I didn’t know there was a Unduk Ngadau Competition in Monsopiad Village on May 14, until a friend who worked there informed me earlier that they got such activity as part of the 10 year celebration of their village. Actually my initial plan was to go to the Unduk Ngadau Competition in Kota Belud. Somehow my friend managed to convince me to go to their function.

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The Unduk Ngadau competition started by 22 contestants crossing the suspension bridge at 2 PM. I was glad that I was there coz most of them seemed to be quite “high quality” (as my wife, hahaha…). Most of them are from Penampang. It was quite true many told me that Penampang is the best place in “making” Unduk Ngadau. Another nice thing is that there were not many “arrogant” Nikon-SLR photographers around.

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The hall was quite small, so I could stand very near to the stage, only a few feet away to take the photos of the contestants. This eliminated the need to use high optical zoom level, as it would make the photos look grainy and blur. Again, I shot 100+ photos so you could see each of them from side, front, figure and up-close. I think the overall outcome is quite ok.

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Being selected as the beauty queen is probably one of the happiest moment in girl’s life. But I never used my camera to capture the expression of their faces at that moment, a mixed feeling of happy, excitement, joy, surprise. Sigh… only now I realise that I miss a lot of precious moment.

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