Here are a few tilt shift photos that I’ve made from my recent trip up to Komtar Tower.  The view from the 60th floor was breath taking and provided a totally different perspective of Penang.  The day was also very cooperative with very little haze.  We could see as far as Butterworth BORR, Tg. Bungah, Penang Hill and Bayan Lepas.  Georgetown is still mostly covered by pre-war buildings.  High rise buildings are mostly found at the seafront like Gurney and the new Jelutong Expressway.  There is a sense of calmness viewing the city from the 60th floor, its the feeling that you get viewing a landscape or city from a mountain or a high location.  One can get lost in time dwelling at such locations. 

The Komtar Tower viewing platform was previously the Tower Restaurant.  Only in recent years, when the restaurant closes, this place was open up for public.  Sad to say, the place was poorly maintain with a few chairs and tables close to the windows, and the rest of the floor was empty.  This is far from KL tower nor those tower view abroad.  The good thing was that we were the only visitor there, we got the entire floor to our selves, unlike we have to fight for view in KL Tower or in Japan.  I believe the RM15 entrance fee may have contributed to the lack of traffic. 

Once arrive at the 60th floor, we were greeted by a friendly lady which sold us the tickets and gave us a bottle of water and two postcards each.  I guess this is the management’s lame way of making up for RM15 entrance fee.  The place looked liken an abandon empty building and it display the management’s lack of commitment to truly turn this into a tourist destination.  There is a vast potential for such a place, look at KL Tower for one, constant flow of tourist from abroad and locals as well.  When I was in Tokyo, their viewing tower was located at their City Council building as well and was also packed with local and foreign tourist.  If the management lack the will to make this tower a tourist destination with complete facility, maybe the building management should look into tendering this out to other companies that has interest, if not, at least run it as a state own non profit org. 

The place certainly lacks a few fundamental items that are a must have in such viewing facility.

1. A map of what you are looking at, with names of the famous buildings (located at each window plane)
2. A free view finder to get a closer look at the city
3. A few souvenir shops to remember Penang by. 
4. A restaurant for tourist to chill and get lost in time. 

Nevertheless, the view from up the tower was breath taking and provided plenty of opportunity for tilt shift photography or post processing tilt shift. 

When I was in Japan about a year ago, i found that many camera prices were rather attractive, almost 30-40% cheaper than what I would pay here in Malaysia.  But the camera language is in Japanese, and there is no option to change it to English or any other language.  There are “International” versions, but they cost the same here.  So, this got me thinking.  How about, we get the camera in Japan, and then get it refreshed with an English Firmware? Would that work?

So, I appeal to camera enthusiast out there, do you know if this works? If yes, then, the next thing to figure out is how to get a ‘friend’ to purchase one back here…

After using WordPress for so long, I have got acustom of this CMS engine and grew out of Movable Type. My long standing photo blog which was previously powered by movable type have been migrated to wordpress. The migration was fairly simple, just export from MT and inport at WordPress and it was done. I manage to tweak the 555 photoblog theme to customize it to my liking and what you see above is the fruit of my customization. In addition, I have also moved from /pblog to the root of my domain. So, now who ever comes to wekgna.com will first come to my photo blog, which fits into what I want to maintain of my personal existance on the web. When I first start blogging years back, I hate to write, and I only post photos, and hence the my photoblog was born. I was on blogspot then. I could still remember, I first subscribe to a free host 100mb that host perl, and movable type was free for all at that time. I name my blog Sweet & Sour, witih the notion that life is full of sweet and sour memories, and they are captured through my photos. After some revisions of movable type upgrade, wordpress starts to spring up on the side. I started to use wordpress out of curiousity and created my ‘blog‘ named ‘My So Called Life’ with wordpress. By that time, I started to write more and took photo less. As my ‘blog’ on wordpress grew, my photoblog powered by movable type starts to be neglected. I have also moved into my own new domain called wekgna.com, which is my name spelled backwards. Not untill a few days ago I tried to post a photo and found issues with movable type. I have upgraded to the latest version and it seams to be so much complicated. So, I decided to ditch movable type and migrate my entire photoblog into wordpress. This brings us here today to this post. I would like to annouce that my old photoblog at wekgna.com/pblog has been shutdown, and now moved to the root of the domain, which is www.wekgna.com. Enjoy the photos, and subscribe for new postings if you like my style of photography.

After going through 1.3k of photos, I have streamline it down to 600 over photos to be shared. The photos can be found by clicking on the picture above. Initially, I wanted to share the photos through a flash based viewer, but found that there are limitations to that, and many are limited to not more than 50 photos, and so I turn to Java Scripts instead. The trip was great, and there are many things to share. I will share them as we go along, there are just too many things to put into one post. Many friends have asked for the photos, you can find them above. All I can say for now is that everyone in their lifetime, must plan for a trip to Japan.

Still thinking of Gwen’s concert, the atmospheric stadium environment, I am sharing a new set of wall paper by manicho. Its photos taken during a packed concert and the photos are amazing. Enjoy.