This is where you love it that your under-powered, turbo-diesel guzzler is pure mechanical. No fancy ECUs, no electronic fuel-injection, no funky stuff. Just mechanical goodness. Everybody knows - electronics and water don't mix. An air intake sitting three feet off the ground also helps. Sorry about the blurry photos - it's hard to be fording a two-foot deep raging river with swift currents, err, I mean Jalanraya and take good photos at the same time. Safety first!

About to go left

Good weather held for a fun-filled pool-side buffet to celebrate Wilayne & David coming together as a couple... but maybe, just a little too much good weather as in a scorching afternoon sun resulted in a little too much warmth. Nevertheless, it was a fun-filled event and there were lots of times where it became more than low-light, it was closer to no light.

But no 3D or 7D yet

More info on DP Review & Rob Galbraith.

EF-S 18-200 Lens, PowerShot SX110 and a whole bunch of Powershots (including a pink one )...

UPDATE: DP Review has a hands-on preview here.

To me the biggest part of the news is this snippet "...and that the 5d replacement would come at Photokina."

More info here and here.

Well, spent this afternoon shooting the back story and back fill for PJEFC's Project Harvest Musical. Shall not spill the beans or the plot here but the following is a bit of behind the scenes action with all our studio lights blazing! Surreal!

While there's no news of the upcoming 5D replacement, there is a 50D in the works... Screen shot of the website here.

EOS 50D Specs:
Sensor: 1.6x crop CMOS
Proc: DIGIV IV
MP: 15.1MP
LCD: 3" VGA LCD
VF: 95% viewfinder .97 magnification
AF: 9 point af
ISO: 100-3200 (Expansion to 6400 & 12800)
FPS: 6.3/3fps
Buffer: 16 RAW - 60 JPG - 10 RAW+JPG
Feature: Dust Reduction
Feature: Auto Brightness Processing
Feature: Microadjustment
Feature: Face Recognition AF
Feature: HDMI Output

Was too busy yesterday going to meetings, making important phone calls and trying to finish up more photo processing so this post kinda slipped by me. Anyways, Five, yes, FIVE years ago, August 20th marked the launch of the DSLR that I think changed the entire Digital Camera landscape. Whether you are a Nikon fan, Pentax or Olympus fan or not it doesn't matter but it was the first DSLR that mortals like me could afford without taking out a bank loan! I'm talking about Canon's EOS-300D (press release link). Well, it was my first DSLR and while I know I traded it up for a 20D later, it still went with me to Perth, Western Australia and boy I remember the slow start-up time and limited burst but hey, it made up for it by creating so many fun shots I can't imagine the trip without it. Here's when I bought it!

Anyways, here's another person celebrating on the 20th. My cousin Alice. Happy happy birthday and don't fall off your bike

Over the weekend, besides processing photos from two weddings, I also was busy getting other stuff done as well as getting a new old PC built for a good friend. Like I said earlier, I've never owned a pre-built PC since I was 17 and probably will continue to do so even though Dell's tempting me but I figure a custom built Media Center is still going to kick-ass. Anyways, I decided to stick with XP for this build cos I didn't have an extra Vista license lying around but also to "try" ATI's (AMD actually) Radeon 3450 which has great reviews for its price/performance. As it turns out, it didn't like my Dell 2405FPW on the DVI port and only partially liked it on the analog VGA port. Worse, it didn't like the E207WFP either and the only monitor it liked was the 2007FPW. Enough of that kind of crap. I drove out and got it swapped for an NVidia 8500GT. I've not encountered a video card that doesn't POST on DVI before so for now, I'm sticking with anything NVidia. The Radeons can go to hell for all I care. Simply unacceptable.

After that little fiasco, the build proceeded so quickly, I mean Windows XP SP2, applications, patches (over 107 critical patches shows how old XP is!) and all that complete in just 2.5 hours

Had a really long day covering this wedding but in the end, it was absolutely worth it! So much energy, fun and joy that it was impossible not to get some of it on you even though you're chasing people down to photograph them!

You can't have enough of RAM so, likewise, you can't get enough of cores!

