1013MM: Photography By John Zhang Blog

LTBMW BIG Grand Opening Meet

admin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 05:24:03 +0000

UPDATE 1: Featured on the front page of BimmerPost! Thanks to everyone there and Jason especially!
UPDATE 2: Featured on the front page of StanceWorks/Canibeat! Thanks to Roy and the staff!

This past weekend I had a chance to attend the official grand opening of Long Tran’s AKA LTBMW’s new shop. This guy started as a normal DIYer in his own garage and now has a full blown shop in Southern California that specializes in BMWs. Pretty amazing if you ask me. A lot of people have watched him grow throughout the years including myself. Anyway I attended with my friend Celine, who’s site by the way is www.celinelau.com, she takes good photos with her Nikon D80! But anyway… Back on topic. There was supposedly 80+ cars and over 100 attendees at the event. This was a great turn out, I got to meet cool people, see friends again and see great looking cars. The photos will be proof…

Doesn’t hurt to advertise a little… I think???

This was taken with Celine’s Nikon D80!!

The rest of the meet…

Hot wheels…

Music…

Squirrel!

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Eric’s Lexus IS350

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 06:07:10 +0000

Got up early to head out and met up with Eric in LA to shoot his blue Lexus IS350. The dark blue color of his car is very similar to BMW’s Monaco Blue Metallic which I have shot before. This color is very difficult to shoot. This blue is pretty hard to shoot because in the shade it will look black and dull, however in the sun it will display abstract reflections all over. My main task for this shoot was to make that blue more apparent and not have the background or reflections distract the viewers. The bad white balance did not help either. Anyway take a look!

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Chinatown Walk Around

admin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:02:49 +0000

So I met up with a friend for a mini shoot around in Chinatown. I was pretty disappointed to not be able to take that many photos. it was a week before Chinese new years and it still looked the same. It’s ok though I was with a friend and we got to know each other. This shoot was all about the natural light and lanterns haha. Oh, and happy Chinese new year!!!

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San Gabriel Valley Mountains

admin — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:10:32 +0000

After spending a nice morning at Eaton Canyon, I decided to go on another outdoor adventure again by myself. This time it was to another local location and it was a park with a huge lake. The clouds were too hard to pass up and not photograph. I wish I could see clouds like these everyday. Very nice and dramatic. Beautiful. The Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 is such a superb wide angle lens :)

Click here to see the rest.

Eaton Canyon

admin — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 04:30:52 +0000

To be honest, I’m not really a full outdoors type of guy. I’ll go, but I won’t be the one to initiate a hike or something. However the time I spend in China changed me. I hiked up the highest mountain in China. Yes, all the way to the top and when I cam back to the states everything else seemed so trivial compared to the monstrosity back in China :) Anyway through a change of heart I got a few of my family members to hike with me to a local canyon. Eaton Canyon. It was something small and good enough to get me back into the hiking mood again. Unfortunately, hiking in the morning really throws off the white balance (maybe the new Nikon D700 firmware fixed this) in photos so I decided to make these photos a black and white set. You can see the rest in color. So enjoy…

You can view the color version from this set by clicking the link below.

Click here to see the rest.

CES 2010

admin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 23:58:41 +0000

This year I finally had the chance to go to my first CES by invitation. So I packed and was headed off to Las Vegas once again. I saw a lot of interesting things and met a lot of interesting people. I also did a lot of things I never thought I would do. But anyway I still left some room to squeeze in some photos. I admit their not my best, but they are worth showing for those who could not attend. Here are some snaps that I thought were interesting…

Boo… no Nikon but everyone else was there, as usual Canon was impressive. But on a more exciting note (at least for me) I was interviewed by WIRED magazine about cameras… Sony cameras haha….

The upcoming year is going to be all about OLED, 3D HD, and super thin LED TVs. Can’t wait!

Embarrassingly blurry photo of Mario… Didn’t expect to see him haha.

