When I...

Sometime in June last year, Sophie and I had actually started planning a book project together. For some reason, we were talking a lot about our emotions then-- mostly to do with starting preschool and moving to Singapore-- and I asked if maybe she wanted to "write" a book on the emotions she felt. She got really excited and we took a series of photos as a start. But before we could do much more with it, the huge move loomed large and we had to put the project on hold.

Even when we arrived in Singapore, the last few months have been consumed by settling in, new jobs, new school, new schedule, the holidays, etc. And it wasn't until last week when we found any time to go back to the book project.

The "When I..." idea is mine but everything else (especially the purple) is all Sophie. Her experiences with these emotions are pretty typical of a three-year-old I guess: a combination of things that happen to her/us on a daily basis (fighting to read one more book before bedtime), things that are constantly on her mind (hating the idea of an injection at the doctor's), things that have recently become quite the preoccupation (visiting Ann Arbor), and things from favorite books (the part when the boat getting tossed about in the ocean in Oliver Jeffers' Lost and Found).

I used FlipSnack to make it into an online flip book but I'm looking into the different options of printing it as an actual book we can hold and read before bed. It was a fun experience for both Sophie and I and I'm already thinking of ideas for the sequel- a trilogy perhaps? :)

[click to read book]

Sophie snaps

For Christmas this year, instead of getting Sophie one big present-- mostly because we didn't want to clutter the house with another big toy-- we bought her several smaller ones instead-- a pile of books, furniture for her dollhouse, a pair of sparkly TOMS that she's worn practically everyday since, and a fully functioning digital camera. Honestly, it was the best $40 spent on a Christmas present. Sophie's gotten really used to us schelpping our camera everywhere and we use our phone camera in front of her all the time so she's pretty much grown up understanding the concept of capturing memories through photography. In fact, lately, she's been using our phones to randomly take pictures of things around her-- though not always in focus and we've gotten our fair share of photos of her fingers...

So the kid digital camera was something she really appreciated and we've taken it out with us everywhere since Christmas. It's as simple as they come-- turn on, aim, shoot, and scroll buttons to go through your pictures. The resolution isn't great but for $40, you're not expecting Ansel Adams quality photographs. And Sophie doesn't care so much how the photos look like but more the fact that she's the one who took them, with her very own camera.

Last weekend, when our friends Melanie and Jonas came into town for a visit, we took them to the Esplanade/ Marina Bay Sands area for a jaunt and took the opportunity for Sophie to go to town with her camera. We told her to look for things she found interesting and to take as many pictures as she wanted. Here are some shots that she took:

[click for more]

1. Cab driver, 2. Dada side profile, 3. Mama's toes, 4. Art installation at the Esplanade

Making faces

Sophie and I are working on a picture book describing the different emotions she feels. Until we're finished, here's a look at the photos we'll be using:

How do you take a Christmas family photo?

1) Negotiate the terms of agreement with a tantrumming two-year-old (I believe it was a bowl of udon soup in exchange for getting up for the family photo)



2) Mill about while everyone gets their act together (a.k.a our Modern Family moment)



3) Make the best of the slightly blurry but otherwise really festive seventh take:



Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas!

Are you smiling?

How about now? :)

What a difference a year makes...

Earlier last month, I posted something about how stoked Sophie was for Picture Day at school. Considering the catastrophic FAIL that was last year's class photo, we were just holding our breaths that this year's would turn out at least half decent so we can frame a couple up for the grandparents.

Fortunately, thanks to the excitement drummed up by her teachers and her heightened familiarity with cameras thrust into her face (thanks to the bigillion photos her parents take of her), this year's photo was a resounding success. Have you seen a child more happy and adorable? No. No, you haven't.



Oh, and about that picture from last year... See for yourself.

Random daycare daily report #18

Practising her "cheese!" for Picture Day today

Sophie sure was ready for Picture Day today. When I asked what we'll be doing, she said, "I say "cheese!"" And later, as we were waiting to have the pictures taken, Sophie turned to me and said, "Erin, we have to show our happy face!" Yes, we do Sophie!

Photo booth in your living room

Maybe I’ve watched Amelie one too many times but I really love the look of the black and white prints taken with an old school photo booth. Sadly, the only one I know of near us is at the mall and we rarely make a trip out there. Which is why I love the site Photoboother that turns any of your uploaded photos into that familiar strip we all love. Check out some of the printed results below. They look so genuine!

"Palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss..."**

It's amazing what a moment of inspiration and an iPhone can capture. While we were waiting for the nurses before Sophie's 6-month shots, we randomly took this photo on Jude's iPhone as Sophie was pressing herself up against the window. We just used the regular camera function, no fancy app and we didn't even tweak the photo after. We love how it came out- the effect of the reflection and how it almost seems as if Sophie's palms are illuminated, almost glowing. It also captures our daughter's cheekiness and need to put everything into her mouth (or close to it anyway...) to a T. Yup, this is Sophie in a nutshell :)


Anyways, I was so proud of our serendipitous photographic accomplishment that on a whim, I entered the photo in the Parents.com photo competition. I'm not really sure how it works or even what the prize is- I think it's either a shot at the cover or a year's supply of diapers or something (we'll take the diapers please, thank you very much...). I had totally forgotten about it until they sent me an email this afternoon to say that the photo's been selected to be in the running to become a weekly winner on Parents.com Photo Faves! Again, I'm not sure what that entails, but as long as it involves winning some baby necessity or a Target/ Babies R' Us gift card, I'm hoping we win! Help us keep our daughter's butt clean and dry with all that potential free dipes and wipes and vote here!

