Snaps : Food Tripping In Penang Island, My Top Five Street Food!

It is no surprise that I live to eat, with street food being my absolute favorite type of cuisine. Having said that, it makes me feel pretty blessed to be born as a Malaysian, where street food are an abundance and you can almost eat at any hour of the day. I live and grew up in Kuala Lumpur where the street food here are one of the best ones you can have. But there is an exception to that statement of course, because there is another place which can rival Kuala Lumpr and it is the 'Pearl of the Orient' of Malaysia, the Penang island!

Snaps: Cameron + Ipoh Road Trip with Olympus M.Zuiko ED 8mm F1.8 Fisheye PRO

Somewhere along the years in my photography journey, I stumbled upon breath-taking pictures of milky way. I decided there and then, that it would be on my photography bucket list to shoot the milky way. I don’t know how and I don’t know when, but it was on my list and it stayed there for years on (collecting dust). I think it’s normal that that happens, just as how our dreams get forgotten as time passes by.

But thanks to Robin, I had my first opportunity of shooting milky way in Cameron Highlands. Together with my friends, Shutter Therapists (except for Jaslyn who couldn’t make it, else we will have full attendance!) we did a short road trip up to Cameron. I arrived much later at night at about 9PM. From the night drive up, I realised how windy the roads are (so we had to drive up slowly) and also how far the foot of the hill was from the top! It was close to 90 minutes drive up!

First stop was at the steamboat restaurant, where we tried the charcoal version of steamboat. It was comforting to have some warm food to fill our tummies before the midnight milk way shoot.

After dinner, we headed over to our apartment for us to drop our luggage and I managed a quick freezing cold shower (after not having shower for 16 hours, I had an early start because I was volunteering in Seremban earlier that day). We quickly grabbed our gears, then proceeded to the shoot location. When we arrived, I stepped down and looked up at the skies. For a minute or so, I was in awe by the sheer number of stars and the milky way. The view was breath-taking and coupled with the chilly weather, it was the best combination. All I wanted to do then was just lie down on the grass and marvel at the beauty of it.

But that didn’t happen because the mission that night was to shoot the milky way! Robin had helped me with the settings on my camera and also, created a cheat sheet for us all. It was super easy to pre-set the settings beforehand and assign a button to enable those settings on my Olympus PEN Lite E-PL7. And just a press of a button, I was able to shoot the milky way. For this shoot, I had the Olympus M.Zuiko ED 8mm F1.8 Fisheye PRO to use.

The fish eye perspective has never been my favourite one, because of the distortion but since we were shooting the milky way, it would be best to use the widest angle I could get my hands on and hence, 8mm F1.8 Fisheye PRO lens.

These two pictures are the best of the photographs that I have taken, which was not many to begin with. We only had a window of 2 hours before the clouds returned. Initially during the day, it was raining and I was afraid that we won’t be able to shoot the skies given the possible cloud cover. In the limited time that we had, temperature was dropping from 18 Celsius to 16 Celsius which caused the lens to fog up. I ended up having to constantly wipe the lens and ended up with more hazy shots. I was also shooting with Olympus M.Zuiko ED 8mm F1.8 Fisheye PRO which was little difficult to focus since there is no indicator to set the manual focus to infinity.

All in all, it was such a magical night being able to capture it all, I wish I had more time to explore other compositions. Here’s to many more milky way pictures in future! By the way, I would like to include the link which I referred to for my post processing of the milky way shots; http://petapixel.com/2015/08/13/how-to-post-process-a-milky-way-photo-in-lightroom/

The morning after, our alarms rang at 530AM and we headed out to catch the sunrise. But unfortunately we were only greeted with clouds instead of a glorious sunrise with the tea plantation in the photographs. It was disappointing to say the least, but these things happen and it’s way beyond our control.

Since I had the Olympus M.Zuiko ED 8mm F1.8 Fisheye PRO with me, I decided to try it to take selfies and some portraits with it. Here’s a selfie taken by Tian Chad together with the bunch of us who woke up for the sunrise shoot. Jackie and his girlfriend didn’t join us for this. Robin and Alex are behind me and Calvin is on my left.

Let me try a selfie! No make up face with only 3 hours of sleep.

Meet Calvin, my partner-in-crime!

Another wefie shot!

Tian Chad decided to do a time lapse with his camera. I can’t wait to see the outcome!

The last selfie at the tea plantation before we left :)

After the unsuccessful attempt of shooting sunrise, it was time for breakfast! And since I was the food blogger amongst my friends, I got to decide where we could head to for breakfast. I did a quick Google search and in some forums, there was mentions of a deaf couple who sold nice pancakes. I thought it would be a good idea to eat there. However Tian Chad did mention that it was just okay, in terms of taste. But since there was no other places Google can tell me of, so we decided on that.

With the Olympus M.Zuiko ED 8mm F1.8 Fisheye PRO, you can capture a lot more in your photograph. I find it extremely convenient how I managed to capture the name of the cafe I was at, coupled with the ambiance and the details of how the cafe actually looked like. Not to mention, my face in it as well since this is a selfie.

These were some of what we had for breakfast which to be honest was a rather huge let-down. Food was mediocre to say the least and it left me feeling rather incomplete. But to be honest, I didn’t know of any other locations for breakfasts and we were running out of time. So, we headed back to the apartment to get ready for check-out.

Initially we had plans to head to a strawberry farm and to visit a tea plantation. We didn’t because it was so jammed to get back up to the apartment. Instead, we ended up at a morning market in Brinchang because I wanted to get strawberries! And I bought two trays of strawberries for RM50. Unfortunately, because it was stuffed into the container, the strawberries were not able to be kept for days long after I returned from Cameron.

And yes, I bought sweet pearly corns at only RM15 for that one bag. Tian Chad and Robin got me some purple roses too, because I mentioned the day before that I wanted to get roses! Super duper sweet of them guys. :D The next time I’m in Cameron again, I’ll definitely going to buy more corns strawberries and even more vegetables!

Since breakfast was such a disappointment, I wasn’t going to head back home before feeding myself with delicious food. After all, we already drove this far. So, it was decided that we’ll head to Ipoh for yummy-licious food! I have been to Ipoh for foodtripping with my family, so I didn’t need to do any research on the places to eat. Plus, everything delicious is within close proximity from one another.

First stop was the famous Funny Mountain tau fu fah, which was extremely packed with people and there was a long queue. There was even a drive-through option. I took one scoop of the tau fu fah and to my surprise, the texture was not as smooth as the ones I have back home. Meh, that was rather disappointing. My favourite tau fu fah are the ones from OUG morning market where it’s so smooth, it can cause a car accident if you ever spill it on the road. That was what Calvin said, actually.

After Funny Mountain, we headed over to Pasir Pinji (which is still within Ipoh) for some yummy delicious yong tau foo, mua chee and rojak! The first time I was in Pasir Pinji, I tried the neighbouring yong tau foo stall and was severely let down by the mediocre food. The whole food court was filled to the brim, which let me to assume that the food must have been amazing. It was the exact opposite, so this time I tried the stall next door which was better! The laksa packed a punch and goes surprisingly well with the yong tau foo.

The mua chee was chewingly tasty, but was slightly overpriced at RM3 per plate. Put that in comparison with the plate of rojak for just only, RM5. The rojak will leave you craving for more with every bite, with hints of lingering spicyness. Having tasted the best rojak ever in my life here in Pasir Pinji, everything else falls flat. Thank you for graciously ‘ruining’ my taste buds.

And with that, it marks the end of my short but packed road trip with some of my lovely friends and photographers! As of the time of writing, we will be planning another trip to shoot the milky way and of course, I’ll make it a food-tripping journey along the way. Anyone who is up for that, do drop me a message and we’ll see how we can plan this!

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The pictures in this post above are solely taken with the Olympus PEN Lite E-PL7 and Olympus M.Zuiko ED 8mm F1.8 Fisheye PRO. No other cameras or lenses were used. :p Except the picture below, which was taken using Calvin’s camera.

Till next time,

xoxo

Snaps: Food Tripping in Kampar Town & Pasir Pinji (Part 1), Ipoh

It’s been a while since I last went for a shutter therapy session with the boys, I think by now it would have been months. It’s a shame when I come to think of it that I don’t find/make enough time for something that I so clearly miss and is passionate about. But try as much as I could, I cannot really make the time to do it. Now, if you’re new and just picked up photography you’ll want to avoid getting too long of a hiatus from shooting because you’ll find that your creative perspective may take a hit from this break. At least to me, that was what that was happening. It can be rather de-motivating, to say the least.

What helps though to ignite that passion again is new sights and sounds, even a simple trip out of town would help. The fresh change in the scenery would be a warm welcome for you. Since there was along holiday in May, I suggested to my parents that it’s time to head for another one of our gastronomic food road trips again. Do you remember the last few edition(s) that I posted about my road trips around Malaysia?

There was the;

• Sekinchan edition [http://www.carmenhong.com/2015/01/snaps-sekinchan-road-trips-with-olympus.html],
• Muar edition [http://www.carmenhong.com/2014/01/snaps-food-tripping-in-muar-town.html] and
• Malacca [http://www.carmenhong.com/2014/02/snaps-impromptu-food-tripping-in-malacca.html]

Initially, the plan was to head to Sg Lembing for the May holidays but as it turns out the place was fully booked and so, we ended up heading to Ipoh instead. I have been to Ipoh on another food trip with my family before and that time we visited Ipoh and Taiping together. Taiping was a rather huge disappointment and hence, this time around Ipoh would be our main place of attraction.

For this trip, I decided that I was going to get my photography mojo back on and I’m lucky enough to have the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II together with the Olympus M Zuiko Digital ED 12-40mm f/2.8 PRO lens to bring with me for this road trip. I actually haven’t shot/played with either one of the two gears, so I was pretty pumped to test these babies out.

In my Sekinchan post, I mentioned how travel friendly the Olympus PEN Lite E-PL7 with it being lightweight, enabling me to bring along all my lenses for the road trip. This time around because I had the Olympus M Zuiko Digital ED 12-40mm f/2.8 PRO which have a constant aperture of f/2.8, so I didn’t bring any other lenses. With this PRO lens, it’s as good as having prime lenses with a focal length ranging for 12mm for wide angle, up till 40mm. Although the E-M5 Mark II is the latest camera addition to the Olympus Micro Four Thirds family, I was more excited with the 12-40mm f/2.8 PRO lens instead. I’ve always been more of a lens person. :p

So for this road trip, I settled with just the E-M5 Mark II and the 12-40mm f/2.8 PRO lens. I did carry along the Olympus PEN Lite E-PL7 together with the 25mm f/1.8 lens. Again, I managed to fit this all into my brown messenger bag. I’m still truly amazed at how compact the Olympus Micro Four Thirds’s cameras are. Before I bore you any further, let’s have a look at the pictures that I taken (mostly with the E-M5 Mark II and the 12-40mm f/2.8 PRO lens)!

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Because we were headed down on the first day of the holiday, we were caught in a somewhat heavy and massive jam on our way to Ipoh. There was nothing interesting to do in the car except taking selfies! The E-M5 Mark II has a 3-inch vari-angle swivel touch screen monitor, which made selfies so much easier too. So, it was car selfie time!

Can you spot the camera in the reflection of my shades? I’m using the e-Portrait Beauty mode for the selfie above, where the camera automatically detects my skin and only smoothen that. Notice how everything else is sharp and in focus too, like my hair and my hoodie!

Like in all our the Hong’s family gastronomic food trips, we would make pit stops along the way before we head to the destination of our choice and this time around, we picked to have a stop over in the Kampar town for breakfast. Mention Kampar and you’ll be reminded of the fish balls and tofu(s) too! And that’s what we headed there for, for some yummy fish balls and fish meat goodies!

We had a family friend whose son studied in Kampar, so she recommended that we pay a visit to the Kedai Hoong Kee, which is located in Kampar Old Town. It’s located amongst many many stalls, so we had to look out for the shop’s name. You’ll find that there are a couple of other shops which would sell similar items as Hoong Kee does, but this shop was the busiest. They have an array of choices like fish ball, pork ball, taufu, fried wantan, fried foo chok and fried eggplant. Price ranges from RM0.40 to RM0.70 per piece. My favourites are the tofu ones!

