About ttstam / Terence T.S. Tam  

About me:

I built and design stuff for a living.

I've worked on a wide variety of projects before, from electrostatic fluid accelerators, to optical instruments, to engine parts and navigation computers. At my current day job, I design batteries and chargers for mission critical / life critical application - stuff like patient monitors, respirators, AEDs, soldier's radios, etc - where if the battery dies, someone can die with it.

My photography skills are born out of a necessity to document things that I built. Early photographs are framed like engineering blueprints, as a result. As time goes on I'm learning more tricks, and experimenting more.

I love to cook, and I love to eat (never trust a skinny chef, right?) and that is reflected in my photography subject often.

I believe that anything that is worth doing is worth doing well - so here I am honing my skills. It's taken about 2 years to go from shooting pictures that look like they were taken by a 6 year old kid high on Snickers and Kit Kat to what I can shoot today, and I still have lots to learn.

The biggest growth to my photography skills come from going out and shooting with like minded people. If you are in the Seattle area, consider joining up with the Seattle Flickr Meetup group - where you'll find a bunch of like-minded, passionate photographers that live, breath and talk photography all day long. It'll be the best thing you can do for your photography, and a lot cheaper than eating instant noodles and mac-n-cheese to save up for art school.

Feel free to comment on my pics! :-)

-=- Terence

Please, email me at my regular email address instead of Flickr mail me. You'll get a much faster reply.

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My slowly growing arsenal:

Cameras and Lens:

PhD (Press here, Dummy) Cameras:
Panasonic Lumix
Casio EX-F1

SLRs:

Canon EOS5D Mk II

Canon EOS40D
- With Canon BG-E2N Battery Grip (Weather sealed)

Canon Rebel-2
- (Analog film camera)

SLR Lenses / Canon EOS Platform:

- Canon EF17-40mm F4L USM
- Canon EF-70-200mm F2.8L IS USM (aka "The Magic Drainpipe", my new pride and joy)
- Canon EF100mm f1:2.8 USM Macro
- Canon EF50mm f1:1.4 USM

SLR Lenses / Nikon F-Mount:
(These lenses will have to be shot Aperture-priority with stopped down metering, via Nikon F->Canon EOS adapter.)

- Medical Nikor 200mm F5.6 (Version 2) 1/15x -> 3x closeup lens with ring flash, data imprint module and power supply.

Camera Support / Mounting
Manfrotto 190XPro Tripod (Black)
- Markins Ball head w/ Acra-Swiss style clamp

Lighting Gear:

Pocket Wizard Multimax Radio Tranceiver (x1)
Pocket Wizard Plus II Radio Transceiver (x3)
Canon Speedlight 580EX II
Canon Speedlight 540EZ (used off-camera only, manual)
Nikon SB-24 (off-camera only, manual)

Wescott 43in double-fold umbrella, shoot-through, white (x2)
Bogen/Manfrotto 3373 5-section light stand (x3)
Bogen/Manfrotto 2905 Umbrella swivel adaptor
- With WizzardBracket modification
Bogen Super Clamp (x2)

Garmin ForeRunner 301 Wrist-mount GPS (geotagging)
1 well used LowePro CompuTrekker Plus backpack
LowePro Field and Stream shoulder harness with utility belt

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Places I've been to: