dens|ee*

Few months ago, my friend Kent asked me to help him to pho­to­graph the inte­rior of a bun­ga­low of his client.

He told me that it will be pub­lished in a mag­a­zine, but what he didn’t tell me was that, the pic­tures going to appear on 11 pages!

You can find them in the lat­est iN DESIGN Mag­a­zine issue 28 both English/Malay ver­sion and English/Chinese version.

Happy to see my own pic­tures printed on a mag­a­zine. But com­pare my pic­tures with the oth­ers in the mag­a­zine, there’s def­i­nitely a big big room for me to improve.

Here are some of my favourite shots, just a small portion.

All in all, learned a lot about inte­rior pho­tog­ra­phy and the con­clu­sion is, inte­rior pho­tog­ra­phy, not easy.

StageKL went live sine 1 Jan­u­ary 2011 in case you still don’t know.

Many peo­ple asked me why did I cre­ate the web­site, or more specif­i­cally, why a web­site about per­form­ing arts?

The short answer is, well, very log­i­cal. Den­nis cre­ates web­sites for liv­ing. Den­nis loves per­form­ing arts. Thus, Den­nis cre­ated a web­site about per­form­ing arts.

Don’t buy the short answer? Okay here’s the long one. But before that, grab your cof­fee, sit down, relax and get ready because it’s going to take a few hours to finish.

Just kid­ding.

Well, I’ve always love per­form­ing arts ever since I was young. I chore­o­graphed a few dance per­for­mances dur­ing high school even though no one has ever taught me how.

I can still remem­ber when I went to watch my first musi­cal — Fame the Musi­cal — exactly 10 years ago in 2001, I loved it so much I spent all my money to watch it twice. After watch­ing it I wished I could leave every­thing behind and tour with the group to per­form on stages all over the world.

But of course it didn’t hap­pen. Those were the naive days.

How­ever, my love for per­form­ing arts is still as strong as always. The only prob­lem is, it’s hard to find a friend who actu­ally would like to go to watch a show with me.

“I’m not a per­form­ing arts person.”

“Per­form­ing arts? Boring…”

“It’s so expen­sive lah…”

Those were the excuses I got from my friends all the time. And most of the time, they have never been to any good stage per­for­mance before.

But of course there were also friends who actu­ally liked musi­cals once they attended their first show. And some even got shocked when I told them they could attend the orches­tra at Dewan Fil­har­monic Petronas, KLCC for as low as RM20.

So I was think­ing, it’s not that peo­ple don’t like per­form­ing arts, it’s just that they are lack­ing of expo­sure of what per­form­ing arts really is.

So one fine day dur­ing mid­night, the idea of cre­at­ing a web­site about per­form­ing arts sud­denly strikes me. I was so excited then I started to think, plan and design.

Okay, fast for­ward till today. Tada…!!! There you have it, StageKL. A com­pre­hen­sive web­site hope­fully to increase people’s expo­sure and inter­est on our boom­ing local per­form­ing arts industry.

There are more improve­ments to be done. If you still want to read more texts, head on to read my wel­come note where I talked about my future plan for StageKL.

Before I end this long post, one small request, please help me to spread the word on Twit­ter. I’ve made it easy for you, just click here and you will see the fol­low­ing mes­sage ready for you to tweet.

Check out http://stagekl.com/ for lat­est musi­cal, con­cert, the­atre and dance around Kuala Lumpur @stagekl

You will never know if any of your friends will find the web­site use­ful. So thanks a lot! And don’t for­get to check out http://stagekl.com/ because there are at least 5 good shows hap­pen­ing this weekend!

Happy New Year everybody!!!

It’s incred­i­ble how time passes so fast. I can still remem­ber clearly what I wrote for my 2010 new year post exactly 1 year ago.

2010 has been a year with ups and downs for me. But at least I have ful­filled my wish by trav­el­ling to 2 for­eign coun­tries — Hong Kong and Cambodia.

Now let’s sum­marise my 2010 in 4 quarters.

First quar­ter

Things were good dur­ing the first quar­ter. I was very much into land­scape photography.

Botan­i­cal Gar­den at Japan­ese Village.

Taip­ing Lake Garden.

Har­vested padi field at Sekinchan.

Light­ing strikes some­where around KLCC.

Beau­ti­ful sun­set with blue and pur­ple sky.

Lanterns on the high­est tower.

The 2^nd Putra­jaya Inter­na­tional Hot Air Bal­loon Fiesta 2010.

Then I had the most won­der­ful birth­day cel­e­bra­tion with my clos­est friends at Hard Rock Cafe.

Cel­e­brated my 27^th birth­day with a bunch of best friends.

And I also went for white water raft­ing for the first time. It was really fun.

White water raft­ing at Kam­par River.

Sec­ond quarter

Things started to change dur­ing the sec­ond quar­ter. I started to be less pas­sion­ate about life until a cer­tain point I realised that my life was a total mess.

But I wasn’t feel­ing sad or down or any­thing. Yeah, I wasn’t feel­ing any­thing. Noth­ing will excite me dur­ing that time. Until one day I threw myself off my bed and tried to cleanup my mess.

Luck­ily things got bet­ter and that’s when I ran my 3^rd 10km marathon.

Stan­dard Charted KL Marathon 2010.

Third quar­ter

Things started to get bet­ter dur­ing the third quarter.

I started to take pic­tures again after I bought a new lens and speedlight.

My new Nikon SB-900 Speed­light and Tok­ina 11-16mm F2.8 DX.

Pavil­ion Kuala Lumpur and the fountain.

A pic­ture taken at Putra­jaya lake.

My first indoor pho­tog­ra­phy with a teddy bear.

Star­craft II light painting.

My first inte­rior shooting.

Another indoor pho­tog­ra­phy shoot­ing still object.

First pre-wedding shooting.

And I went to Hong Kong for the first time! It was such a won­der­ful time!

I vis­ited Hong Kong for the first time.

And not for­get­ting to men­tion I won a brand new iPhone 4 from Maxis! See, things were get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter near the end of 2010.

I won a brand new iPhone 4 from the lucky draw.

Fourth quar­ter

When it came to the last quar­ter of the year, things got pretty busy. I was so busy until I didn’t have much time to blog.

First, I ran my fourth 10km marathon at Nike City 10K 2010.

Nike City 10K 2010.

Then I vis­ited Cam­bo­dia for the first time. It was such a mem­o­rable and mean­ing­ful trip.

Angkor Wat at sunrise.

And one last thing which was one of the rea­sons I didn’t blog much and that’s my pet project StageKL.

I had the con­cept since early 2010 but not until the end of the year I decided it was time to make it a reality.

My pet project StageKL.

Happy New Year 2011

2010 has been a great year for me and I have a feel­ing that 2011 will be an even bet­ter one.

No new year res­o­lu­tions again this time. But I will try my very best to make my 2011 the most awe­some year ever.

Happy new year once again and wish you all have a pros­per­ous and wonderful 2011!