Time to dress up :)

 
For Loi Kratong festival, the school left a note for all parents to dress up their children in a traditional Thai attire, of course the first person we turned to for advice was my mother… and she did not let us down :)

Unfortunately she did not see you all dressed up first hand, but the video I took gave her a huge smile. It must have been destiny, but the traffic was non existence, so we arrived at the school well before it starts (which is a rare occasion, haa haa haa), and to see all the kids dressed up was just  amazing.

In the afternoon, all of the children went over to the pool and each class’ paired representatives would ‘loi’ the ‘kratong’, V and Angie were chosen to represent your class, and for your mother and I, it was a good decision (V and Angie were always calm and well behaved when we saw them) you sat at front all smart and salivary… haa haa haa.
 

That’s a lot of concrete :)

The composition was kind a obvious, I just wished there were more cars beneath it, to balance it out a little more. This is Siam BTS station (aka Sky Train), probably the busiest station in the whole of the kingdom :)

Not quite sure how the structure is lit at night, but it could be an interesting shot, with less cars and display lights coming from the various stores.

Good to be back…

It has already been three months since we’ve moved, but for the past few weeks we have been going back and staying over the weekend at the old place, your mother loves it because she is into making soap at the moment, and so she needs as much room as the Space Shuttle needs before she takes off for the stars.

I think you love it as well, with all that space to run around, and a garden with 5 taps all connected to a huge water pump meaning you can be totally soaked in about 5 seconds, it also gives us opportunities to be back to Putthamonthon…

All in all it is certainly good to be back… :)


 




















 

Loy Kratong 2010

 
“Loi Krathong takes place on the evening of the full moon of the 12th month in the traditional Thai lunar calendar. In the western calendar this usually falls in November.”

Wikipedia

The moon was certainly full that night :)

Here was an attempt to capture the bright full moon with no tripod, not too bad, well it helped having the camera jammed up against the wall.

To be honest here baby, I think you have the view out of all of us, not that you care of course, being only two and a half, you are now more interested in jumping fully clothes into the bath full of water.

Anyway, this was your only second loy-kratong and there was no way we were going to stay in, we had to go and ‘loy’ the ‘kratong’ (a direct translation would probably be ‘float-basket’). Usually the place to go would be the riverside temples, so that the kratong can be floated down the river. However, another popular place is ‘Suan Lum’s (huge) lake’.

We decided to head for Suan Lum, simply because we wanted to take you on the sky train…  (and it was close to our house)
 
 
  

Somehow you have forgotten how to walk, you now come in two modes, ‘sit’ or ‘run’, both are really tiring for both your mother and I, because we ended up either carrying you everywhere or chasing after you at full pelt (running towards moving cars seems to be your specialty).

The one station BTS (aka Sky Train) ride was a hoot, the crowd was not that bad and you were all bright eyed and bushy tailed :)
     
   
  
It was a good walk from the BTS Silom station to the main entrance of Suan Lum (there is large statue of King Rama VI), the street hawkers were out en mass, the delicious smell of food cooking filled the cool night air, while the colourful kratong added eye candy to the normally peaceful but plain square.

    
  
  
Not to repeat the same mistake we made last year, this time we bought our kratong early, we basically stopped at the very first hawker we saw, you chose the kratong, then we made our way through the gates.

It was a mistake letting you carry the kratong, no need to go into detail here, (after a minute most of the flowers were on the floor :) )

 

 
 
  
The organiser decided to re-create old bangkok, with people dressing like the olden days, there were also stalls selling traditional food, I quite liked the display boards explaining the past.

By far the stall with the longest queue was the ‘fortune teller’s’, anyway, after a couple of minutes we decided to ‘loy’ the ‘kratong’ so that we would have more hands to look after you :) Of course I no longer carry a lighter, so we had to borrow it from a ‘farang’ (a polite slang for caucasian foreigners) to light the candle and the joss sticks.

  
   

After the kratong peacefully floated away (we totally forgot to put some coins in the kratong… aaahhhggghhh). Your mother and I decided to have a walk around, there was quite a lot to be seen, but you were having none of it… so we decided to call it a night.









