The selection of my photography in 2008.
Tigger’s Friend
Pride and Beer at Australia Day
Seductive Queen at Mardi Gras Launch
Chinese New Year Parade Preparation
Chinese New Year Parade Preparation
Punch and Judy Show
Mardi Gras Fair Day
Mardi Gras Fair Day
Mardi Gras Harbour Party
Mardi Gras Harbour Party
Mardi Gras Parade
Mardi Gras Party
Front of House
Garry & Marissa
Garry & Marissa
The World Behind Bars
Cockatoo Island
Stilgherrian Live on Crown Street
Newtown Festival
Newtown Festival
The final video I make in 2008. I spend my first Christmas not working in a restaurant, editing this video for Stilgherrian.
Hangover and Rage guest programmer wannabe with Miss Wired and Barry Saunders
May your love, compassion and courage make ways to your wishes in this holiday season and throughout 2009. Please take a good care of the planet, your neighbours, friends, family and yourself.
I have been using Brightcove Network to host my video works for just over a year. It is actually more complex than any other video sharing sites but gives you more control of how you want to publish flash videos. More importantly, they offer a client encoding application, Brightcove Published, and the compressing quality is not so bad at all.
Unfortunately, they are moving on from free service to paid account. My account has been disabled and the videos will be turned off at the end of January unless I upgrade to Brightcove 3 account. One has to develop and change to a better business model. And they seem to focus more on corporate target. No-fuss. I just need to find another host. The hunt is on.
Control and compression quality come first when I choose this service. No one gives you options as Brightcove does, so it comes down to the final flash video they produce up in the cloud. I decided to find out which one is the best for the job.
So Long Cathy is the perfect video for this exercise. I literally made this video frame by frame. It is very tricky to codec this one because of its constant change. In fact, it is the key for me to choose which video sharing web site that I will use to publish my work from.
I am done with YouTube. Although it is the most popular video social media, they have got the worst quality. It comes down to these two sites, Dailymotion and Vimeo. Dailymotion is not as bad as YouTube but is not that good either. On top of that, after signing up, I start to get spam contacts from them.
And the winner is Vimeo. Their video compression is very impressing, even better than Brightcove. It preserves the details nicely, especially, on my face that appears only 2-4 frames each time. Nothing can compare to the original and watch it as a video loop on a CRT television but this is the best. Next task is just to upload the videos and embed them to the blog.
Australia is facing a major censorship threat from its own Federal Government when Senator Conroy proposes ISP-level Internet filtering to protect the children, as they say. However, no one knows how this scheme will effectively work or how it will accidentally block other websites. Even the Senator could not provide a clear answer himself. Although this is a fundamental issue in a developed country, like Australia, that we are taking for granted, media coverage to remind us of this problem is still very poor. In Sydney, as well as the other Australian capital cities, Internet-based communities are fighting for a basic right to express themselves. We still need ripple effects to spread the words about this sneaky policy and stop the Government snatching away one of the most important rights in our society, communication.
While Thailand is celebrating Loy Krathong Festival around November each year, the Thai community in Sydney has an unrelated event, Thai Food Festival, in Tumbalong Park, Darling Harbour. This year features Thai Prawn Showcase to promote the export.
One trick I learned is to stay around until the party is over. The stalls are willing to lower the food price rather than pack the food back even though there is not much left to scoop.
