Industrial Photography: Nodding Donkey Ad Campaign

A couple of months ago, a client came across my nodding donkey picture and asked me for ideas to present the image on a 2m x 1.8m billboard for their corporate ad campaign. Cropping a vertical image to fit a horizontal aspect ratio template wouldn’t produce a convincing and dramatic corporate branding — client is in the business of maintaining these nodding donkeys (also called beam pumps) among other products and services in their oil and gas portfolio. So I took the image and mirrored it back to back, tweaked the colours to give it a dramatic flair to get this composite piece.

The big print is mounted, framed and I’m told makes its appearance at a location where it gets a lot of inbound/outbound traffic. It helps that I have a computer capable of rendering such large files — the final image size was 24,000 x 21,662 pixels at 300 DPI — without much effort.

Enchanted Sungai Liang Forest

On days when I am not sweating buckets at badminton, I’m doing the same here inside the humid Sungai Liang forest reserve, though not nearly as much. The club where I play is a 10 minutes drive while the green outdoors sets me back 20-25 minutes depending on traffic — I once considered driving half an hour to spend another half an hour in the forest a silly thing to do. This photo, captured with the Galaxy S3, is the beginning of a rather steep climb that pumps the heart good by the time you get up there. Make this spot the beginning of the trek and the journey gets easier as you finish on concrete steps rather than the other way round.

Brunei Darussalam National Day Run 2013

Some years back my daughter Jewel ran her first long distance event — a 6 km run starting from and finishing at the Hassanal Bolkiah National Stadium in the Brunei capital, an event she was neither trained nor had much preparation for other than the occasional school practice. Back then I wasn’t very much involved with her running as I am today in her athletic training and competition. Cut a long story short, she completed the event and was among the top 30-something students out of what appeared to be a large number of participants from all schools in the country.

Last Sunday, Jewel participated in her second run this time a kilometer shorter which was held right in our home town, Seria. The difference this time she has had eleven months of athletic coaching, having earned several medals in 400m, 200m and 4x100m events, she’s in way better shape than she ever was. The transformation from the weak, migraine-prone asthmatic little girl to the determined athlete she is today, is nothing short of amazing. She is 13, and finished 5th in the Under 17 category.

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July 25, 2011: Overcoming all odds to triumph: Jewel’s first 400m event.
Feb 23, 2009: Growing Up With Asthma and Allergies

Jewel stretching before her 5 km run.

All images: Canon PowerShot G11