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Barry’s Ferrari F430 and Nissan GT-R

admin — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:36:19 +0000

So I was lucky enough to shoot two of my most favorite cars in the world recently. I set something up with Barry again. This time around with his Ferrari and Nissan together. The cars come from two very different parts of the world but they both have a couple things in common… speed and power. It was a great day, not only because I was around great cars, Barry also gave me the keys to his GTR and I had a chance to drive the GTR for pretty much half the day. Anyway enough about me and my drool all over these two beauties, here the the photos…

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Official Launch of 1013MM Portfolio Version 3

admin — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:49:34 +0000

Hey everyone! It’s very rare that I make a personal/direct blog posts, but I just wanted to share with you guys and gals what I’ve been up to for the past 2 months or so. I basically, took my portfolio and completely reworked it from ground up. This time I had two very important goals in mind. The first was to make my site accessible to the most common resolutions, browsers and internet connections. Not a very easy task to take up might I add. The second was to have my photos displayed in the best quality that everyones’ different internet connections would allow. So there you have it, better load times, cross OS and browser compatibility, and better image quality without compromise! I’ve also had beta testers run my new portfolio extensively throughout my whole revamp process and I received a generous amount of feedback which I am still very thankfully for. Rest assure, this portfolio of mine will be updated unlike my older one. I am still accepting continuous feedback so please feel free to contact me if you run across some errors. Once again I really want to thank everyone and anyone who was remotely connected to this portfolio revamp process, without you all I couldn’t have done it myself!!! :)

Here is the change log:

12.19: REV. 9.5 - BETA TESTING COMPLETE. OFFICIAL LAUNCH. MOBILE VERSION PLANNED.
12.13: REV. 9.0 - REVISTED AND REVISED CODING.
12.12: REV. 8.0 - ASIA SECTION COMPLETED. ALL SECTIONS COMPLETED.
12.08: REV. 7.0 - MINOR FUNCTIONAL ERROR CHANGES.
12.07: REV. 6.5 - MINOR FUNCTIONAL CHANGES THROUGHOUT, SPECIFICALLY FOR WINDOWS IE.
12.06: REV. 6.0 - AMERICA SECTION COMPLETED AND MINOR CHANGES THROUGHOUT SITE.
12.05: REV. 5.0 - ADDED UNFINISHED ASIA AND AMERICA SECTIONS.
12.05: REV. 4.5 - ADJUSTED SITE STYLING AND CORRECTED SEVERAL CODING ERRORS.
12.05: REV. 4.0 - ADDED COMPLETE WEDDING SECTION.
12.05: REV. 3.0 - ADDED COMPLETE MISCELLANEOUS SECTION AND PRELOADER.
11.28: REV. 2.5 - AUTOMOTIVE, NATURE, PORTRAIT AND MUSIC SECTIONS COMPLETED WITH HIGHER RESOLUTION PHOTOS.
11.28: REV. 2.0 - HIGHER RESOLUTION PHOTOS UPLOADED, EXPERIMENTING WITH LOAD TIMES/IMAGE QUALITY.
11.19: REV. 1.5 - FIXED AN IE ERROR, TESTED ON CHROME, FIREFOX, AND SAFARI ON MAC AND PC. 100% WORKING.
11.14: REV. 1.0 - ONLY WORKING SECTIONS ARE AUTOMOTIVE, PORTRAITS, AND ABOUT.

Click here to view the new 1013MM portfolio

Lydia and Jackie Photoshoot

admin — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:05:43 +0000

So my good friend Jackie whom I’ve shot before introduced me to her co-worker Lydia who wanted to get some portrait shots done. Jackie and I met up with Lydia at her boyfriend’s very nice house and had the shots done there. It was my first time using most of my lighting equipment together and trying out some strobist type portrait shoots outdoors. It was a fun shoot that took the whole day but I didn’t mind and I really hope they didn’t.

And of course one with the photographer…

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Chuck and Lily’s Wedding

admin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 05:21:28 +0000

Chuck’s family and my family have been really close and Lily’s mom was my Chinese school teacher and co-worker at one point. Talk about small world. Haha… Anyway they had a traditional Chinese wedding and I was invited to take some photos for them on their special day. I got some good photos and some good food. Once again congrats Chuck and Lily!! Check it out…

Please forgive some of the photos, I was using new gear and it took a while to adjust to it. :)

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