About

 

All about Kota Kinabalu City blog - Hello and welcome to my photoblog. This is a travel and tourism blog that mainly consists of photos about Kota Kinabalu city center - what to see, what things to do, what to eat, where to sleep, and popular tourist spots.

All these began with my hobby of taking photos and collecting photos. I took photos a lot every day as a personal hobby to calm my mind and relieve stress from work. 

I am a 41-year-old guy living and working in Kota Kinabalu city center. 

I work in a tourism company as a full-time Webmaster, content creator, and as a digital marketer. My job is to promote tourism packages conducted by the local tour company I am working in. To promote those packages I need to take photos, edit pictures, create promotional images and create social media posts.

I took photos a lot for my work which involve creating, editing, and publishing social media posts. I must create original content so I can promote and sell better online. People trust you more when you use your own original photos rather than using other people's photos.

I took a lot of photos and images every day because it is my hobby. Normally I will take a lot of photos randomly after working hours out of assignments for work.

I like the sound of the camera flicker.

I do mobile photography for my own personal enjoyment and for personal pleasure - not to show off my skills and gadgets. 

I love taking photos because I want to preserve the moments I saw around me. With a smartphone as my camera, I can blend in the crowd easily and I can capture photos easily in candid style without being seen doing it.

I own a DSLR camera equipped with accessories at home (the Nikon D5100 and Nikon D3400) but the DSLR camera is too bulky, too big, heavy, and not fit in my pocket.

I will have to carry a backpack every time I wanna use my DSLR cameras. It involves a lot of preparation, a lot of packaging process, and a lot of busy stuff arrangements in a short period of time. I have to hurry.

The process drains out the creative juice and kills my excitement for taking photos.

The Nikon DSLR is not in hands most of the time. Only for special occasions and events.

But my smartphone is with me all the time from the moment I woke up for work to the moment I go to bed for sleep.

I did not install any kind of games app on my smartphone. I use my smartphone to take photos most of the time. I did it as a hobby. 

I did street photography as a hobby back in January 2012 using my iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy S2 as a hobby. I was 32 years old at that time.

Then one day in the middle of April 2022 I realized photos, pictures and images area taking lots of space in my laptop. 

I dont have enough place to store them and keep them. So I need to upload them to an online album to keep them, to preserve them and to put them there so I can take a look back at time some other time.

Previously I use Flickr to save lots of my photos. But now in April 2022 Flickr is only giving free membership for only 1,000 photos. Other than that you will have to pay for a premium membership.

You will have to pay every month to keep all your photos there. Just in case you don't have money to pay for the membership or you forgot to pay for your Flickr membership your photos will be gone.

The same goes for Instagram. Although Instagram is free it is quite limited in uploading speed and you cant upload many photos at once during that time (2012). I don't want to use my photos as content for Instagram because I just want to keep them for myself and for my own enjoyment.

Then I uploaded my photos to Picasa Web Album. Then Google made a change on Picasa. Google no longer wants Picasa accessible to the public. They just want to preserve Picasa Web Album. All my photos in Google Picasa Web Album will only be stored as album archives.

So I got an idea. 

Why do I open up a new photo blog so I can upload my photos directly from my Android smartphone and from my iPhone? It will my personal photo album and my personal photo gallery.

Right now I am using Vivo Y15, Vivo 21E, and iPhone 7 smartphones and my device to take photos.

Vivo Y15 is the one I use the most because that is my main smartphone which I will bring most of the time to keep in touch with my boss, my clients, my customers, and my work colleagues.

When you do mobile photography as a hobby, the camera model is not important. 

For me, the most important thing is to capture the best moment at the best time to tell stories and to tell information in a visual way. 

Sometimes you will have to capture a lot of moments so you can pick the best one. 

Sometimes you want to capture all of that moments so you can tell better stories, as best as you can show and tell, in deeper details.

I understand my photos will be public on the internet. 

It will be available for public view. 

Anyone can find it. Anyone can steal my pictures.

But I did not do this for money.

I do this as a passion, as a personal hobby, and as personal enjoyment.

All I want is to upload my photos and share them with the world.

Thank you for visiting my photoblog.