Greetings and welcome to tonychow.net!
It has been a long journey setting up this site. Those who know me personally would have seen a few of my blogs come and go over the past years. And so, it has been decided (finally) that tonychow.net will be “the” site.
Here’s a quick glance at what I do. I tried very hard to keep it short and sweet, but there’s a lot to share!
Photography
As an amateur photographer, my aim is to capture the moment, in the most natural manner possible. Sure, there will be some photo enhancing , some extent of colour and exposure alterations, but it’s all part and parcel of bringing out the best of the images. Scene staging is something I’d like to keep down to a minimum. I love candid shots. They contain so much personality and they have some sort of magical power in story-telling.
On a broader sense, I love my colours and I admire unconventional shots. Just because most of the photos out there are taken from a certain angle or perspective does not mean we have to stick to the trend. I enjoy making use of whatever is out there and wait for the surprises when I post process. All that being said, I don’t do it for a living, so the stress is obviously negligible.
I’m a Nikon user, if you really want to know. 
My working life
My expertise lies heavily in documentation – making something complex easy, then complicate it, and simplifying it again. Sounds confusing? That’s actually the base concept of kaisen, which I was exposed to when dad’s company was implementing it. They went about labelling every single document folder, colour coding and labelling light switches, drawers and etc. Some call it being fussy, but without actually detailing every single process, the inefficiencies will never be discovered.
So that leads me into the field of business process optimisation, or any optimisation for that matter. How do we makes things simpler? How do we ensure accuracy and integrity of data and processes? How do we streamline what we do? How do we get rid of the inefficiencies? A lot of questions, but perhaps not with a lot of answers. And that is exactly what makes this interesting – you can never be done and over with it!
Now a bit of background for myself…
After completing my Bachelor degree in Aviation Management at UNSW, I moved back to KL hoping to get a job. Cutting the very long story short, I ended up back in Sydney working as an admin assistant for the Department of Aviation at the uni while actively seeking for a permanent job. After a few months of perserverence, I was finally employed by DHL Express Australia as a Transportation Coordinator.
DHL was a very good company to work for. I have learnt a great deal from the lovely people there and met so many business contacts that have taught me so much in such a short time to get myself up to speed in the freight industry. My role had grown extensively by the time I left DHL. There was so much more decision making, so much more interaction with external contacts, and of course so much more responsibilities. Initially my job scope is only within 2 states (NSW and ACT), but I soon found myself being involved in various national and regional projects, most importantly the implementation of ISO14001 EMS (Environmental Management System) in Australia which is part of a regional campaign for “going green”.
Then a phone call from my lecturer one afternoon changed my life. I made the “big move”, from Sydney to Brisbane; from the freight industry back into the airline industry.
I now work for “the new world carrier”, or some say the “airline of the future”. Putting things in plain English, my team is like a mini Quality Assurance team that looks after the softwares used for crewing, rostering and planning. Whenever new releases are given to us, we test them and make sure things are working as designed before deployment into the live environment. Saves the actual hassle of debugging on-the-go and reduces the risk of high blood pressure from a user’s perspective. Cool job, but requires a lot of brain power, and I foresee more grey hair over the next few years. 
If you’ve come this far down the page, reading all that stuff I typed up there – thank you for your patience. If you’ve skipped right down to the end, thank you for scrolling this far. Anyway, feel free to leave a comment on any of my blog entries. Cheers! 