I really forgot how bad KL traffic at 7;30am was and is! Have been spending the last four days at Tech-Ed South East Asia over at the KL Convention center. And traffic was really bad! Anyways, here are a few photos. I didn't bother bringing my camera plus also after last weekend's off-road jaunt, something whacked my truck's air-conditioning fan out of commission so no cool air if the truck isn't moving and on Jalan Damansara, Mahameru and Tun Razak, moving is defined as snail's pace!

I know I've not made any updates for over a week but there's been a whole lot of activities that just leave me totally zonked out by day's end. Good thing is that I finally got my wife's PC up and running. Everything's sort of installed and in place except for a few minor utilities like DVD authoring software and the like. Then came the big bathroom leak incident. For poor workmanship (gone are the good old days), the master bathroom of my condominium started leaking into the unit below. We've been using the second bathroom for a week now and that doesn't help my weariness as I've got to boil water to get hot water since I don't have a water heater installed there.

Loading durians for the trip home!

Last weekend was Sanofi-Aventis' Corporate Social Responsibility trip into the SEMOA villages and we did eat lots of durians and donated some needy supplies. And I had to rush to deliver the photos for their marketing department within 48 hours! Oh well, I still have got two weddings to process, a photobook to complete by next week and another wedding shoot the week after!

Yes we ate all that!

Well, yesterday I headed down to LY Plaza to my favorite IT retailer for a bunch of parts. I was aiming to wait till end September to get this upgrade but an unexpected disaster happened. Anyways, so, here goes upgrade phase one. Phase two is smaller and is not so obvious. If you noticed I have two Intel Core 2 CPU boxes in the photo. The one below is a Quad-core CPU which will be going into my main workstation but not exactly so soon. Why wait? I've two weddings to process so that takes priority and I need to stabilize the other workstation first. Choice of parts is nothing extraordinary. Just reliable parts to get the job done. After all, tech refresh is every 18 months anyway

Bunch of new parts ready to be assembled!

New architectural marvel or just a simple heat sink?

64-bit Vista install...

This time by Kong Weng while I was batch processing about 150+ photos and assembling the 'Our Big Day' Slide show. I look more relaxed now since at this moment the photo was taken, the slide show was almost completed.

Had a jammed pack weekend starting at good friend's wedding and ending at my parents place doing re-potting and other stuff. A long sleepless week with a few problems didn't help things much and my wife's PC decided to expire peacefully at 7:04pm, Thursday, July 31st. Cause of death is two blown capacitors. Oh, well, time to upgrade. Anyways, after conducting a FlashWorks 101 lession on Friday night, I put all the batteries into chargers, packed my gear and slept at 1am.

05:38 : Woke up due to heat and couldn't get back to sleep
06:20 : Little dog barking (my iPhone alarm clock)
06:32 : Aromatic coffee (Starbucks Rwanda Blue Bourbon) to kickstart the system
06:45 : Shower and soon after, load-up and head-out of the house
07:10 : Arrive at Jalan Selangor House
12:40 : After two houses, arrive home for lunch. Down 500ml of water, 325ml of 100Plus
14:00 : Download photos and take shower. Batch convert from CR2 to JPEG, downsize.
14:45 : Finished shower, and hit the road again.
15:05 : Arrive at Bible College of Malaysia - Wowzers, it's 100 degress in the shade!
18:30 : Arrive at Bangsar Seafood Garden. Immediate download of photos
18:50 : Test run of first slideshow. Restaurant notebook crashes, Flash doesn't work on backup PC.
19:01 : Batch conversion from CR2 to JPEG. Test my notebook to Projector
19:20 : Finalize slideshow and re-arrange some (reviewing it yesterday made me realize a few more photo sorting/ordering slips)
00:30 : Arrive home. Take shower.
01:00 : Review my photos and my wife's photos (from another wedding)
02:30 : Crash into bed.

You can check out the some of photos on Anna-Rina's blog here. It's always fantastic to always meet another awesome photographer and how could anyone be more cool than Anna-Rina? Plus she managed to snag my big ass blocking the entire view at Church! Awesome!

© Anna-Rina