NYE Sydney style!

Posted on December 31, 2008

Sydney’s one of the first cities to celebrate the New Year, so here’s a glimpse of how ours went down!

Trace held a bash at Milson’s Point, so we had to head over the Harbour Bridge early to beat the road closures. Unfortunately the closest parking I could find was a good half hour away. Saw Yonas from JDM Yard doing laps trying to find a spot too!

The party was held right on the edge of the harbour, where Tracy’s family owns an office. The balcony was enormous, and there was food and even a live band as well, which was super cool.

Lining the stomach for a heavy dose of alcohol. Unfortunately I was designated driver, and so the drinking had to stop early for me. Damn I suck at rock-scissors-paper.

Sydney’s all about fireworks, with two shows - 9pm and midnight - scheduled during the evening. The fireworks are placed at a variety of places such as Pyrmont, Darling Harbour, the Opera House and of course the bridge.

More fireworks.

Massive ending of course!

End of the year

Posted on December 31, 2008

Where did 2008 go?

Hasn’t been the best of years so perhaps it’s good that ‘09 is just around the corner. See you on the other side!

The most painful of shoots

Posted on December 29, 2008

(image copyright Easton Chang)
Photo shoots go down along with deadlines as the bane of any Editor’s existence. And I guess that’s probably why most modified car magazines ran rubbish photos until the boom of the digital era made anyone a semi-pro photographer, from which point the magazines either lifted their game or fell behind the pack. As soon as I was put in the Ed’s seat I wanted our magazine to have cutting edge design, meaningful copy and photography with high impact. Thankfully, there were many car photographers who were dying to express themselves rather than stick to the mundane.

Over the years I’ve been at photo shoots in so many countries, at all times of the day and in all sorts of weather conditions. I’ve lost count of the cars, but I can always recollect the strange and curious shoots. Like the Indonesian photographer I was assigned overseas - who didn’t speak a word of English - and shot everything on full auto. Or the time a local photographer asked me to look through the view-finder to see if the subject was blurry.

While most people probably think directing a shoot means you sit in a fold-out chair, cigar in hand and with assistants everywhere, nothing could be further from the truth. At least not at Auto Salon Magazine. Typically it means holding flashes in the freezing cold, shooing away stray cats (which seemed quite a common problem whenever we shot a car in Indonesia), and pushing cars into inch-perfect positions.

(image copyright Easton Chang)
However one shoot takes the cake as being the most painful, and that’s the infamous NSX photo shoot Easton Chang did for us. After we ran the images, it became a hit worldwide with other publications (you’ll even spot me in the driver’s seat when it made the cover of MAX Power; the above shot has the owner behind the wheel) and is a well-known favourite amongst our readers. Behind the scenes however, it was a shoot that pushed Easton, the car’s owner Nico Tjen and myself to the point of exhaustion. Overall the shoot took a staggering 26 hours to complete.

Anything and everything that could go wrong did. After setting everything up, installing the rig and reeling off a couple of shots, the cops happened to drive by and shut down our shoot. We’d then have to move to a back-up location, only for rent-a-cops to come by and kick us off their property. This happened - no shit - four times. It would always occur halfway through a shoot, and since we wanted a uniform set for the magazine spread, it pretty much meant we had to scrap it and start all over again. I guess it was always bound to happen, as this particular car is hardly inconspicuous. That night we drove all over Sydney visiting most of my emergency back-up locations, and unfortunately Nico’s supremely low slung NSX couldn’t make it into half of them. Eventually we settled on an empty car park, which is testimony to Easton’s high level photography and post-processing as he made it look spectacular.

From the past

Posted on December 29, 2008

Since I was going for another run today, I rummaged through my closet to find an old shirt to wear. That’s when I came across this shirt from a now defunct company called Valve Clothing. Valve was owned by a good friend of mine, who did it as a hobby about five or six years ago. Unfortunately bigger prospects, such as fulfilling big garment orders for third parties, meant that he no longer had time for it. He sold off the remaining stock to a few boutique clothing stores and that was the end of that. It’s a shame really, because he had a few cool designs - all based on cars of course - including this model kit one.

In the mail

Posted on December 28, 2008

Received an envelope all the way from the Fatlace store in San Fran.

Couple of cool stickers, my favourite being the Illest design of course.

Sunday in the park

Posted on December 28, 2008

After being holed up in my old city apartment for over two years, it’s a real shock to be out in the ‘burbs again. Down the road from my current home is Centennial Park, which I think is Sydney’s biggest park at some 190 hectares. Today I got off my lazy butt and spent a couple of hours working on my fitness.

