Sony AMC August Seminar

The excitement of waiting finally end. The Sony AMC August seminar was held today at Le Meridian Hotel. As usual, it’s FREE for Sony Alpha user!! The event was posted at forum for pre-registration and all seats were reserved in just 3 days! What man! The funny thing is, no one knows the seminar details until last minute

As sneak preview by George, the Sony AMC person in charge (actually he is the product manager), there will be few important announcements during the seminar. All rumors and speculation link up with A900 full frame SLR launching or F58 flashgun release date. Hahaha.. It didn’t happen here but what actual announced will benefit AMC most.

Let’s see…

1. Every seminar participant will get a Alpha Survival Kit (retail price RM599) for FREE!!! Although it just some merchandises and accessories like bag, t-shirt, watch and etc. It show how sincere Sony to keep the user happy.

2. Aphanatics forum would be our new home and AMC.com.my is converting to knowledge database. This is a good move to open the forum to more user and expand our territory and poisons Same time new moderators were introduced to all. They are all AMC forum pioneers by the way. 100% support.

3. Sony will sponsor RM1000 monthly to Alphanatics as club fund. The best thing is we can snow ball it and decide what to do with the fund. Can I suggest to buy a white lens and loan to member??? (in my dream) Truly can’t find anything like this in today world. This is not a hoax. Believe it.

4. The biggest surprise is – Malaysia will be the host of world 1st ever Alpha Convention!!!! And it happen in October!!! World class speakers are coming down to give free talk for 3 days!!! Who is reading this please go out and grab your alpha SLR now

I feel very energetic with the Sony AMC effort in expanding its market share and same time practicing good consumer service. The user is final winner. Although I am just a ordinary customer, but feel like doing MLM and want to recruit more member to join us Not to forget today seminar speaker were Ted Adnan and Darren Chang. Both are very experience in portraiture and automotive photography respectively. The talk covered basic to intermediate skill level, now everyone can shoot.

A Day with Leica

Today I obey Sony Alpha and join Leica. The outing was organized by Photo Malaysia and Schmidt Marketing. Leica is the Rolls-Royce in camera industry. So the price and quality is all at premium level. There were two groups of user, black and white film and digital. I was in the digital group and given a Leica M8 loan unit. Even though it was 30 minutes of usage, it has proven I am a lousy photographer and M8 is a good camera. The specialty of M8,

1. It’s a rangefinder. What you see from viewfinder is what you get, no darker nor brighter. Just it doesn’t has DOF preview as SLR.

2. The viewfinder will display the gird/guide line for framing, thus different focal lens will have different square size. I always hard to frame (although just 30minutes of usage).

3. No autofocus. All focus done by my index finger. The middle view finder will display the split image, just match it at ur subject. The difficulty when focus subject is not in the middle. Bye bye multipoint auto focus.

4. The camera is light so hardly notice shaky hand. Also the mechanism is simple, just a nice ‘qichak’ buzz.

5. No funny stuff like vivid mode and stitch shot. All you have are Aperture or Manual (self define shutter speed and aperture). Thanks Leica there is continuous shutter and timer.

6. Aperture dial from lenses. The Manual mode will have metering info to tell you dial up or down. Cool! (because it make me feel like driving an antic Rolls Royce with Turbo)

7. No zoom lens. Save the zoom effects with SLR.

8. Small body size. Can shoot like lomography (shoot from hip).
9. THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT. VERY CLEAN AND CRISPY IMAGE. POISONOUS!!!

I am happy to be a 30 minutes Leica user. In the afternoon we back to Schmidt HQ to attend seminar. Sifu Teng Wei enlighten us with colour management stuff. It’s technical as attend a degree course, but it does clear many doubts and mysteries happen in digital photography workflow. Finally we receive a Leica T-shirt (which wear by the Leica promoter) and two prints of best shot. Not a bad day since we paid registration fee. Ok, Sony AMC I am coming back now.