Actually, most of us know what we need and what we should do in life but we all fall into the biggest trap of all time and that is the rat race. We spend hours and hours of our life doing what our bosses have planned for us to do, what the government is encouraging us to do, what all our peers are doing and seldom do we stop and think, is it really what we want? If putting in a simple math equation, we are all simply trading our freedom and own priorities in life for the comfort and security of doing things planned by someone else whom we believe are better than us. We start to do things without thinking, if we start thinking, we are all thinking for someone else and seldom we spare any thoughts for our own priorities in life, that maybe we actually knew what are they. We wake in the morning, go to office on time, do our work and after office hours, went back home for the day. Sometimes we meet our friends for dinner, we look forward to the occasional yearly overseas vacations, etc.. Sometimes we hate the bosses and the jobs and we switch jobs, switch industry, maybe some of us will start our own businesses.

All these are perfectly fine, if they fall within your own definition of what your life should be and if they are not, maybe you should relook into your priorities.

The triangle here shows what I believe my priorites in life should be. The most important is at the top and the least important is at the bottom.

Survival

This is a no brainer. Survival is the most important priority in life. They are oxygen, water and food. Without means for survival, you wouldnt have any life to think about priorities.

Health and Family*

Health is everything. It is easy to sit in front of a computer in an air conditioned room talking about how important health is. One will only know how important health is when they personally experienced it. Without health, you will be a burden to people around you, you will not be able to do much thing. If you are born healthy, cherish the greatest gift. And yes, without health, no amount of money can compensate you for what you lose in life.

Family and spouses are the one who will be there for you regardless of what happen. The bond between all of your family members are the strength that overcome all difficulties. However there are people who do not have a good family and they are only there in life to make life miserable. One cannot choose what family he or she is born into, but they can choose the way they lead their life.

These two are two of the most important priorities in life and yet these two are the most easily neglectable elements in everyone’s lives. We came home from work every day and sit down in front of our computer immdediately without exercising nor talking with our family members. Losing these 2 aspects could create a real inbalance in our lives and we could need to spend more time trying to recover them when we realise the problems than maintaing them.

Money & Friends

Money is the simply some token that enable someone the rights to own some commodities in this huge economy. It is a honest reflection. Money is indeed important in the world now. Money talks.  Without money, nothing move. But fundementally, money cannot replace health and family. Period.

Some of us are lucky to have a couple of good friends who are willing to go through shit with you just because you are their friends. Most of the “friends” are just people who we invite over at wedding dinners, meet up over meals and go for movies maybe. IT is not that these friends are not good, but due to the way we lead our lives now, we just do not have the correct formula to build up the necessary bonds between everyone. But friends cannot compete with family (except for those without good families), the bonds are usually more fragile as compared to family bonds. But still friends are important in lives for connection & social networking. Usually when you are in trouble, you will not want to seek friends for help first, sometimes friends also do not want to be found at these times.

Personal Aspirations & Dreams

One should have their own aspirations and dreams, while the factors on top are the fundemental aspects of life, having a dream or goal define one’s blueprint in life. This will asnwer the question “why are we living for”? Without aspirations and dreams, one could just lead their daily lives without motivations and maybe sometimes get excitied by rewards given by someone else when you have fulfiled what they require you to do in their plans. You can still be a worker, a chef, a business owner, a pilot. The key point is if that is your own masterplan or your own aspiration for your own life. Take control.

Jobs

It is important to disassociate jobs with money. Jobs are simply doing things planned by your boss and in return he give you the monetary rewards. Money is important but not the job. Think really hard, is it really a must to have jobs to earn money? Just simply do a search in Google and you find a lot of people same like us who earn money without having a daily job. However, if your aspirations is to belong to a certain job trade and position than the job will move one level higher to your personal aspiration importance. Ironically, this is the point where many of us pay the most attention to, spent the most time of our lives on, neglecting health, family, aspirations and friends.

I write with my left hand, so I proclaim I am more artistic than my right hander girlfriend, much to her annoyance. However we spent several debating on what colour our websites should be, trying and trying and unable to get the correct tone that we wanted. I found my ideal combination and she deleted it the next day, she uploaded her combination and get rejected by me straight away!

So I begin searching, I am sure there are something out there that will make it easy for us to match colour. Ok, I admit, we are not designers. So I finally found Colouronthewebs.com, which make it so easy for you to mix and match colours.

There are several tools, which I think will be very useful for designers.

1) Color Wizard

2) Color Wheel

3) Contrast Analyser

4) All the color charts

I found myself using Color Wizard the most. We have this idea we wanted our website to look blue and green and this tool perfectly match what we wanted, giving us several ideas what could be an matching colour based on your needs and design perceptions.

See no further! Visit them now!

Going down the road of life, I always wonder why the road I am travelling on seems to be full of obstacles that are slowing me down to my goals.

Yesterday, I have read an interesting story, it is about bamboo and fern.

Fern only take a short while to grew and flourish its green and beautify the world around it. While for bamboo, first year, you see nothing, second year, you see nothing, the same goes for third and fourth year until its fifth year you will see a tiny sprout. Everything starts from there, the bamboo will grew taller and taller and you cannot even see the top anymore! Do you think for the first 4 years, the bamboo is not doing anything? No, the bamboo is all along building its roots, its foundation deep into the ground although no one can see it.

