His name is Graham. Graham seems to be a very cautious person. He sent me all the information we needed in details, like locations, time… including photos and screen shots from Google.  Graham even called me in advance to make sure all the photos he saw on my website www.hakinkin.com were really mine.  I told him: “Absolutely”!

Proposing must be really exciting and nervous. Even a careful person like Graham made some mistakes on location and time when emailing me; he said he must be too nervous. That sounded more interesting to me though.  I only saw the surprise proposals on TV and in movies. Never saw them in real life!

Finally Graham figured out a good date to do the proposal. It was chilly and windy day in Central Park and he was in the suit shivering waiting for her to arrive. I and my brother had to be there 45 mins earlier to make sure everything and…he will be OK.  We were so excited for the outcome.

It was supposed that she would arrive around 5h30 but due to that traffic time, she could not be on time. Graham said he hired a Limousine to take her here from work. And to make sure she would not be suspicious about what he was doing, he called her and made her mad on the phone. Ah, that’s pretty cute!

We had to wait nearly one hour in the cold. I caught the cold but Graham should be more freezing, because he only had the suit on, not to include the excitement would make you ten times colder. There’s a big tree there so me and my brother would “hide” in case she approaches near him later. We definitely did not want her to see what was coming.

Finally she arrived; the sun was already gone so the exposure was a bit off.  We moved behind the tree so she wouldn’t notice. She had a rose in her hand. I wonder if she really knew anything.

So here we go, the story would go by stop motions actually. I wanted to make sure that I caught everything. I promised Graham that he was in very good hands! These are just highlights!

Preparing for the important moments:

OOh, he’s really freezing.

Graham’s grandmother’s ring which will be used to propose. That was a surprise proposal, so of course this should be a surprise ring.

Let’s tell the story in STOP MOTION

I love the way she’s looking at him, such a look of loving and filling with happiness.

Our malevolent tale of immorality serving my vice for taking photos begins with an article on Vietnam’s biggest news site:  http://vnexpress.net/GL/Vi-tinh/Kinh-nghiem/2009/08/3BA12F60/

The article shows how to take macro photos with a cell phone, using a tiny lens adapted from a BROKEN DVD player.  Seemed pretty easy and effective to me.

They did not have detailed instructions; it was translated from an English article and some lines were cut or mistranslated. Yet I still could understand pretty well and wanted to give it a try—to serve my photo addiction.  To bring you beauty.  Sometimes beauty requires a bit of unpleasantness.

The article said to find an old broken DVD player, open it up and look for the tiny lens used to read the disk.  By removing that lens and attaching it over the lens of a phone, extreme macro photos become possible.  Man, doesn’t that sound breathtaking?

I was curious.  Intrigued.  Inspired.  My photo addiction twitched and called me silently to do this—no matter the cost, no matter the consequences, no matter who gets hurt.  I wanted to do this as I’ve never wanted anything before.  I could already see the photos of tiny, tiny things blown up huge in full digital technicolor, causing admiration and gasps of pleasure from you, my faithful viewers.  This tiny lens would SURELY make me, HA KIN, the greatest photographer in the world!

My family has one DVD player that works perfectly well.  I have no broken DVD player.

But shit happens.  Doesn’t it?  Evil shit.

I peeked into our living room, secretly watching my father enjoying a music program on DVD.

He looked happy.

My longing for that tiny, perfect lens tugged at my artistic soul.  Evil thoughts formed silently and began to harden my heart. “Look at him!  Look how he loved the music, the movies…all spewing from that old and unfashionable, but perfectly working DVD player!  Damn Japan and their quality electronics!  Why oh why couldn’t my family buy cheap Chinese things like all the other Vietnamese people?”

“Too bad, Daddy”, I thought.  “I WANT THAT DVD PLAYER – AND I WANT IT DEAD!

I had discreetly taken note of where my father kept his tools under the chest.

My treacherous plan formed itself.  I would wait until he falls deeply asleep and kick off my wicked plan.

And so it goes that one breezy happy evening, my father was happily dreaming, taking his nap when…out came the tools.  A few turns of the screwdriver later, the case on the perfectly good DVD player had somehow popped open, and then things began to “fall out”…

As I have said earlier, what the article described sounded so easy and effective.  But since the instructions were not quite clear, I had hard time finding the lens they were talking about.  The article described a tiny lens attached to the reading arm of the DVD, but I saw several similar ones around!

I took them all, to make sure I would get the right one.

Dad was snoring, still deeply asleep.  I hope he was enjoying his dreams, because it would be a while before he saw a nice movie again…

That tiny lens the article talked about did not work.  I tried to put it on the cell phone and everything was blurred, and the hard cover that was described as something to help stick the lens to the cell phone vignetted the blurry images with a circle.  Drats!  Foiled!

I was disappointed.   If this had been a real BROKEN DVD player, I would not have felt that bad.  But I had sacrificed my father’s entertainment for my own–entertainment.