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// Kedai Hoong Kee //

Jalan Baru, Taman Tasik Emas,

31900 Kampar, Perak

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Dad saw another stall selling some chee cheong fun, about a few stalls away from Hoong Kee and decided to give it a try. But alas, as good and promising that it looks it actually pretty meh. I didn’t like the texture and taste of it that much. So it’s a no from me. The real winner of Kampar is the fresh sliced fish porridge in the next two pictures.

It’s true when they say that the simplest things are the best thing in life, and the same goes for food. This is one of my favourite comfort food that I eat in Pudu, Kuala Lumpur. This one was even tastier, because the sliced fish was so fresh! So fresh that you can eat it raw too, like sashimi. It had a raw crunchy sweet fish taste to it. I hope you can imagine how that tasted like, or else you can always taste it yourself.

There is also delicious chicken porridge served here, so if fresh fish slices are not your choice, you can have the chicken instead. The stall is located just opposite from the rows of stalls where Hoong Kee is located at. The porridge stall is located in Pusat Makanan Gold Wing and a bowl of porridge is RM3.50 each.

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// Pusat Makanan Gold Wing //

012-5713177 | 018-5791821

Jalan Baru, Taman Tasik Emas,

31900 Kampar, Perak

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After that, we headed to Pasir Pinji which actually was a neighbourhood place located in Ipoh. What I found out was that the delicious food from Pasir Pinji was located in those house in a neighbourhood, especially the famous chee cheong fun.

My brother took the two pictures above, while we waiting in queue for our chee cheong fun. There was actually a rather long queue for the chee cheong fun, whereby you’ll be assigned with a number and then you’ll need to wait till your number is called out. Only then you’ll be able to place your order. We were lucky to have been able to get a table to sit and wait and even have our chee cheong fun.

The chee cheong fun comes in three different sauce of choice; the sweet one or chilli or just the plain soya sauce. Since there were all together 5 of us and we wanted to try all three sauce so we ordered all three! My favourite one would still be the simple soya sauce. To be honest, I always like my chee cheong fun plain and simple. I feel like it’s only then I’m able to taste the smoothness and the flavour of the chee cheong fun. 

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// Pasir Pinji - Chee Cheong Fun //

House No 1456,
Jalan Pasir Pinji 5,
31650 Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia

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There are a couple more places in Pasir Pinji that we have visited but I decided I’ll shorten the post right here and cover the rest of the places we have visited in the next post instead. As I was reviewing and working on my pictures in Lightroom, I realised that I have actually been shooting in a range of focal length of 20mm till 25mm with Olympus M Zuiko Digital ED 12-40mm f/2.8 PRO lens, on the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II. The thing was I was probably doing this very unconsciously because with that lens, it’s very convenient to pick any focal length and not having to worry about the aperture.

So, when I took the pictures above, most of the time I’ll zoomed right it to a focal length which I’m comfortable with. It’s probably around that range because the Olympus 25mm lens is my default lens anyway. That would explain why. But I did truly enjoyed using the Olympus M Zuiko Digital ED 12-40mm f/2.8 PRO lens with the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II. Shooting with this combination feels rather solid and personally, damn I miss that feeling. The Olympus PEN Lite E-PL7 is amazing, but doesn’t feel the same. Ah, wells till the next road trip then. ;p

Till next time,

xoxo

Snaps: Thaipusam Celebration at Batu Caves

About a year ago, my friends suggested for a shoot at the Thaipusam festival in Batu Caves but I couldn’t make it back then because I had to work (yes, even though it was a public holiday). I had to pass on that opportunity last year. This time around, as it happens I didn’t need to work on Thaipusam Day and again, my shutter loving friends invited me along to shoot. This time around, I wasn’t going to miss on the opportunity too.

I was all pumped up for the Thaipusam shoot until Robin told me that we’ll be meeting at 2am at the KTM station to take the train down, so that we will arrive at 3am. And I died a little inside when I heard the plan, because this is equivalent to me not sleeping at all seeing that I usually only sleep at 2am anyways. But for the sake of this all, I decided if I wanted to shoot the festival, I will go all the way.

