duck could have had a little more flavor, but I kind of like it after having not eaten good duck noodles over half a decade.

Pun Chun Duck Noodles

Note: If you’re looking for the place don’t Google the wrong address. The one on maps appears to be the older location (either that or someone entered the wrong address. The picture on flickr has the correct location (see map).

They also have a presence on Facebook 😀

Waroeng Mas Timoer

@ Sunway Giza, you have Waroeng Mas Timoer a restaurant that specializes in Sundanese food. Reminds me of my two trips to Bandung. They’re not very expensive and I think their setup is relatively new.

The ayam penyet was done quite well, not dry but juicy unlike all the fried chicken you get from the local fare:

Ayam Penyet

Of starters there’s sup buntut. With a name like that you have to try it….

Sup Buntut

For drinks I had limau jeruk that tasted way better than any limau ais kosong in any local store:

Limau Jeruk

Then there’s desert which I had the fried bananas. Not quite the way I remembered it in Bandung or Bali but still better than any fried bananas in Malaysia:

Fried Bananas

On another note I should have mode the dishes to the left a little, put the flash to the right. Then the right side of the dishes wouldn’t have that dark look 😦

Waroeng Mas Timoer can be found here in the Sunway Giza Mall:

Oh need to try out Modiva. Their menu looks interesting.

UFOs in Sabah….

…..no, more like idiots who don’t do a little searching on their own. Came across this when I typed Sabah into Google search. Seriously.

That is not a UFO. If it was there is one glaring inconsistency in it. It’s growing in size!

It actually fits and looks like a fall streak hole, I’ll quote Wikipedia liberally here:

A fallstreak hole (also: hole punch cloud, punch hole cloud, canal cloud) is a large circular gap that can appear in cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds. Such holes are formed when the water temperature in the clouds is below freezing but the water has not frozen yet due to the lack of ice nucleation particles. When a portion of the water does start to freeze it will set off a domino effect, due to the Bergeron process, causing the water vapor around it to freeze and fall to the earth as well. This leaves a large, often circular, hole in the cloud.[1]

It is believed that a disruption in the stability of the cloud layer, such as that caused by a passing jet, may induce the domino process of evaporation which creates the hole. Such clouds are not unique to one geographic area and have been photographed from the United States to Russia.[2]

Because of their rarity and unusual appearance, fallstreak holes are often mistaken for or attributed to unidentified flying objects.[3]

 

Picture from Wikipedia

See the similarities in the picture and grainy video ?

Causeway Bay Spicy Crab

Their Menu

Had the chance to go with sis and her friends to Hartamas to try this restaurant from HK out. Spicy crabs it said. It’s quite a quaint place and the food is pretty good. See what we ate here:

Pork ribs for two. The guy said it was for two, but it's ok if there's 4 cause we ordered more anyway.

Their signature bean curd dish (the one with sauce, not the dry one)

Some vegie thingy. They've got preserved egg in it!

Of course the whole reason of going to the restaurant is just an excuse to eat crabs. Check it out, decked garlic.

SPICY CRAB!

Close up look of the CLAW!

It's a big claw! Lots of meat in it too.

Pricing of the crab is a little different from the usual shops. It’s either big or small (AFAICT) which is ok so you don’t get into a situation where you’re charged too much. Texture of the meat was nice, tasted sweet and the spices was really well done into the crab.

Oh yeah, don’t know if it’s standard but desert was free.  I think this is the only crab place in Hartamas? Good change from all the pork places.

Y’all can find the restaurant here:

Water Cooling Adventures

Yeah the heat in my desktop has been a bit too much lately so decided to throw out the serviceable Zalman in favor of a quieter and more efficient water cooling. I’m a bit lazy to do everything so I looked for a closed loop solution.

The Corsair H50 it is. It’s not a particularly expensive system but you do need to spend the better part of RM400 to get this baby. You still need to dis-assemble your PC because you’re definitely going to need to put the support plate behind so that the retention brackets can sit on it. It’s not a difficult thing to assemble but if you’re not sure just do a dry fit before committing anything during assembly.

Is it worth the time, effort and money?

In a word YES.

With the Zalman CPU temps hover around 60C-65C idling. They go as high as 75C under load. Add the GPU to the mix and you can reach 79C.  Core temps go up to about 40C when idling.

It’s day and night with the H50. Idles at 52C with the core at 26C. On 100% load it goes to 60C. Core goes up to a little over 40-45C. System temps remain pretty manageable.

Here’s the skinny of it installed:

Detailed notes are in the link

Close up shot

Strobist info: Canon 580EX II remote, triggered with PW, using my room door as a BIG soft box.

The George & Dragon

Yew Li’s farewell was last week & the OD gang wound up @ The George and  Dragon. It’s strictly not a food place, but for a watering hole, I thought their pork knuckles were great 😀

There's a dragon lurking behind the menu....

Their finger food looks pretty good and the pork ribs serving is pretty huge too. I’m not really good with names of things that I eat so I tend to substitute them with ‘something’ ‘something’ on a plate.

Sausage and Pork

Not fishcakes! Most likely sausages!

Carbonara something.... haha Carbonara Vongle ....

Not sure who ordered the ribs but if I had any of this I wouldn't be able to move the next day.

Some pics of the gang. Sis wasn’t around so was ambassador for the evening 😀

End of event bill? 2k. That’s a lot of alcohol haha!

High Speed Sync using PocketWizards

Since I’ve got a pair of these setup I’ve been looking to see what I could do besides using off camera flash. I like what you can do in the open sun with these:

Basically going into high speed sync lets you set your shutter speed as fast as you can go and opening up real wide on the aperture. Look at the video and tell me you don’t think that’s good looking bokeh!