Introducing Quick Takes – Photoblogging With My Samsung Galaxy S II

Looks like I have been going through a spell of drought where blogging is concerned. By blogging, I meant writing. September was the worst month as I only churned out one post. On the other hand, I have been actively updating my second photoblog that I christened Quick Takes. It features images taken and uploaded with the Samsung Galaxy S II.

Although the camera phone allows very limited control as compared to a conventional digital camera, I enjoy capturing images and post them up on the go. The lack of updates was also due to the fact that I have been spending the past couple of weeks setting up the photoblog and updating the other blogs as well. There was an issue of the image captions not being parsed in the RSS feed that took almost a week of wading through Google and WordPress forums to resolve.

The Digital Awakening’s homepage has been redesigned to include links to the latest posts in my other blogs and Wuan’s photoblog. Some of these have not been updated for a couple of years. I noticed the same trend among bloggers active in Facebook and Twitter who have not been updating their blogs as frequently as they used to. These two microblogging medias have dampened our enthusiasm somewhat for writing longer posts. I guess I need to manage my time better between Facebook, Twitter and my blogs to break this affliction.

Early Christmas Present

Wuan and I met up with Victor Chin at The Gardens Mall last Saturday. If anything, we are bound together by our love for photography, with Victor constantly encouraging us to work on photography projects from unusual perspectives. We are grateful for the opportunity to learn from him. At the meeting, he surprised us with an early Christmas gift, a coffee table photobook. It is a collection of work from National Geographic photographers from around the world titled “Visions of Paradise“. Many of the images are sights most of us will never have the chance to train our cameras on. Thanks Victor, for the beautiful gift.

Christmas present from Victor Chin to Wuan and me
National Geographic’s Visions of Paradise – an early Christmas present from Victor Chin.

Christmas present from Victor Chin to Wuan and me
Paradise through the lens of a National Geographic photographer.

The Secret Garden of 1 Utama After The Rain

Lily magnolia bud at the Secret Garden of 1 Utama
Lily magnolia bud at the Secret Garden of 1 Utama

Last weekend, we got into the Secret Garden of 1 Utama just after it stopped raining. The plants and everything else were dripping wet. As we squeezed through narrow pathways, any light brush against the leaves would send a cascade of water droplets onto us. It was not that good an idea to be poking around the garden after all.

It has been seven months since we were there last. Nothing much has changed. Not many plants were in full bloom. Nevertheless, we were pleased to discover that one of the lily magnolia trees was flowering. A number of buds were about to unfurl their petals, too. The water droplets hugging on to the satiny deep red buds and the leaves made such an interesting subject for our cameras.

That must have been our briefest visit to the Secret Garden. We only spent about 40 minutes wandering among the greenery. I guess we will not be going there again any time soon, not at least until the weather turns hot and dry. That is the time when the flowers will start to bloom again.