After helping my good friend and fellow photographer Chris Cheng set up his own website, I realized I should actually make an attempt to update my own blog.

Earlier this summer, I attended this year’s NYC Obon Festival in Bryant Park.  You may remember my post from the same event in 2008.  This year’s was even better, and both Hoh Daiko and Soh Daiko put on great performances!

Friend and fellow photographer Irene Wu helped cover the event.  We shot two video angles, both in 1080p, and edited them together afterwards, and also shot photos.

[Soh Daiko: Matsuri, on YouTube]

My last year at TCNJ was quite enjoyable – I caught up with a lot of old friends, met a bunch of new friends, and still found time for class and other projects.

This year saw (among other things) the release of collegiatetaiko.org (a hub for collegiate taiko groups and players), a refactoring of mtwstudios.com, work on TCNJ’s COMTOR and IJIMS projects, and work on a soon-to-be-released site!

I also found time to hone my photography skills by lugging my trusty Rebel XTs around with me everywhere I go, and holding impromptu photoshoots in the PAR.

Much of the Spring was spent preparing for Mystique of the East, an annual cultural showcase run by TCNJ’s Asian American Association.  I performed with TCNJ Taiko, debuting a new original song written by Mike Smith, and sang with Mariko Curran in a rendition of “All I Ask of You” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera… in Japanese.

When I wasn’t worrying about things at TCNJ, I was preparing for life after college by sending out various applications, interviewing, etc.  I eventually was offered (and accepted) a full-time position as a Web Developer for The New York Times!  I’m in the Client Technologies department which is responsible for (among other things) the front-end development on nytimes.com.

I started on May 17th (3 days after graduation.  Breaks are overrated.), and am working in the brand new building on 8th Ave. in Manhattan.  Come visit if you’re in the city, and we’ll do lunch! : )

	Canon Digital Rebel XT (with 18-55mm f/4-5.6 II Lens)
	Canon 35-80mm f/4-5.6 III lens that came with a Rebel GII I got off eBay
	Canon 50mm prime f/1.8
	SanDisk Ultra II 2GB CompactFlash Card
	Opteka Battery Pack Grip for Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi & Rebel XT with 2 NB-2LH Batteries

I decided to go with the XT because since the release of its successor (the Digital Rebel XTi) the XT has gone down significantly in price. Plus, most reviews seem to agree that the image quality improvement from XT to the XTi is negligible and I decided that it wasn’t worth the extra $200.

After using the kit lens for awhile, I decided I needed a faster lens for indoor shooting. Doing alittle research, I stumbled upon the Canon 50mm prime f/1.8 which seems to get good reviews ’round the board. With the $70 price tag, I figured I couldn’t go wrong.

So far, I’m impressed with what good value the XT is! The kit lens isn’t very good quality, but using the camera with the 50mm seems to produce really nice results!

And after more than a year of owning my Flickr account and doing nothing with it, I’ve finally decided to put a select few of my better photos up there as something of a portfolio. Photos.mtwstudios.com is great for photo hosting, but it doesn’t have any kind of a photoblog feature/mode (yet).

I’m also looking for a nice point and shoot camera for the fall. The Rebel XT is nice, but I cant bring it everywhere like I can with a compact camera. I’m looking at the Canon Powershot A710IS or maybe the A570IS but I’m open to suggestions!

• Tag/Keyword Support – Now all those tags I spent adding to pictures wont be in vain! Keywords are now searchable, and you can click on a keyword for a particular item to view other items that match that keyword.
• Dynamic Albums – Long awaited support for dynamic albums lets me do things like albums for Highly Rated, Most Viewed, Recently Added, as well as albums based on a particular keyword.
• Autorotation – Gallery will now auto-rotate the pictures from the EXIF property Orientation if your camera has an orientation sensor.
• Watchlist – Now on each album, there’s a ‘Watch’ button on the sidebar where you can have photos.mtwstudios.com notify you (via email) whenever a new item is added to that album. Think of it as equivalent to the Facebook mini-feed…

Also, in celebration of nothing in particular, I’m bumping up the quota for all normal users to 1GB. Enjoy!