Hello ladies & gentlemen, boys & girls
I am a Malaysian pure Chinese working in England as a highways engineer living in London outskirt. How is my life over here? Boring. Yes. England is a very boring place to stay. All the shops & shopping complex close at 6pm, & there are no hawkers selling food at night. So, no place to get gathering & have yourself relise after dark, I miss my family & friends in Malaysia & Singapore very much. I have almost no nightlife over here. Suffering lah! How can a night bird live without nightlife. Don’t worry guys, I have made up my mind to pack all my stuff & going home next summer.
If you are planning to visit or study in England, write me an email, I will try my best to give you all the information I can. Never expect London is a modern city pack with all high-rise building. It is a very very old tourist spot city which full of historical building. London is very much busier than Sydney, but is not as modern as Sydney.
I have a great interest in marketing strategy & very sensitive with economy, that is my real interest & I am really born with that interest. Until today I still cannot find up why I end up being an engineer. Many people said, i look nothing like an engineer. 1 consultant director used to say i more like japanese footballer than a engineer. Many people from china in university of Surrey think i am Korean.
I had always dream to be a businessman & politician. It was not meant as an inducement to becoming an engineer, I hate to study & never plan to go to university when I was young. I have to admit I am very lazy boy & there were always many unidentified never-ending problems in my studies during my primary school years. Let me express what was in my mind, “Why I have to study & acting so stupid to spend the whole night just to study the bloody spelling test? What is the point? There is no reward after all! I prefer to get caned by the teacher Instead of spending whole meaningless hardworking night.
Teachers were allowed to cane their pupils in my country if the pupils don’t behave themself. People can score up to 100%, So What!”, they were just too silly for doing something by putting in a great effort and then, no reward!. Because of that kind of thinking, I end up almost never past in my Chinese spelling at my early primary years. Is quite difficult to learn Chinese wording, you have to memorise the whole word as a picture. Yes, you learn it by memorising pictures & ANG KONG, there is no way you can guess from the pronouncements. I really feel thankful for my teachers to cane and beat me when I was young, or else, I wouldn’t be here today.
Photography has bugged me ever since childhood, when I was very young I can always felt my personal judgement of fashion & arts were different from others, of course the others I meant are my family, because they were the only persons I can compare my senses of artistic with. From day to day, year to year, I started realising my artistic & aesthetic senses are very much different from my parents, sister, and brothers and even most of the people I know. Yes, that’s what I am, abnormal person with freak taste & weird arts judgement.
Lets talk about my dressing, people always think I dress that way just to catch all the attraction & try to be different from others so that I can be a bit outstanding. Honestly that is not what I am, I never tried to impress someone with funky dress, I only buy the cloth I really like, I am wearing it completely for my own personal liking reason, I can be very picky for buying clothes. I don’t like funky fashion either especially street fashion.
I think you can guess from my dressing, I like Rock music. & 80’s 90’s song. Rock but not heavy metal. Sometimes sentimental love songs make my moody emotion worse, even I know the song is going to make me more sad, I am still playing it. I just can’t help it, My favourite artist are Bon Jovi, Meatloaf, Chao Chuan, Power station & Chi Ching. I would listen to alternative sometimes but I will never like pop, R&B, & rape, I don’t consider Techno & euro beat as a kind of music, they are just a discordant & disturbance noise to me.
I have a very lousy drawing skill, but I always know how to differentiate a nice & bad art, I can imagine a very different kind of art in my mind, I just couldn’t draw it up. I couldn’t even draw a proper apple; I used to score only 22% in my fixed title art drawing final exam when I was in form 2.
I can’t really draw. Probably I couldn’t present & express my artistic sense on the pencil & the paper so; I have to do it with the cameras.
Me & My Cameras
I played around with my father’s broken camera at very young age. It was a very good camera in those years. Unlike the others in my age, the first camera I used was fully manual but not automatic, It was an alloy magnesium “RICOH”, I start taking picture in parties & Chinese new year with my family when I was 9. At that time the flash light that I was using is national which I have to wait about 1 minute for the flash to function after I switch the button on. It’s really annoying, and I have to find a metal object to make the flash death after switching it off. Until now I can still remember my mother used to tell me, “ your should use 180 in sunny day with 6, 90 in cloudy day & 60 at night. That was the only camera I used before 21. Even through that camera is very old I believe it is still functioning & in good working order now.
I used to feel very embarrassing with that camera, I never bought my mum’s camera to my friends birthday parties & even my graduation day in my primary & secondary school, I really though every one is going to laugh at me for using that antic grandfather’s rage camera. All of my friends were using compact automatic camera, I kept on begging my mum to buy one, but it never happen with the reason, “that Ricoh is a very good camera”.
The Canon Sureshot 60 was my first fully automatic compact camera; it cost me about RM 300. It is very much convenient compare with manual camera, fewer things to worry about the aperture & speed corporate with the dept of field. There was nothing wrong with the image quality. But, I cannot take the picture I wanted. The bloody camera just cannot get my signal how to capture the image I wanted in my own way. What a silly camera! I just couldn’t do anything to control the camera; the ways of that camera functioning & taking picture is really out of my hands. I bought that stupid camera just before I came to England with the expectation of much better image quality. What a damn camera! Only photography dummy buys that kind of stupid camera. I am definitely not a photography dummy, and I know I will never fully apply my photographing technique and natural born artistic sense onto the photo by using that camera. I started realising the weakness of an automatic camera which I never though. I started regret for buying that camera. “Why didn’t I bring that Ricoh” The capability of that stupid camera has totally limiting my creativity. We can't even know which object the camera is focusing, which end up many of my picture out of focus, that kind of camera is a bit shitty, isn't it.
Introductory to the world of SLR
My previous job as a assistant engineer in my country led me to travel and see many places and people and that was the first time I had passion for photography. I cant believe my own eyes how beautiful the scenery is at Sri Aman?, Especially the Long House, all the surrounding is full of mist in the morning under the mountain’s feet. That passion become stronger when I came to live in England
By chance, I got the opportunity to use an EOS 300 to take picture for my friends at the house warming party of my friend.
The weirdest thing start to happend as I took his SLR in my hands: I automatically started composing, shutter and aperture was instantly adjusted, and my trigger finger was shaking... My photographic nerve reawoke! Then I told myself, “I must have that!”
On the June of 2003, I finally got the camera that I have been waiting for too long. ”Canon EOS 300”, Yes that’s the camera I really wanted to have. Fully manual can be made with
aperture & speed proposed. It is very much easier to use than what had I expected. I know it looks complicated but it’s not that difficult as you think.
Finally, I got my Digital camera before the xmas 04, EOS 300D. & within few months. i took more than 600 pictures. Almost all the picture in my homepage were taken by EOS 300D
其实我很简单