** For those of you so inclined-- I'm talking specifically to you Lit-geeks out there who should be able to do this even if you were unconscious- you know who you are...-- you can guess where this quote comes from :)

I love your smile

Ok, so I know that as her parents, it's impossible for us to be objective; but honestly...

... she's the most beautiful thing in our world.

Passport photo- FAIL!

This is what happens when you try to take a passport photo for a 6-week old with a white bed-sheet and her bouncer...

[click for full effect]

Someone say "Lens Envy"?

Over the weekend, Jude and I helped my sister and her fiancé, Piao, take some pre-wedding photos. They're thankfully eschewing the whole exorbitant wedding photography package nonsense and wanted instead, something more fun and spontaneous. So they settled on us taking their photos in the picturesque Botanical Gardens and the pretty- and increasingly gentrified- Ann Siang Hill area in Chinatown. While we love taking photos, we clearly don't have the kind of professional gear necessary for wedding-quality photos. But apparently, there is now a burgeoning business in Singapore leasing cameras and lenses. So all thanks to a Canon 5D camera and a monster of a 70-200 F2.8L lens (plus a couple of our own cameras- hence the very meta photos of the photographers...), you get photos like these:

They're nowhere near professional quality, of course, but we're still quite happy with what we achieved- at least the future newlyweds seem to be :) It's amazing what a huge difference a good camera and lens can do. Shots like this and this would have been impossible without high-speed, paparazzi-level equipment. Which is why for the last couple of days, I've had to deal with a somewhat antsy husband who seems to be going through a bout of rather acute lens-envy-citis for what now seems in comparison to be our very humble and modest Nikon D60... ;)

Food Pornography

So, with the photo of the buttermilk drop biscuits I made for dinner last night, our Food Pornography set on Flickr has officially reached 500 pictures! For those of you who follow our Flickr account, you'll know that Jude and I are as obsessive about documenting our food experiences as we are indulging in them. We have a ways to go before perfecting the art of truly stunning food photography, but thankfully, our trusty Lumix has a Food mode which helps :) The aim is to ultimately go full manual, but despite my dear husband's best efforts, I've just never been able to remember all the different settings on the camera. That or I'll just have to wait till we save up enough for a digital SLR and then I'll be inspired to play with as many of the light, flash and aperture settings as I can possible handle.

Till then, here's just a sample of some of my favorite of our food photos in all their graphic, obscene, delectable glory!


1. Fried bread (ham chee paeng), 2. Creamy crab, 3. Cannoli from Mike's Pastry, 4. Tempeh tauhu goreng, 5. Bean sprouts ("tau gay"), 6. Food Symmetry, 7. Dusted with powdered sugar, 8. Adobo, 9. New mac & cheese recipe, 10. Roasting sausages with grapes, 11. Jude's Wagyu skirt steak, 12. Sushi in auto mode, 13. Laksa!!! @ Les Amis, Botanical Gardens

What you've got to realize is that the clever cook puts unlikely things together, like duck and orange, like pineapple and ham. It's called 'artistry'. You know, I am an artist the way I combine my business and my pleasure: Money's my business, eating's my pleasure and Georgie's my pleasure, too, though in a more private kind of way than stuffing the mouth and feeding the sewers, though the pleasures are related because the naughty bits and the dirty bits are so close together that it just goes to show how eating and sex are related.
-Albert, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

Tempeh contribution

Sometime in April when we had the Cooks over for dinner, we made Tempeh Tauhu Goreng and then posted the photo onto Flickr.


Subsequently, we were approached by someone in the U.K. who manufactures tempeh who asked if he could use the photo on his company's website as well as have the recipe. The website's now up and so is the photo and the recipe. Here's the site's front page:


I gave them a modified recipe from the one I had used since they told me that most of their customers are vegetarians. Here's the vegetarian version of the dish.

There was no money exchanged in the process of course, but we got credit for the photo and the recipe, and it's just nice to know that our food pornography's appreciated ... :)

The Saturn

I really, really like this photo. It captures a mood and aesthetic that I only wished I could replicate in my photos. Additionally, the photo's artfully staged, impeccably timed, interestingly lighted and beautifully shot. It sort of reminds me of an Edward Hopper painting somehow ... except that this is Hopper in celluloid film (I am assuming here, you never know everything's digitally shot now.)

What are 640 photos worth to you?