The first meeting was at the Bandar Tasik Selatan KTM station, where I met up with Tian Chad, Robin and Tobias. From which we took the KTM to KL Sentral to change to the other KTM line which was headed to Batu Caves. I didn’t time the journey, but it took us less than 45 minutes to arrive at the station. Since it was in the wee hours of the morning, the train was relatively spacious still.

| ISO 800, 25 mm f/1.8, f/1.8, 1/60 sec | 

So, at approximately 4am in the morning, I found myself sandwiched between a sea of devotees and I’m among the thousands queuing in line to head up to the caves. It wasn’t a dream, I could feel the heat in the humid air and sweat trickling down my face. To top this all, I had both my cameras with me, with my lenses too. At times like this, I am ever so grateful that my Olympus cameras and lenses are so compact and lightweight, it didn’t feel so much of a burden to carry them around.

| ISO 1600, 25 mm f/1.8, f/1.8, 1/125 sec | 

We did eventually made it to the top of the caves, where we stayed there to shoot for a little while. Personally, when we first started out, I felt lost and overwhelmed amongst all the happenings and I couldn’t decide on what to shoot. This is why, I didn’t have much pictures from the first half of the shoot. It is only after we made our way down from the caves and headed to the preparation areas for the devotees, that I found my interesting subjects to shoot or perhaps, it was because I had the Olympus M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 40-150mm f/2.8 PRO Lens with me.

I have never shot with that lens before but I know when it was first released, Jackie and Alex had a chance to try it out and they were gushing about it all. Since I could finally use that lens, I ditched all my lenses during the second half of the shoot and only shot with just that lens alone (except for a couple of pictures).

| ISO 1600, 60 mm f/2.8, f/2.8, 1/2000 sec | 

| ISO 200, 40-150 mm f/2.8 PRO, 40mm, f/2.8, 1/160 sec |

| ISO 200, 40-150 mm f/2.8 PRO, 48mm, f/2.8, 1/160 sec |

| ISO 200, 40-150 mm f/2.8 PRO, 67mm, f/2.8, 1/160 sec |

| ISO 200, 40-150 mm f/2.8 PRO, 40mm, f/2.8, 1/160 sec |

| ISO 200, 40-150 mm f/2.8 PRO, 75mm, f/2.8, 1/160 sec |

| ISO 200, 40-150 mm f/2.8 PRO, 79mm, f/2.8, 1/160 sec |

| ISO 200, 40-150 mm f/2.8 PRO, 90mm, f/2.8, 1/160 sec |

| ISO 200, 40-150 mm f/2.8 PRO, 40mm, f/2.8, 1/160 sec |

| ISO 200, 40-150 mm f/2.8 PRO, 46mm, f/2.8, 1/160 sec |

| ISO 200, 40-150 mm f/2.8 PRO, 43mm, f/2.8, 1/160 sec |

And that’s all the pictures I have from Thaipusam festival, which was actually a rather lengthy shoot. We spend about like 6 hours there but for me, I only did actually started shooting about 7am onwards. Nevertheless, the whole experience of witnessing for myself what happened during Thaipusam, from the preparation to the prayers and to the walk up the caves. I can say with pride that as a Malaysian myself, I know more about this than I had previously.

My parents’ reaction when I told them I was headed to the festival was that, it’ll be packed and uncomfortable. Knowing this, I still went ahead because I couldn’t possibly miss a cultural event like this when I would travel to another country for something similar. Throngs of tourists come over here to watch this, I would be ashamed if I didn’t at least attend it once.

I hope you enjoyed the pictures and reading this post, albeit it being a rather short post on the Thaipusam festival. Oh, I do realise that some pictures may feel rather repetitive, in the sense that I shot mostly portraits. I did wished I shot more ‘action’ photographs, but somehow there were always a handful of photographers crowding around the devotees and it made it harder to compose while trying to avoid capturing that.

On a side note, I am falling madly in love with the Olympus M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 40-150mm f/2.8 PRO Lens especially when there are so much to love about the lens. I’m very tempted to use the lens again, I’m hoping to come up with a shoot concept which would allow me to test the lens more in-depth. Any suggestions for that? Or perhaps, would anyone be up for a collaboration? :) Let me know!

Till next time,

xoxo