Big Fat Society

I don’t like the way society treats people nowadays. You have an obese friend and you tell her that she’s beautiful just the way she is, and you feel good about yourself for telling her that. No she’s not. That’s not beautiful; that’s NOT healthy. People are not supposed to be that fat. And you’re not a good person for telling her that it’s okay. I’d say you should tell her to lose weight, unless you want her to die in a young age from heart attack.

Bottom line, I should emphasize that I’m talking about obese people, not fat people. Fat is okay. I know many fat people who look good and healthy. I’m talking about the Nutty-Professor-fat kinda thing. Go see a doctor, get on a healthy diet, and lose some weight.

Wanted: The Best Wedding Video

The painful thing about working in wedding video business is when the clients show me this sample of brilliantly extravagant looking video, and they think it’s so fucking simple. Let me tell you it’s not.

And the worse part is when they think it’s MY job to make it work, to make them look good on screen. Let me tell you, it’s not JUST  my job. It’s more of YOUR job to make it work. You see, i stand behind the camera and shoot YOU. YOU’re the one who’s gonna show up on the screen, not ME. So no matter how fucking genius I am, if you don’t feel good about yourself and about the moment, it’s nothing. It won’t work. It’s just gonna be a piece of brilliantly edited video with no meaning.

So please, be comfortable. Enjoy yourself. Be happy. Love the moment. That, my friend, is more than enough to make the best wedding video.

The painful thing about working in wedding video business is when the clients show me this sample of brilliantly extravagant looking video, and they think it’s so fucking simple. Let me tell you it’s not.

Everybody wants “the best wedding video”, and even worse, they think it’s my job to make it work. That it’s my job to make them look good on screen. Let me tell you, it’s not just my job. It’s more of your job to make it work. You see, i stand behind the camera and shoot you. You‘re the one who’s gonna show up on the screen, not me. So no matter how fucking genius I am, if you don’t feel good about yourself and about the moment, it’s nothing. It won’t work. It’s just gonna be a piece of brilliantly edited video with no meaning.

So please, be comfortable. Enjoy yourself. Be happy. Love the moment. That, my friend, is more than enough to make the best wedding video.

Idle August

Whoa, I didn’t write at all in August! I was in Bali nearly the whole month, and there were too many other things to do beside sitting in front of a computer and type

I remember having loads of good stuffs in my head that needed to be transformed into good written stuffs on screen. But clearly, I just remember having them in my head. I really gotta start bringing notes with me everywhere. Or even further, I should just blog from my cell.

Anyway, some random updates are: Karpet Merah’s new Denpasar HQ is opened. I met some really cool new friends in Bali; two of them are Eka & Halszka. Karpetmerah.com was infected with malware (which I suspected was caused by some wordpress plugins), and has caused my notebook to be infected, too; but things are good and clean now. Andre adopted a puppy from a French couple; her name is Selem (Balinese, means “black”). Mocca was ill when I got back to Jakarta; he bit his skin until it bled; but he’s okay now; my mom took him to the vet, and he gave him a shot & some meds. Me and Andre have a new house in Bali. I got a new cell; Sony Ericsson W350. My mom turned 66 on 09/09/09 (which I think is cool).

Caleb & Abby

Last Saturday, I was babysitting my relative’s kids. They’re born & raised in USA, & can’t speak Indonesian. Caleb is 4, and Abby is 6. They were playing with Mocca, my beagle, when this conversation happened;

Caleb: (pointing at Mocca’s pee pee) What’s that?
Me: umm.. that’s eh.. um.. what you call it.. err.. well, that’s his penis. (I decided to skip the baby talk and just, you know, “tell the truth”. LOL)
Abby: or you can call it his burung. (burung, means “bird”, is an Indonesian slang for penis)
Me: where did you get that???
Abby: Caleb has one, too. But not that big.
Me: (thinking: 20 years from now, that sentence is gonna kill Caleb).

Anyway, they’re such sweet kids. Abby always looked after her little brother, and Caleb seemed to look up to his big sister

Here’s a photo of them with Mocca:

One More Shot, Say “Jeez”!

My aunt sent her digital camera to me so I could print the photos. “Just pick the good ones,” she said. So I opened the folder in my PC, and tried to choose out of about 1000 photos, many of them are similar to each other. In the end I had about 200 photos to print.

We live in digital age, and I often feel sorry about how digital photography has killed our senses. Back in film photography era, we took photos efficiently. We thought before we shot. And we tried our best to perfectly capture one moment in one precious frame.

Back then, we didn’t feel it’s necessary to take repetitive shots of a single moment. Surprisingly, if we take a look at some old photo albums from those days, they’re filled with beautiful, and more importantly, meaningful snapshots. This is the thing I love about film photography era; we didn’t waste our films on similar, repetitive, meaningless, crapilicious photos.

These days, I notice people often shoot like ten frames in less than a minute to capture one moment. I find it disturbing because that LCD was pasted there at the back of our camera so that we can see a clearer preview of what we’re about to shoot. It’s supposed to make us take better, not more pictures.