It's Keroncong time with Suhaimi Yusof !

Towards the later part of our 2nd Day's performance...celebrity actor and comedienne Suhaimi Yusof dropped over at our pavilion again. He had sung with us the day before and must have enjoyed himself so much he could not resist the sweet music coming from our performing area.
I was happy to welcome him back again!
With him around I decided to go "keroncong" with a medley of popular keroncong-style hits.


We had so much fun and laughter doing the well-known Rasa Sayang with him contributing a pantun here and there.
Here you see him truly singing away the blues!


He was a real funny chap, a real joker if I may say so. A terrific livewire for any party or to spice up things.

Suhaimi was truly a crowd favourite much like Gurmit Singh. And it was a privilege to have played for these two top stars.

How to enhance vintage photos.

I have tried to manually improve on the quality of the photo which was from my original 1969 Tahan files. The best result was still the picture shown above.

I can hardly make out the faces in the group and all the surrounding details like the rushing swirls of water, the craggy rocks and fauna cannot be seen in all its glory.

Of course, when the photo was first printed out 40 years ago on Kodak paper from a roll of Kodak film...it was so crispy and sharp, lovely to look at.

But Picassa 3 has saved the situation for me. However, it requires much trying out and lots of forward and backward kind of patience. For those who have not done any editing yet..here is what you can do.

1. Download Picassa 3 programme.

2. Locate your photo and right click on it.

3. Choose edit and view with Picassa 3

4. Do manual cropping first.

5. Decide size of picture

6. Start manual adjustments of tone, light, hue, saturation, sharpness, effects, tuning etc...

7. You can even put captions or a personal "watermark" if you like.

8. Save it

Working with old Photos

Here is another example of an edited photo using Picassa 3 enhancement options.

The original photo is yellowed and has a tinge of orange saturation making everything look dark and blurred.
You can see this photo at my Tahan Blogposts Feb and March 2008 archives.

The edited photo is so much clearer and sharper...and will even be suitable for publishing!

Enhancing very old photos

A few days ago, I decided to spend some time on the Picassa 3 programme that I had downloaded since last year in my computer system. When I do my blogs, I normally go to my photo files or albums, locate and select the relevant ones, edit, enlarge, crop ..before I upload to Blogger. I do all this on Microsfoft Picture editor which is generally ok.
However, Picassa 3 comes with more options and applications for picture enhancement especially for old, scratchy pictures. I tried out various options ...actually it is much like experimenting again. I realise now a lot depends on having a good eye for tone, contrast and perhaps even a touch of creativity!

In this sample...photos taken from my Tahan blogs, the original pictures are obvious. Blurred, yellowed to the point of being crispy brown, they are representative of many of my old photos.

And the same pictures after I editted with Picassa Picture enahncement look far superior.

Clearer, sharper features and more balanced and natural in tone and colour.

And all this after just an initial attempt at this new programme.

The wonders of technology!

View From The Top

This was the scene in the early part of the performance from the top.
These very active and enthusiastic visitors came closer and closer to get in the action.

You can see the 3 of us on Ukuleles and we had the company of another 3 impromptu singers and dancers with us.

It was truly wonderful to entertain such an enthusiastic bunch of almost fan-like followers!

In fact a few had asked, " what is the name of your Group ?"

I told them just call us for the time being...the elderly uncles!

A Truly Appreciative Crowd !

It was such a nice feeling to be able to play the Ukulele and entertain such fun-loving senior citizens from all walks of life at the Expo.

We were scheduled to perform for only half an hour in all. However, as no other groups were appearing after us and more importantly, we were attracting more visitors by our music and songs...the organisers encouraged us to play on.

It was non-stop music all the way for 2 solid hours from 2.30- 4.30 pm before we took a much needed break. In that time, we must have done between 60-80 songs!

We had so many impromptu "back-up singers" joining us at the Mic.

What an appreciative crowd this was!

My very old handwritten songbook is a valuable resource for not only songs of all types but with Ukulele and Guitar chords included as well.

The cowgirls and cowboys doing their "stuff" while we made the sweet sounds.

It's Cha Cha Cha Time!

The eager visitors wasted little time before getting into action.

As soon as we started with some of our local favourites....Gelang Si-Paku Gelang, Chan mali Chan, Dayung Sampan, Di Tanjong Katong, they moved onto the floor of the pavillion to "joget".

Then someone called out, " How about Cha-Cha? We love Cha-Cha!"

I went to the Mic and said, "You like Cha-Cha, so let's Cha-Cha !"

Turning to Richard C and Ronald L, I whispered to them to just follow even if they do not know the lyrics to the songs I was playing....starting with "Isle of Capri ". I always have a number or medley of songs ready in "my head" whenever folks request



for a certain type of music. It could be waltz, bossa-nova, rock, calypso, keroncong, country or whatever. It would not be smooth to play a piece and when it ends then start looking for another song from the file or book.

As I've said before that will break the momentum that is on-going.

So most performing groups would have prepared some of their own selections and rehearsed them well.

The advantage I think we had was my repertoire for song types is actually quite wide...and so could do almost any type of songs asked for.

These ladies and some men as well surely can dance and groove!


Many could not "tahan" and rush to the Mic to join in the singing of their old time favourites.

We were happy to let that happen!

But not many performers would allow such a thing, as quite often, some eager beavers may actually "kill the song" for you unintentionally.