andyrak

My 1 year old nephew Joshua from the Bay Area who keep calling me grandpa...

(double posting from my public blog)

After 2 weeks of telecommuting from the Bay Area tomorrow is finally the first day of my Hong Kong trip. I haven't been back home for 3 years and I'm sure a lot have changed since my last visit. The temperature is still very warm (around 83 degree) over there so I guess it'll be like summer again.

Aside from shopping and visiting friends and family, I'll probably check out a local cosplay event called HKU cosplay party during my short stay in Hong Kong. Can't wait for some cosplay-culture-shock XD


The amount of HK money I'll bring with me to the airport (~ $87.73 USD)

Last weekend my friend Tyson and I did a causal photo shoot. We decided to showcase Tyson and his handsome dating partner Lexus IS 300

( Dating 101 (large images) )

FYI, the "mystery date" in the last shot is REALLY gorgeous XDD

Special thanks to Leilany and Tyson for being our awesome models and Billy for assisting with our lighting!! For more information of this shoot please check out my public blog.

RIP Yoshito Usui

... another random update, with a transformable Optimus Prime cosplay from Asia :)

It reads "Optimus Prime" on his costume (image source: komica)

So sadly our coworker Kevin didn't win Big Brother this season. Although he didn't win the half-million dollar price he still got $10K to take home with so I guess it's still good ^___^) He is currently  in Vegas partying like crazy!! I can hardly wait to seeing him in the office next week ^^

Our next TV-star coworker is Cheyne Whitney! This awesome friend of us is gonna be in Amazing Race this season!! To be honest I have never watched Amazing Race and I don't even know how much you can win but Goooooo Cheyne!!!! @D@)/~



Seriously, do they have a cosplay-reality show that we can all join in??? XDDDD

Run into this cosplay picture of Charie the Unicorn this morning XD

(image source: komica)

I am sure most of you already seen Charie before but if you haven't you gotta check it out!! I LOL'd everytime I see it XDD


On a side note, our coworker Kevin is in the FINAL THREE of Big Brother this season! We'll know whether he wins the half-million dollar price by tonite!

GOOOOOO Kevin!!!! \(@D@)/~~

Since I BSed typed too much on my public blog I'm gonna keep it short here ^^;;;

With helps from my Bay Area buddies I was able to execute 2 photoshoots during my short stay in NorCal. One of them was with Nadia (pho3nix )in her Perona costume from One Piece. This character is a gothic-lolita ghost princess with the special ability to split up into many ghosts in combat. The only weakness of this ghost princess is the fact that her true body remains unconscious and vulnerable during her summon of ghosts. For more information of this character please check out the One Piece Wiki.

The shoot is about the Perona and her "Wonders Garden". On the technical side, Multiple exposure was used on all of these shots to help portray the character. (instead of yoga XD)

We did a total of 7 setups, excluding omake. 1 was dropped since it wasn't helping the theme. m(_ _)m

( Moonless Garden )

Thanks a lot Nadia for being the model and my friend Raymond for helping us out on the shoot!! ^___^)
For more info on our Perona Cosplay shoot please check out my public blog entry.

Wow WTH our coworker Kevin is actually doing pretty good in Big Brother. He is currently one of the final 5 contestants and is the current HoH (Head-of-Household)

Dude KC, what you gonna do if you win that $500K (@D@)/~

You can find episode of Big Brother on the offical website

Pretty random post...

1. Baby kitten found in backyard this morning ^__^)


2. Missing SDCC but finally catching up on work. Glad to know that everybody had fun!! Can't wait to see pictures ^___^)

3. Gonna be telecommuting from the bay area till the 19th August to take care of some passport renewal + work.

4. Finally finished re-watching Neon Genesis Evangelion. Definitely a classic!! Personal favorite are "Death and Rebirth" and "the End of Evangelion". Can't wait to do some Eva shooting ^__^)

5. Gankutsuou was very goooood! A very creative way to bring a classic to the world of anime. ^^

LOL I've been soooo behind on Project Runway and American Next Top Model but I'm checking out a reality show I've never even heard of until recently... Big Brother. It's because one of my awesome coworker is on it this season XDDDD:



Goooo KC!~~ What a nice way to spend your vacation man XDDDD

It was so much fun shooting with Mel and Jazzy on Sat in Anime Expo! ^___^

They were cosplaying Dio and Lucciola from Last Exile and they did such a wonderful job portraying the two characters. The creators of Last Exile loves to name characters in Italian so Dio translates to "God" while Lucciola translates to "Firefly" (or "bitch", according to one of my Italian friends XD)

The two boys were two very very close friends (supposedly a master-and-servant relationship) and they were ALWAYS being seen together in the series. The characters development of the show was pretty good at first but unfortunately they rushed thing out towards the end and didn't focus enough on each of the characters (including Dio and Lucciola)... sigh >.<)

The photo shoot was relatively short. We did a total of 6 setups (dropped 1).



( God and his firefly (+5) )

Special thanks to Kevin and SuperNo1 for helping me out with strobes and Tony for letting me borrow his flashes!

And thanks Mel and Jazzy! It was soooo much fun shooting with you girls^^ Can't wait to see you girls in the next gathering/shoot/convention ^___^)!!!

Tony and I got together to prepare for an upcoming project. We pulled out all our strobes and play around with different lighting setups.



