Last night I had the Golden Key Career Workshop running, which I have organized quite a while ago. The speakers were great, Joe Corrigan and Jon Yeo talked about the importance of setting yourself above others in order to secure a better career.

Personally I’m quite pleased with the materials covered here and I am also pleased to hear the audiences find that the workshop was useful (from the conversation with different people). In the beginning I was quite worried about the turnout rate: I kept thinking whether this lecture theater gonna end up empty.

The turnout rate turns out to be great!! The theater was quite crowded and people were listening intently to the presentations.

As Joe and Jon moves towards the meat of the presentation, I could see that people are getting more and more interested. This workshop’s materials were very different from the standard job seeking advices. It wasn’t just about resume and cover letter, it was about our attitude and habit. It was about improving ourselves to overcome fear in trying something new, learn top make mistake and learn to accept or hear bad responses.

I believe this kind of workshop can alleviate Golden Key RMIT into a more professional level and help giving back to its members as well as the student community.

This was a great presentation and in the future, this kind of workshop is not to be missed. I’m planning to hold another professional workshop in the future, the topic will depends on the interest of the community.

More Pictures

Photography Takeaway

Right, you might think that this kind of workshop have nothing to do with photography? Well there are a few things that we can takeaway from attending this kind of workshop (and taking photos):

1. You learn how to build up your skills to get a good job in photography
2. You get to practice your indoor photography skills. The images in this post are taken without flash, the requirement is to use a fast lens and high ISO. The fastest lens that I have is my trusty Tamron f/2.8, it does the job wonderfully. Open up the aperture to the max and ISO as high as possible, you’ll get a sharp shot.
3. If you don’t have a fast lens, then bring a powerful flash such as Nikon SB-600 or Nikon SB-800

More workshop images can be seen at http://www.goldenkey-rmit.org.

BenchmarkEdu can be found in: http://benchmarkedu.blogspot.com/

The Melbourne Motor Show, always a good place to admire cool and interesting cars…and of course, taking photographs of them.

One of the thing that interests me a lot is that many of the concept cars in there are hybrid cars. I guess most of the car manufacturers are going green due to the global movement towards “less carbon emission”… anyway, this is a photography blog so I’m not gonna to the whole environmental discussion

A spark of different addition is the participation of Bolwell, the Australian “Ferrari”. Nice looking car with a smaller engine than most of the exotic cars.

Other sport cars includes the new Hyundai Genesis Coupe, Ford and of course other familiar players like Ferrari.

Star of the Show

Located in a modest corner of the exhibition without is the promoted star of the show, the Bugatti Veyron. This fastest car in the world stopped only for 3 days, which no doubt attracted some of the crowd to visit the exhibition sooner. Deviating into photography topic a bit, notice that I take a picture of the information board in order to tell the story through the picture.

The Veyron is not the only star as far as I can see. I think the car on the left, the Lexus LS600hs is much more interesting. Its ability to automate parking procedure is quite an advancement in the car industry. Notice on the left that the lady didn’t even touch the steering wheel while the car is parking. I was at the right place and time to take a quick snap when the demonstration happened :D.

The Other…

The motorbike on the left is considered the “other”, I have no other words. Standing tall like a monster truck this motorbike is the biggest motorbike in the world. Apparently this motorbike is being used in destruction shows, where it flattened different normal cars.

Interesting addition to the show. Anyway, it was pretty hard to get a whole shot of this thing due to its size although I was using an 17mm lens.

It was great going to the car show, it is very interesting to see the technologies out there.

Photography Take Away

By going to shows like this one, there are a couple points that we can learn from photography stand point.

1. Be on the lookout for interesting demonstration.
2. Be patient when photographing, there are hundreds of people in the arena and they will most likely walk in front of you.
3. Take your time, don’t be hasty, there are plenty to look at. Refrain from going home in the first 30-60 minutes. This is important as demonstrations are done on particular times only.
4. Look at the exhibition booklet in order to properly understand the arena.

I have finally obtained my new (power) toy, a great addition to my camera’s family. What I have here is the Tamron SP AF 90mm F/2.8 Macro 1:1 lens.The first thing that I can say about this lens is that this is a real “value for money”. Some of you might ask why not get a Nikkor Lens (Nikon Lens)? Well I guess we all know that Nikkor lens cost a whopping amount of cash and seriously, sometimes the quality difference between a third party lens like this one and the Nikkor is so little that I consider it arbitrary in some circumstances. After all, it’s more on the photographer and not the gear to get great images.

So what can we expect from this lens?

First thing, this is a 1:1 Macro lens, meaning that it is capable of creating 1:1 image reproduction of the actual object; although if the “limit switch” (not shown in this picture) is turned off, you can get much closer than 1:1 scale. I have been testing this lens for a while and quite please with the resulting images, the depth of field is great and the sharpness of the resulting image is very pleasing. On the right is an example of a necklace pendant taken using this lens under studio lights.

More on the specs…

One of the most important spec is the focal length. This camera came with a fixed focal length at 90mm, meaning there’s no zoom in and out. Some might disagree however I think when I’m photographing outdoor with this lens for non product object, such as a person, it forces me to be more creative and to make the most out of the available space at the time of the shoot. So with this I can also say that this lens is not just for close-ups, instead can be a great companion for a portrait shoot.

Another interesting aspect of this lens is that availability of a manual aperture ring, a feature that is not very common in the era of digital, in particular with less-expensive lens like this one. Of course with the digital SLR camera the ring is not being used very much however with my F-801s film that does not support electronic aperture ring, the manual ring is a handy addition.

Lastly and handy

The last prominent and most handy feature of this lens is the AF (Auto Focus) and M (Manual Focus) switch, in order to switch to and fro between those two, all I have to do is just pulling or pushing the focusing ring. Notice that you can see a blue “M” and white “AF” writing on the lens, that’s where the focusing ring would “clicks” in. So there’s no more fiddling around with the small on camera body AF/MF switch. This is especially great when taking picture and the auto-focus won’t focus properly.

So why is there any catch with the half price of Nikkor?

Alhough this lens is one of the sturdy lens, compared to the Nikkor it feels more plasticky and in addition the focussing speed is slower than the nikkor lens. However eventhough I knew these things existed, they didn’t threw me off my decision to get this lens. As long as it focuses well, takes 1:1 macro reproduction, able to productng clear and high quality image, its all good. The sturdiness at this point is enough for me, after all, I don’t intent to throw my lens to the floor.

All in all this is a great lens!

I have to say that I’m very glad that I get this one, and it’ll be useful for years to come So if you’re getting a macro lens, consider this one!