Having hurt my hamstring in a soccer game a week or two ago, I took it pretty easy with only a little bit of sprinting. In high school I was in the track & field team, and it’s truly crap knowing just how slow I am in comparison to those days. My resolution for 2009 is to try and claw back some of my teen fitness.

Papz’s bday

Posted on December 26, 2008

This time of the year is always chaotic, more so for Michael Papandrea (Papz) as he and his good friend Grant both have their birthdays on the 26th and 27th respectively. Every year they do a joint party - pretty crazy affairs I must say - although this year turned out to be a lot more toned down as it was held at Papz’s new house. Besides eating plenty of steaks and burgers, we played a game of poker which went for several hours. Although Papz was pretty drunk, he still managed to clean up the $360 pot!

Xmas with friends

Posted on December 25, 2008

Spent Christmas with my old university friends at Thao’s awesome new house in Sydney’s west. Of course, the day was all about food and alcohol. The weather was awesome: warm, sunny, and with a nice breeze.

Kris Kringle/Secret Santa of course, with a $20 limit. Boys bought pressies for boys, and girls bought pressies for girls. It seemed all of the girls received something to do with make-up or body care, while the boys’ pressies were a lot more eclectic: DVDs, beach towels, USB-powered desk rockets, and Willy’s curious box of creatine accompanied by Conan 1 and 2. We all laughed pretty hard at that one.

Thao’s boyfriend John made this extremely potent punch. I think it had a whole bottle of Smirnoff in it, along with some gin and Malibu to boot. Three glasses of this made most of us tipsy. Its alcoholic content increased with each top-up too.

Here’s ASM’s Deputy Ed Willy thinking some serious thoughts (about fishing apparently). Red face courtesy of the punch.

Eating was done outside under the setting sun, with huge servings of turkey and ham along with salads and sushi.

Washed down with Asahi of course.

Dessert was made from scratch by Thao, who put together one of the best sticky date puddings I’ve ever eaten. It was so damn good that I had already wolfed down half of it before I realised I should take a photo!

After plenty of eating and drinking, Grace came up with the idea of playing Cranium, a board game that has elements of trivial pursuit, charades and so on. It was, of course, boys vs girls, with each correct answer meaning the opposing team had to drink a shot. Us guys absolutely smashed the girls, and they had to down something like six or seven shots each. Most of us had to hang around til after midnight to sober up.

Here’s Willy’s Cloodle (think Pictionary) attempt at representing a merry-go-round. Until he drew the arrows, we all thought it was a lily pad with a pube growing out of the middle. Today was simply awesome and spent in the company of some great friends, and it’s good we’ll all be catching up again on New Year’s at Field Day.

Have a good one!

Posted on December 24, 2008

Merry Christmas to you all! Hope you all have a safe and enjoyable time!

The photos you see

Posted on December 23, 2008

Recently I’ve been receiving a lot of queries regarding the equipment I use to shoot for this blog. Well, here it is. Nothing special, but it gets the job done most of the time. For 99% of the shots you see on Empty Wrapper, I use a Canon IXUS 960 IS which I bought when I was in South Korea, way back when the Aussie dollar was strong and meant buying overseas was a huge bargain. It’s the replacement for my previous camera, which was crushed during a drunk weekend in Melbourne (as posted a couple months back). I use a telescopic tripod for some shots, as well as an attachable wide-angle lens. Both of these are Japanese aftermarket products, and having experienced the shoddy Chinese made versions, are certainly worth the extra investment.

Overall it’s a decent digicam. I’ve dropped it onto concrete a couple of times and since its cased in titanium, it didn’t even leave a scratch. One gripe though is its performance at higher ISOs, which is pretty disappointing. While moving house I uncovered a considerable wad of Japanese Yen in an old box, which I’ve had since my previous trip to Japan. So if I head over to Tokyo in the near future, I may just splurge it on a G10. We’ll see though, because knowing me I’ll probably blow it on clothing while I’m there.

Absolute mayhem

Posted on December 22, 2008

Arsenal vs Liverpool is always a highly contested match. As two of the ‘big four’ English clubs, there’s plenty of history and a lot of bad blood between the clubs. But boy, was this game more on a knife’s edge than usual. Crashing tackles, two super goals, and nervy moments for both. That’s until some stupid refereeing interfered with it all. Harsh tackles went unpunished, and dubious ones awarded with yellow cards. And then, out of nowhere, Adebayor was shown a second yellow and sent off. For those who didn’t watch the match, Adebayor shielded the ball on edge of the Liverpool box, getting ready to line up a shot. With his arms out for balance, one lightly struck Liverpool’s Arbeloa, who then proceeded to go down like he had received a head shot in Counter Strike. FFS.

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