Life is the same thing isn’t it. It is full of obstacles and challenges and unexpected events that will screwed up everthing.  You look at other people and wonder, how come they don’t have the same problem. In life, everyone has their own set of problems, just that one cannot see everything.

To live is to experience. To experience is to try and make mistake. Face failure like your friend. A lot of people have quoted Thomas Edison who failed many times before he finally invented the light bulb which changes the life of the future generations. Facing failures, overcoming them are just like building your roots, your foundation of life. The stronger your foundation is, the more stable you will be and the further you can grow even though in the inital stages, the going seems tough and you will not see much results yet.

If beacuse of a single failure, you give up on life, refused to try anything that will risk what you think is your everything, your life will no longer become dynamic, it is just like a full colour camera, who chooses to shoot in monotone….. What is the meaning of your life then?

LIVE LIFE TO THE FULLEST.

EVERYTIME YOU FAIL, YOU LEARN SOMETHING IN LIFE.

IT IS NOT WHAT YOU LOST.

IT IS NOT WHAT YOU FAILED TO ACHIEVE.

IT IS THE EXPERIENCE YOU GAINED.

EVERYTIME YOU FAILED, YOU LEARNED.

SOMEONE CAN TAKE AWAY EVERYTHING YOU HAVE. BUT HE CANNOT TAKE AWAY WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED.

Do you want to have a burned off or torn off kind of border effect for your photo?

It is very simple, within 5 minutes, you can do it with Photoshop!

Step 1: Create a border, extra large one with Photoshop. Not sure how to do it, see tutorial here!

Step 2: Go to the background lader, press alt-A to select everything and press DELETE. This is to ensure your background is totally white. You can simply use an eraser to rub off everything!

Step 3: This is really simple, choose eraser but select a rough edge brush! This is very important as a normal brush will make your borders too clean to look like it is torn off.

Step 4: To finish off and make the effect look more realistic, just go to layer and right click on it and select blending option. Simply add drop shadow to complete this effect!

There you have the torn off paper effect! Simple, isn’t it!

You can simply create a rounded frame in photoshop easily and these will be very useful for you to create buttons for your websites, favicon or even act as your border for your photographes!

Step 1: Open a layer of transparent layer in Photoshop. For button, generally you may want to choose a square size.

Step 2: Go to Shape Tool from the Tools Panel and select Rounded Rectangle Tool.

Step 3: Draw the shape out.

Step 4: Go to style and select “1 Px Stroke Fill Capacity”

Step 5: Right click the layer and select blending option. Go to the “Stroke” option. Just simply increase the size to see  your border coming out!

There you have your border and your rounded frame for whatever stuff you want to do! Stay tuned on how to create button as a follow up from this tutorial !

I have spent thousand of dollars on camera bodies, thousand of dollars on camera lens, hundred of dollars on camera bags and I think the best buy of all is this simple book, which cost me around SGD$70.00. The title of this book is call, Visual Poet. As the name indicates, it is a photography book, not a techincal photography book though. This book does not tell you what is the best camera, what is the best shutter speed to use nor does it states what is the best aperture, best post, etc…

It is a very basic yet very deep and meaningful photography book.

The deepest impressions that the book left me are these few quotes:

“Logic is the enemy of creativity”

“Learn to let go”

“Photography is a way you can slow down in life and see things you normally will not see”

No matter, whether you are an amatuer or professional in photography, I believe this book will enable you to relearn what photography actually means to everyone. We normally start learning photography in a very naive and open mindset. As time pass, we are burden with the weight of life, the pressure to upgrade to the latest photography gadget and we often forgotten that the camera is used to capture memories in our life and we tried too hard to create that perfect photo.

IF you believe you have also lost touch the true meaning of photography, this book will be a good read, a perfect reminder for everyone of us, what photography truely is.

You can find out more from the website: http://www.visual-poet.com

Times and times of neglection. Times and times of empty words. 2010 is here, I have to wake up.

First photo project, a simple visualisation on how I am going to start my year in the 2010. Title: Start.

Start of 2010

The start of the day from the safest place in the world,

thinking whether has my life been too comfortable,…

where they are always lights to tell me where to go,…

My feet, are they walking the path I wanted to go?

Or do I need a new start?

I have to go out, all the way out.

And start my engine,…

and plan my directions in life,…

Most of the times, I spend too much time looking backward,….

Without noticing that in front of me, lies opportunties.

and when I look up,…

I have so much more to conquer.

This is the start.

These stories firmly strengthen my belief that a man in coma or someone who just pass away, they still can hear and feel. They still can hear, but they cannot speak, cannot see, cannot move and cannot communicate. I think hearing require the least resources from a human body that why people loses their hearing ability last when their body dies.

I believe when someone dies, for some moments he still can hear the cries of his loved ones until his body completely disgenerate.  When someone is in coma, he can hear his family discussing whether to let him go or to donate his organs.  And yet both cases, they cannot do anything except to listen. Isn’t this situation worse then being dead. He will no longer be able to tell his loved one how much he loves them and will no longer be able to protect them. The most heart wrenching part is he will not be able to tell them, he is still there and he can hear.

What will you do if you have loved ones in such situation. Before you make the decision to pull the plug to make everyone life easier, I suggest you can trying anything to activate his body system again. Try things like wasabi, something to stimulate his brain, just like a spark that need to start the engine. Pour ice on his body to shock him, Pinch him. Or whatever it takes to boot up his system again.

Sound crazy? I think this is nothing as compared to letting your loved one goes when there is a chance of him still there, listening to everyone.