1. Gold reflector (Westcott)
2. 42" half a shoot-through umbrella w. Nikon SB 800 (the other half covered by the black cover)
3. shoot-through umbrella w Canon 580EX
4. 42" shoot-through umbrella w. Nikon SB 800
5. Honeycomb grid Toilet paper
6. Charles Francis Xavier Professor X

Picture unrelated, but man I really starting to like the effect of bounce-umbrella! Can't wait to put them in action ^^

... OK back to work XDD

Our company is hosting a photoshoot for a national LGBT print campaign set to run in New Mexico, Maine, California & Nevada. The model casting started last week so I set up a simple audition room for the casting. Very simple, really XD

1. attaching my paycheck to the strobe to block off light leak



( The Simple Studio )

It was quite a fun experience XD! If anyone of you guys are interested in modeling for the campaign please drop me an email. We'll be doing open audition tomorrow and Wednesday. The actual shoot will be on Thursday (2009/6/4) carried out by the amazing American Next Top Model photographer Trevor o’shana and myself. It's gonna be fun I promise XDD

Here is the official Ads:
http://rescuescg.com/vergephotoshoot/

The first photoshoot I did in Fanime 09 was with Mel and Nadia in their Reyson and Leanne costumes. The two beautiful herons are from the game Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. Their outfits were extremely stunning kudos to them!

It was a lot of fun to carry out this shoot with Quito. I was able to execute 2 setups for Leanne, 2 for Reyson and 1 group shot.



( Pictures under the cut )

Lots of thanks to Jazzy and Philip for helping with the lighting!! They were the one who created the sunset beam in shot #2-6 and to say the least the sun was quite heavy to hand-held XDD

Quito's shots can be found from his flickr. Hope you like our images! Can't wait to see you guys in AX ^^

Fanime was lots of fun! It is always great to party and meet up with old friends and new people.

* Muze and Sephy: Thanks A LOT for letting us stay with you guys during the entire convention!! Hope we didn't cause too much trouble (0_0)

* Mike, Tony, Peter, Bobby, Minh, Quito, Steff, Anela, Eric, Andy(ASB), Ricky, Susan, Aku, Haku, Gina, Tomoko and Super: Thanks for all the fun time hanging out at the con + party + photoshoot

* Imari, Azu, Nadia, Mel, Jazzy, Philip: Thanks for being the models for the 2 scheduled photoshoots I did.

* James and David: It was so nice to shoot with you guys!

Here is 1 random non-cosplay image of Jazzy.


Btw, Superior-No1 is really a great name for Super XDDDD

Wow I haven't been posing here for a while... there is definitely a lot of posts I need to catch up ^^;;;

I've been trying out some commercial photography projects for the past 2 months. I did some headshots, events coverage, wedding coverage and fashion shoot for print. Each of these projects are so different and it seems like each project require working with a deadline a slightly different "set of eyes". The only down-side was I guess I took in too many projects and all of a sudden I've been doing back-to-back weekend shooting for a couple weeks... LOL that was so intense but yet so much fun now I think about it. Definitely learn a lot in the process. Thanks a lot for my friends for sharing with me the sadness, craziness (?) and happiness in the process XDD

SoCal Cosplay Gathering last Saturday was lots of fun. It was so nice to hang out with old friends and meet some new ones. Thanks a lot for the organizers for putting up such a great event this year!

( As a preview have some Aku XD )

and WOW, Fanime is in 2 weeks. I'm so excited already!! ^^ It seems like I have a big list of anime/game/manga to catch up ^^;; Oh yes I finally finished Black Butler anime and it was very good!! Now I kinda understand why ycysusan is soooo into it (^__^)

Now let me run and finish editing pictures from the wedding ^^;;; (OMG due on Tue End-Of-Day...)

"Ringu" and "the Ring" are both good movies. I love the original "Ringu" for the concept of Onryo and I also love how they portrayed Samara Morgan in "the Ring". Besides the super scary-nature of the films what attracted me the most were the stories of Sadako/Samara. I had a hard time understanding her character but I found it very interesting to think about.

I was able to get two compositions of ravendarkwings 's Sadako before we leave the Arboretum.





I think of the way Sadako crawled must be related to her will to escape the well before she died. Hopefully a shot from behind would reduce the horror element and help describe the character more. Thanks a lot ravendarkwings for posing!! ^^

We did a photoshoot at the Arboretum last Saturday. Thanks Minh for organizing this shoot.

The location was extremely beautiful and full of potential for great photographs. However we wasn't aware that a license is required to take pictures there. According to a lady (who claimed to be the head of their photography department) the type of photography we did, with lots of "costumes" and "big camera", would be considered "commercial photography" and thus require a commercial photography rental of their location.

Because we didn't have such license and we didn't wanna break the rule too badly we ended up didn't take too many pictures. Fortunately we split into smaller photog-coser team so hopefully everybody got some pictures taken. I was with Noel, mikecabusi ,
itsukayume and hakuku . During our shoot Mike was working with haku (as Ginko) and I was working with Jen (as Renzu). I'm a big fans of Mushishi, however it is not a very popular series in the US so it was really nice to see you guys in Mushishi's outfits!! It was sooo much rush last Sat I wish I could have taken more pictures of you guys =/ Oh well, maybe next time...

Before we head out of the Arboretum I was able to get some headshots of ravendarkwings 's awesome Sadako from Ringu. ^^



( Renzu, Mushishi )

It was really fun seeing everybody! Although the shoot itself was a bit short but overall I love the experience ^^ Being chased around was kinda fun too (?) XDD