Hail, the angels sing; not...

My goodness, talk about the weather gone bongos!

We are into the THIRD day of spring,the weather men said it is pouring rain the whole day; yet it was sunshine all the way to 4pm!

Then at 5.30pm we heard the roar, I know immediately it is a big hail storm! It is rather rare in this part of town, Karori; Wellington, New Zealand.

Our deck was all white, as a matter of fact; everywhere around our house are white! Out came my Olympus E-P2 with the Panasonic 7-14 zoom.

The light was fading fast, the photog in me wanting to go to the deck's railing to get a better shot. My General grumbling that it is too slippery for this old bones... I went anyway, making sure I do not skate over ;)

Dolly Hoooo!

Friends and colleagues asked me how we spent our weekend, I told them I was busy on Saturday and Sunday testing out my new tripod dolly! And some of them go, "Eh? A tripod what?"

A tripod dolly is a gizmo that you can attach your tripod to and give it wheels! Take a look at the picture below:

That is what I pay NZ$65.00 for :) And why do I need a dolly when I am not Peter Jackson? Ha ha ha...

Is it a Nikon? Is it a Canon? No! It is a SONY SLT!!

Before I go ranting, I assumed all of you understand how a Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera work. If you don't, please read it here in Wikipedia.
Cross-section of a SLR camera

1) Front mount lens
2) Reflex mirror, instant return
3) Focal plane shutter
4) Film or digital sensor
5) Focusing screen
6) Fresnel lens
7) Pentaprism
8) Eyepiece

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?