So as some of you may know, Yahoo! Photos will be shutting down for good come September. Before we finally decided to go Flickr Pro a couple of years back, we had been using Yahoo! for all our photos and little did we know, that amounted to almost 640 pics over the course of 2 years. Thankfully, Yahoo! has just completed moving all those photos over to our Flickr account, and everything's finally in one place! :)

Although all the sets, titles and descriptions were retained in the move, I went through a bunch of them just to make sure. And we never tagged them in Yahoo! so I did a whole lot of tagging too. Going through the photos was a little surreal though... These were all taken in 2004 and 2005, so most of them captured us during our Masters program. Those were fun times :) Not that the last two years haven't been fun, but it was just a different kind, with a different group of friends who are now scattered all over the country- well, mostly in the West Coast (actually mostly in a very specific part of the West Coast...) I thought I already had very distinct memories of things that happened in those two years, but these photos just made them even more vivid.

First, there was the time when everyone (literally, I think everyone we invited turned up...) came to celebrate us moving into our apartment (where a grand total of 45 people squeezed and jostled in our little nook), then the many, many, many, many, many, many birthdays that were celebrated over the course of those 24 months; there was Spring Break in New York, rock climbing in Kentucky; and who can forget the utterly indulgent and debauched weekend, otherwise known as Jude's MSI graduation where we had no less than four parties over a span of three days (see here, here and here)? :)

Just thinking about how many memories are captured in photos, and how tenuous online archiving of photos can be, I'm now seriously thinking of 1) getting them all backed-up on discs; and 2) printing some of our favorite ones out and then putting them in albums, like it used to be done in the old days... ;) Ultimately, scrolling through web-pages of photos will never be the same as flipping through a photo album. Ten or twenty years down the road, I want to be able to pull out a dusty old album from the shelf and say to my kid, "Look, at one time, your dad and I survived on only $1500 a month, and we were happy." :)

Tastespotting update

Instead of spending the day more fruitfully, a.k.a watching less Top Chef, tweaking my prelim paper more, and not taking that afternoon nap, what do I do? Submit more of our food porn onto Tastespotting. And believe it or not, four of them made it in (including the one of the monks on the cream puff)!

This is so cool. Our camera is so cool... :)

Tastespotting

So we get an email from Billie yesterday suggesting that we look at a website, Tastespotting in light of our food pornography tendencies. I go there and am sucked in for a good hour admiring all these delectable shots of food and food-related things people contribute to this online picturebook, or so it's conceived.

An offshoot of notcot.com, a design site, Tastespotting allows it's readers to submit pictures of their food finds, all of which are subject to the approval of their editorial team. As you can see, they are a little snooty about the kinds of photos they accept, and it does seem that many of them are taken professionally. I went through our Food Pornography set on Flickr, and believe it or not, out of 158 photos, only found two which I might potentially submit onto Tastespotting. I guess this means our pornographic proclivities are unabashedly of the more consumptive, rather than visual variety... ;)

[Update: I submitted one of the photos I mentioned in this post on edible items being used as photographic landscapes, and Tastespotting put it up! We didn't take the photo of course, but I'm enjoying the whole user-contribution vibe... :)]

Shake it like a Polaroid picture

Just when you thought Polaroids were dead, they resurface on the web in the form of the Polaroid-o-nizer™, a nifty online tool that allows you "polaroidize" any picture that you have. I like it coz you don't need an external application like Picasa and you can caption your pictures in a sweet handwriting scrawl. The only thing is that the photo needs to already be online and have a URL of its own.

As always, retro is the new chic!

Of "real" photos & letters

"Real photos"
Originally uploaded by jyew.

I signed up for Shutterfly last week for no other reason than the fact that they enticed me with 15 free photos prints. I chose some pictures of when my family was here in the Fall, some of Christmas at home last year, and these to remember our friends here in A2. There are some from the SI graduation, the post-graduation parties, and the smashing SIGN picnic in 2004.

Is it silly that I actually got really excited at the prospect of getting these "real" photos in the mail? Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate digital technology, the ability to photoshop, and of course Flickr in all its social-networking glory, but at the end of the day, there's just something kind of elemental about holding the real thing in your hand. And then being able to put them in frames or an album or scrapbook.

It's like email- I don't think I could live without it now, and I love the fact that it allows me to keep in touch with friends and family from afar. But honestly, nothing makes me happier than receiving a handwritten card or letter in the mailbox. The comforting feel of something tangible in your hand, the thought and effort it took the person to put something down on paper, no matter how good or bad the penmanship. I stand guilty of course for not making an effort to write as many letters and postcards as I would like to (although I try to hand-write as many of my Christmas cards as I can every year...), and I sometimes wish I could sacrifice the time and convenience of email to sit down and pen a proper letter. Unlike an email that you can type, correct and rewrite what you don't like, there's an art to letter-writing that I think is fast disappearing. It takes a level of patience and committment to apply yourself to composing a good letter that's somehow absent in emails. Or maybe that's just me...

"Oh, my Dear Friend, my heart was trembling as I walked into the post office, and there you were, lying in Box 237. I took you out of your envelope and read you, read you right there."
- Klara (Margaret Sullavan) in her letter to Alfred (Jimmy Stewart) in The Shop Around the Corner, the film on which You've Got Mail is based.