Tag Archives: shimworld

Trail Running with the Insta360 X3

With zero experience in shooting videos, never owned a GoPro before much less a 360° camera, I took the plunge with the Insta360 X3 for a once in a lifetime family trip abroadlater this year.

Took the X3 out for practice filming my trail run at Bukit Silat and was so impressed with the incredibly smooth 5.7K 30fps video. Quite the learning curve coming from over a decade of working with DSLR, editing video files sends me right back to the beginning of a steep learning curve.

Colour Your World With a Canon Laser Printer

It’s a well established fact that inkjet printers are far superior than their laser counterparts when it comes to critical photo printing. Those of you who have just recently discovered this blog, I am a freelance photographer who runs a small photo editing studio from home. I have two Canon A4 inkjet printers that are one or two generations apart. The PIXMA iP6700D is a few years old, quickly heading into obsolescence but still produces brilliant photos though I limit its use to DVD printing. Last year I added a Canon PIXMA MG6370 All-in-One for the other features the iP6700D can’t do notably high quality document scanning.

A few months ago, my 12 years old HP LaserJet 1200 laser printer died 😥 and I found myself in the market for a replacement and an upgrade. Colour laser printers are a lot more affordable today compared to a decade back — I went all out to look for a unit that handled not just colour but also supported network and duplex printing at a price range I could afford. Sounded like a tall order except it’s not, and I found everything I needed in the Canon Laser Shot LBP7200Cdn and more. Yes, more — photo quality blew me away. Laser printers aren’t exactly known for handling images very well and this printer (perhaps other models too) prints exceptionally good images <3.

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Amazing photo quality: A two-page spread of a Men’s Fitness digital magazine printed in A4 size.

This printer is by far the easiest networked printers I have ever had to install over Local Area Network. I simply connected the printer to my Cisco router, ran the installer on two PCs and two laptops running both 32-bits and 64-bits Windows 7 including a PC that’s still running XP and printer detection had never been so straightforward.

Working from home this printer is now an indispensable addition to the office and at the same time a wonderful convenience for the children when it comes to school assignments and projects. On a month to month basis I scan and print a lot of documents, everything from bank transcripts, children’s school assignments, copies of personal IDs, customer invoicing (very few corporate clients allow electronic invoices), and printing them in colour adds much greater appeal than a black and white print. Both printers have their place in this studio and they complement each other nicely. This is not a product review but an experience I’m happy 🙂 to share with regards to the choice of equipment I use.

The local Canon distributor in Brunei is Interhouse Company and they deserve a mention for looking after my photography and printing needs since I started my Jan Shim Photography business 10 years ago. Thank you! 😉

Home Is Where The Art Is

I began taking pictures for a living in the middle of 2004 shortly after I bid farewell to my 13 year career in I.T. A lot has changed in the nine years I’ve been in the creative field — camera technology has improved by leaps and bounds, a far cry from the very first DSLR I owned, a Canon EOS 300D, and personal computers are now incredibly powerful and a lot more affordable than they ever were before. Yup, a lot has changed in 9 years but the one thing that has remained constant is that I work from home — I am my “own boss” as Butra Home Concept magazine put it.

Welcome to shimworld, the home of Jan Shim Photography. Everything to do with the final image — online and offline — happens here. This studio only handles archiving and editing work, no walk-in portrait or baby session like some of you might imagine. As my work mostly involves shooting at the client’s location, not much actual commercial photography goes on here. I do occasionally bring small items home to photograph when it’s a more practical option to do so.

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The heart of studio is an ASUS Republic of Gamers Maximus V GENE, unlocked Intel Core i7-3770K 4.6GHz liquid cooled by Corsair H80 cooler, Corsair Vengeance™ DDR3 OC Edition 1866MHz 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 2GB, Crucial M4 128GB + 256GB SSDs housed in a SilverStone Fortress FT03 chassis. See comments on Facebook.

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It’s a cozy office just big enough to accommodate everything I need to run my photography business. Own boss also means doing everything from replying emails, marketing, quotation, invoicing, payment collection (when electronic transfer isn’t an option) by myself.

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Read also: Adobe Lightroom ‘Parallel Processing’ Speeds Up JPEG Export by 50%

Two stacked USB 3.0 SanDisk ImateMate card readers to handle simultaneous Compact Flash cards downloads.
Two stacked SanDisk ImateMate USB 3.0 card readers to handle simultaneous Compact Flash cards downloads.

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Colour accuracy is a critical component of photography and owning a good quality IPS panel LCD monitor is only half equation. The other half lies in colour calibration to ensure colour reproduction, brightness levels are accurate and consistent.

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Although prints are not a core business I demand nothing less than high quality prints when I do need them. For that I trust my Canon PIXMA MG6370 printer to deliver vibrant and consistent quality every time. (click on image for more info)

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No mention of photo editing rig is complete without giving credit to the mouse that we hold and click countless times per day. My favourite are these — Razer Abyssus — one for the desktop and another attached to my Dell Studio 17 laptop.