 
 
 
Before going home we decided to stop by Chester Grill (Thailand own QSR), then you decide to drop your special #2… haa haa haa, without a spare nappy, it was the correct decision to make a quick exit :)

 
  
In stead of going back by BTS, we decided to catch a ‘tuk-tuk’ instead, I never haggle (because I am just terrible at it), so in no time we were sprinting through Silom and Narathiwas. Luckily the traffic was very light, with all that fresh air it really helped us to forget that you were totally filled up with #2 :)

Bangkok’s BRT

First was the BTS (aka skytrain), then came the MRT (undergrounds), now comes the BRT (Bus Rapid Transit). Although the first (and only) BRT line runs right in front of our place, we have never thought of actually using it… until now (before going on any further, BRT is simply a bus with a dedicated lane all to itself (although on some part of the route they do share the road with the rest)).

This mass transport has caused a bit of a stir, because in some area they took away one lane of the road and gave it to BRT, just imagine that you’ve been stuck in traffic for the last 45 minutes without moving an inch (a very common occurrence in BKK), then as you glance to your right and see this empty oasis lane (as far as the eyes could see) but you can’t just get to it… :)

Anyway, right now there is a promotion, 10 THB for the whole route… as this was a weekend the road was pretty empty, so it took us only 30 minutes to travel 12.5 Kms, very good for BKK standard.

Truly “The Great Photo Book Round-Up Review”

 

Click here to go to "The Great Photo Book Round-Up Review"

Trust me, you must read this immediately if you are thinking of embarking on a Photobook project :)

First Book is coming (end)… in my very hands :)

Very pleased  with it (since I don’t have any other experience with the other vendors), but just for this first time order for the quality check, I shall definitely be going back to Blurb :)

Now, I can see myself slaving over thousands of photo, trying to group them into stories, then painstakingly put them in a book… :) I wonder how long this fad would last :)

Photoscape.org

Only until recently I have started to do simple ‘tweaks’ to most photos before adding it to the blog, I don’t mean heavy manipulation or anything like that, nothing have been added and certainly no frown lines have been removed (much to your mother’s despair). 

I always knew that most of the photos could do with a few tweaks (contrast, brightness, colour and etc.) but just couldn’t be bothered, and more importantly there wasn’t a truly simple tool (well this being 2010, there were probably loads of good tools out there but I just wasn’t aware of it).

I’d guess if one was serious, then one should always shoot ‘raw’ then you can have a field day tweaking anything from the exposure to white balance, making it truly perfect (kind of).
  
 
 
Anyway, I have known about ‘Photoscape’ (click here) for quite some time now, but have never seriously looked into it (apart from its very good Gif tool), until a friend said that this was the best and simple tool there is, there was the magic word… ‘Simple’. So after giving it a chance it has become as important/essential to me as ‘Windows Live Writer’.
 
Here is how I use it, usually working in the ‘Batch Editor’ section (this is where you can do things to several photos at the same time), load all the photos into this window, then go to the ‘filter’ tab to the right, then just tweak away…

Once you are all tweaked out, you can save it, so that for your next batch lot of photos you can apply all the same filters you had painstakingly tuned earlier.

If all permutations of Photoshop gives you a headache, or even if Gimp is a tad too much, then you certainly should give this Photoscape a try :)

First Book is coming (cont.)… ‘On Schedule’

It is on Schedule :) according to the projection it will be here next Tuesday :) can not wait to see it, to have it in my hands; at this moment I don’t have any expectation whatsoever, I know I am going to love it whatever the outcome… :) :) :)

First Book is coming

While I was listening to the ‘This Week in Photo’ podcast, there was a mention of ‘Blurb’ (online self publishing'), the premise of having our own personal book was just too ‘fun’ to not have a go.

Decided to do more research on this self publishing thing, there are loads more than I had first thought, here is a link to a nice round up, ‘http://photo-book-review.toptenreviews.com/’ but some upper class players were missing from the list, such as Asukabook.

Decided to go with ‘Blurb’… downloaded their program and in 15 minutes I was dragging and dropping various pics from our latest trip library into the program. Admittedly, I was having too much fun to put any real arty-farty mind to it, just picked the best pics and stuffed it in… just wanted to see the quality of the book first before putting real effort into it. So by 3 am I was uploading the book to Blurb… and then clicked ‘Pay’ :)

Decided to go with all the best options, including paper, binding and so on… as per my past experience the shipping (from there to all the way over here) was going to be about 60%-70% of the actual book… all in all can not wait to have it in my hands though… :)