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“Awas!”
By hisham
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I stood on the edge of a road bustling with people and cars. “Awas!” read a sign in Malay. The roads in Kuala Lumpur were, as in most cities, littered with signs that cautioned drivers of impending doom should they heed no warning as they zipped past roadworks and construction sites. “Awas,” was for all intents and purposes, _attention, hazard, achtung–_call it what you will, in Malay.
From the Petronas Towers to Chinatown and from the Butterfly Park to a shady shop in lower Kuala Lumpur that sold concoctions of a most dubious nature and effect, Malaysia offered a good opportunity to grab my photography gear and run wild with it.
Armed with my brand new and first ever SLR camera, a Sony Alpha 100, I took on the task of documenting my recent trip to Kuala Lumpur. To digress slightly, my advent into photography goes back to when my father gifted me a book on the subject back in fifth or sixth grade. Though my interest has only recently taken the form it has following my DOF adapter project (which utilized an SLR lens).
While the Sony Alpha 100 does not enjoy the pedigree of its Nikon and Canon brethren, I’d still highly recommend it. An internal shot stabilizer (does not need an in-lens stabilizer), and the fact that you can use a variety of Konica Minolta Maxxum-mount lenses make it a charm to use. Let’s also not forget that anyone who’s used a Nikon has most probably used a Sony in some sense: The CCDs used in some models are manufactured by Sony.
Post-processing while traveling was done on Picasa. I was planning on using Photoshop or Lightroom on the photos once I got back home, but Picasa proved to be such a good contender to the heavyweights that when it came to simple corrections and effects, it did such a good job on the photos that I had no need for the commercial packages. I’ll definitely be using Picasa more often than originally anticipated.
The slideshow above has 45 photos. Enjoy.
Note: The Alpha line is a result of Sony’s acquisition of Konica Minolta’s SLR assets in 2006.