I guess I’ll start of the 2009 post with a little bit of my short trip to Indonesia. I went to a small town of Pati in Central Java to look for something different than the capital city Jakarta. Of course, while there is not much modern entertainments like those large shopping centres, pubs, etc. This town has its own unique appearance.

The buildings remains the same as it was when I went here a few years ago, time seems to go slower here. If we look at the picture of the houses, those are the typical house + shop buildings.

Among other things however one of the best activities that I did was hunting for food. My favourite would be the traditional food called “Nasi Gandul”.

Its most prominent characteristics is having to place the food on top of a sheet of banana leave, giving the dish a very traditional look. I’m not quite sure what part of the cattle is the meat , all I know is that this food taste great and I love it! By the way, this is why we have to bring our camera everywhere including restaurants, so that we can take a picture of those different looking foods.

That was all exciting, unfortunately there are some sad aspect of this city (probably throughout the nation); it is the fact that most of the historical and old buildings are not being cared for. Take a look at the picture below, this was the once great looking sports hall, now a “ghost” looking hall.

From this city, I then moved on to a village, kind of rural suburb area I guess; it was called Trangkil.

Trangkil Sugar Factory

This place was once one of the biggest sugar factory in Central Java during the time of Dutch Colonial. I went there because my Grandpa was one of the head machinist in that sugar factory. Let’s take a look of the few shots that I took during the visit:

Although looking like a worn out factory, according to the caretaker there, this factory is actually operational. Too bad they didn’t take care of the facility like it used to be, could have been a good tourist attraction, especially there are still a lot of younger visitors who are the family members of the ones who used to work here. The saddest part is when the caretaker said that the last remaining old building will be destroyed as well.

The factory visit was a great thing to look at a portion of the Indonesian history.

Photo Tips: In the dark places like the factory machines above, use high ISO settings and the highest aperture (eg. f/2.8) possible to ensure sharp result. If you use a zoom lens, use the lowest focal length.

From the visits in Pati I then moved to the Semarang city. It is much larger than Pati and more modern in a sense. As usual however, I prefer to visit historical places. I’d like to show you one of the interesting place in there, the Pagoda Avalokitsvara.

This is a realtively new place with great aesthetics. Maybe with a little bit more publication it can be a good addition to the city’s tourism. The pictures that I took here could have been better. The rainy day when I came here didn’t help with the photography aspect of the visit . Here’s a little bit more shots from the site.

All in all, I am delighted to say that my trip had been a wonderful one. Great sites to see, great historical view, great food and most of all great chance to take good photos!

Season’s Greetings and Happy New Year!

I hope that you all have a wonderful holiday and great times.

As quick tips for those who will be travelling:

1. Don’t forget to bring your wider angle lens, along 18-28 mm. This is so that you can capture the scenery and not forgetting where you have been.
2. Bring your flash, as you’ll never know when you need to shoot indoors.
3. Charge up your camera at the end of each day.
4. Dump your photos into a portable storage or your laptop if you have them, so that you have more room to shoot.

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/