PhotosByMarbles Blog

Have a lot of ROMs to cover this wedding season.  I don’t know why, but most of my shoots this year end are ROM ones.
Anyway, it gives me lots of opportunities to shoot portraits when time permits.

Here’s some to share from 2 couples whom I delivered albums to this afternoon.

Chris & Sharon and their friends are a crazy bunch, that’s for sure.  They assured me that their Actual Day would be an even whackier one.  Looking forward to that!

Equally whacky friends!

I know this is not a portrait, but… =p

And some from Larry & Yen’s ROM.  They had their ROM on a boat restaurant run by Santa Fe.
It was really interesting, but some of their guests couldn’t take the perpetual rocking of the boat.
Thank God I don’t get seasick!  Haha…

They were game to try out a bus shot like this…

This shot reminded us all of a SingTel advert.  I have no idea why.
Anyone can enlighten me?

I’m back after the break!
Kicking off this wedding season is Alvin & Windy’s ROM.

Windy is a good friend of mine.  Got to know her from church.  She’s an award winning designer and I remember she even taught me some photoshop skills that I still use nowadays!  Haha.  Oh yes!  She’s really pretty too!

The wedding was held at Crowne Hotel at Changi Airport Terminal 3.  It’s really new, and I won’t be surprised if they were one of the first couples getting married there.

I think the expressions on everyone’s faces are priceless!

That’s Windy’s nephew. =)

Shot my first wedding of this wedding season yesterday for a very good friend of mine.

Here’s a teaser to share!  Look out for more to come!

Wedding Season is coming… really soon.  It’ll start with a friend’s ROM this Sunday and continue on till December… At least for now.  Not as many assignments in 2009 just yet, but I’m sure they’ll come in.

Back to topic…
I downloaded and tried 2 new applications from Google yesterday, Chrome by Google and Picasa 3.  Best thing about stuff by Google is that they are FREE!  And I believe that Google is the exception to the "free is not good" rule.

Chrome is Google’s new, no-frills web browser.  It’s lightweight and generates web pages at a significantly faster speed.  It’s still in beta stage, and there is just one major drawback that I experienced that caused me to switch back to Firefox immediately.  It doesn’t seem to have Javascript support just yet.  If anyone knows otherwise, please enlighten me ok?  Other than that, everything runs really fast.

The next application I tried was Picasa, again by Google.  Picasa 2 has been around for quite a while now, and I’m still very impressed by the fact that it can read RAW files from my DSLR.  It also provides a simple, yet powerful interface for basic touchup of photos.

These have not changed with Picasa 3.  They just got better.

The new collage function now allows you a lot more customisation of your collage, which will make this function a lot more appealing to users.
The slideshow function now allows you to add in a music track for your slideshow was well, something that couldn’t be done previously.  This might be a good solution for creating quick slideshows of your photos.

Now, what I like most about Picasa 3 is not Picasa 3.  What???  Yes, you heard it right.  My favourite function of Picasa 3 is the Picasa Photo Viewer that comes with it.

Not only is the look really cool, it also reads RAW files like Picasa!  When you use Picasa Photo Viewer to open a file, a translucent overlay appears on your screen and the image zooms into view.  At the bottom of the screen, you see the other photos in the same folder, allowing you to scroll through them.  Zooming in to 100% view is just a simple double-click away.  Previewing RAW files is so simple now.  just treat the RAW files like jpgs and click them to open in Picasa Photo Viewer.  Awesome!

Even if you’re an advanced user who prefers using tools like Photoshop or Lightroom instead of Picasa, Picasa Photo Viewer makes a great companion photo viewer for all images. 

Kudos to Google once again!