For Frank...

Frank was my colleague, Frank was Aussie, Frank was my mate.

When we were in London on the 26th April I received a SMS from my boss that ex colleague and good friend Frank has died of a heart attack!

It is still hard to believe that Frank, who played golf everyday and 100 times fitter that me just went like that! It is so unfair!

Frank has been a very caring friend, during our house got flooded, he called constantly to make sure we are alright! Same when my wife and me had our ops. Frank was that type of friend that is indeed rare and hard to find!

All this time we are suppose to meet up with Frank's wife, Serena but the weather has been really mean most weekend; we were on the phone but never get round to meet up!

Then this morning the sun is actually shinning, the weather man was way off his radar :) I called Serena, we are at her place at 12.30 noon; after got lost at a few junctions ;)

Frank and Serena live in Titahi Bay, a 35 minutes drive from where we are. We had nice long lunch at a newly found Chinese restaurant, Top Taste in Porirua. There are a lot of catching up to do!

Sharper Image

This article got nothing to do with The Sharper Image even though it is about sharper image ;)

Especially sharper digital images.

By its nature, digital images from every digital cameras are slightly blurry. This is because virtually all digital camera have an anti aliasing filter in front of the sensor, such a filter involves a trade-off among sharpness. Why do we need this filter? Read about it here.

The anti aliasing filter is also known as an optical low-pass filter.

Some cameras like certain Canon models used TWO low-pass filters!

BIGGER not BETTER

You just came home with your super duper DSLR that you deprived yourself months of fish n chips to get, put on your super duper thousand dollar zoom lens; snapping away... expecting super sharp results than your humble point & shoot and was promptly disappointed ;) What gives?

Not far off from the above scenario, I took some shots of our neighbor; Gully's son Jerico a while back when I got my Canon 30D camera; the lens was a rather pricey EF80-200 f2.8L. The camera and lens combined cost a whopping NZ$4,200.00!!

Let there be Rules!

Last week I talk about the Rules of Thirds, an imaginary two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines that assists your composition.

You also learned that finally even Adobe recognise the importance of The Rule of Third in photography. The crop tool in their latest Photoshop CS5 Extended will superimpose a "Third Rules" over your to be crop image, hopefully guiding you to a better composed crop.

The only problem I find about those very fine overlay lines, they are a bit hard to see; wouldn't it be nice if we can have easy to see white lines and we are able to overlay them to our image anytime we want?

Rule of Thirds

Every photographers serious about their composition would understand the importance of "The Rule Of Thirds".

If you don't, listen up ;)

So what is this "Rule"?

Wikipedia described this powerful technique to make your photos more interesting as:

"The rule of thirds is a compositional rule of thumb in visual arts such as painting, photography and design.

[1] The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.

[2] Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would."

Confused? Take a look at the diagram below...

Put it simply, the rule of thirds says that your picture is most interesting when its subject is composed along imaginary lines that divide the photo into thirds, vertically and horizontally.

Homesick Blues

It is winter like this that you miss your old hometown, it is the bitterly cold wind; the never ending drizzles; the gloomy 5 pm dark... it is time like this that you miss Penang :(

You missed the beach, the warmth of the setting sun; even the hot humid breeze!

SD Card Disaster!

After weeks of rain, freezing Southerlies; we were given a sunny Saturday! Le general and I decided to soak in the late afternoon sun along our Overseas Terminal.

After a nice cup of Flat White and banana-white-chocolate muffin, we took a stroll along the marina... I was attracted by the hundreds of sea gulls along the shore. I had my Olympus E-P2 with me, I took some shots.

Back home I plug the 8 gig SDHC card into the card reader and open this shot in Photoshop.

Shot with E-P2 and a Leica Elmarit 28mm f2.8 lens.

And before I can say "gull", the SDHC card crash! I was "told" the card has not been ejected properly and all that rubbish and it promptly disappear from the desktop! Arrrrrrr!