I felt bad!  Regret.  Shame on me!  The only path to redemption would be success and the photos that would come from that success!  I labored on…

Determined to make this work, I tried out the different lenses that I had taken from the DVD player earlier, in the hope of making my sin pay off, so that all of my treachery and betrayal would not be for naught.  Finally, the last lens I tried, although it looked so dirty and unclear, seemed to be working!  It felt like I had been saved from drowning! Because that hard cover attachment refused to work, and this tiny lens is smaller than the lens from the cell phone, I had to put the tiny lens directly in contact with the surface of the cell phone’s lens. I had to be extremely careful:  that tiny bit of glass can fall out at any time if I tilt the phone just a bit too much.  And since my prize little lens is so tiny, once it is dropped, there would be no way to find it again!

Let us remember, the cost of the tiny lens is not cheap:  it cost the price of a whole DVD player, the happiness of my father, and the consequences that I would surely face…eventually, maybe, if I couldn’t somehow figure out how to blame this on my brother, or perhaps the cat…

I looked for little things around my room to shoot then I decided to go outside to take some outdoor photos.  I went down to the grass in the yard.  There, I found growing different kinds of tiny flowers.  I wanted to take real close up shots of these beautiful things.

This is the funny part.  In order to take clear photos, since it is macro, I had to move the cell phone real close to the objects, and I had to see by eye when the correct distances were attained to bring the details into sharp focus. I also had to be careful when I moved the phone, because I certainly did not want that tiny lens to drop off into the grass, never to be seen again by my feeble human eyes!

I dropped it.

I dropped it seven times.

And each time it dropped, I thought I would never, ever find it again.  I had to slowly pull out each blade of grass by the root, intensely watching for some little sparkle.  I could not lose this thing.  Thoughts of my father’s sadness haunted me and spurred me on to keep looking, keep looking, keep looking…

And I did not look so pretty as I was taking photos of the grass or trying to look for the lens.  There I was, alone in the yard, on my knees, butt pointed skyward, hands picking out blades of grass by the root.  No one who was passing through would ever understand what this cute little girl was doing.  Pessimistic people might think I was mentally ill and had just escaped from the asylum.  Optimistic people or those who watched so many CSI episodes would think I was a CIA agent looking for some hidden microphones on the ground. Only another Ha Kin or my brother would know the truth!
Finally, I finished my photo session and decided to go back home.  As I pushed open the door, I realized my father would have woken up by then–and he would probably be thinking of some punishments for me
As I walked into the room I saw him looking at the corpse and detached body parts of the dissected DVD player.  He was mumbling over and over that familiar “Father Song”: “Oh no, not again…”

Here we go, my EVIL PROJECT:

This tiny flower is as small as one third of my finger nail: The photo below these two is the overview image of them, taken by my big camera.

As you can see it here,

I will not tell you what the name of my new little camera is yet. Just tell you a reason why I bought it.

5D is pretty big and I learnt that in some cases I can not carry it around. People are scared when I hold this thing up and point right to their face. In some circumstances I might have to pay for a permission to photograph since it looks so “professional” and contains “commercial purposes”. And of course, not to mention its weight, it is not so uncomfortable to carry 15 pounds of camera on your back and hands for a whole day and everyday!

Carrying 5D for nearly one year and a half, so it felt quite funny when holding this little camera on my hand, it’s so light and….cute,  just like a small baby sleeping in my arm, it’s light enough that I almost feel like having nothing in my hand. A funny thought even crossed through my mind: “I can’t use it often, because once I get used to it, I don’t want to go back to 5D and feel the weight anymore. It took me nearly two years to train myself to carry that big baby”! Haha, but I know that will not happen!

There’s also something funny about me. Once you are a photographer, you always want better cameras and updated versions of new equipments. But that has never been a concern of mine, I feel like I almost know nothing about the camera’s world out there, even able to acknowledge the names of different brands.  If I said I want a 5D mark II, it is just because I am so crazy with making motion pictures. Not because it is “new” and “updated”.

So mostly discussing about new cameras’ functions is not always my inspiration. Yet I have to admit I was once became depression looking at a photo taken by 1Ds mark III and 85fx 1.2!

But I know myself well, I do not have money to race for some fancy equipments. The best I can do is to do the best I can with what I have. I am quite satisfied with what I have done!

And well, no need to be surprised when I will keep purchasing “new” cameras but instead of “new” (as means in quality) or “modern”, I am buying old and long – used stuffs.  I found some unexplainable joy for taking lower quality photographs. Well, it is so easy to have a stunning photo taken by an expensive camera, but it will be a long night sleepless if you catch one taken by a very cheap camera. You’ll know what I mean by the next entry!

From now on, photos taken by this little baby will appear more on my sites and stories!

Just had the camera some moments ago. Don’t be surprised with this too: The lens are made from Vietnam. Haha, I was shocked looking at this. Never knew that Vietnam has been producing cameras too!

The photos were taken indoor, around my room and in a very bad lighting situation. The camera was too light that I could not hold it….steadily. But I meant it…and well, Vietnamese lens are pretty good hahahaha!

I already did some color adjustments.

Watch this:  He suddenly appeared in front of a group with just young guys sitting and chatting at the Times Square.  Then he played his strange guitar and started singing a Vietnamese song, not to mention he was dressed in the traditional Vietnamese dress. Bach brought his little cousins to join the shoot but they were far away from him at the moment, did not want to be caught having any relationship with this “weird uncle”.

Some shoots…

TO BE CONTINUED – WITH SOME EXTREME FUNNY PHOTOS BEHIND THE SCENE.