Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed.

20th July marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission when man first walked on the moon. 66 years before that (1903) was the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight. In a span of a single generation, man was able to fly, travel to space and walk on moon!

food for thought; today's electronic toy has twice the processing power of the lunar module that landed on moon.

Christian jargons

Let's make an effort to minimise the use of Christian jargons and be more relevant to the society around us. If you have many friends who are non-believers, being "holy" in facebook may possibly isolate you to your own little Christian world. Where do we draw the line between professing our faith and not stuffing them down the throat of unbelievers?

I've uploaded more birthday photos.

Photography garbage

What is photography garbage? it is just garbage. Just log into facebook and you will find hundreds, if not thousands of garbage photos. I am guilty of posting garbage photos at times too...

What I consider to be garbage photos;

• the subject is over/under exposed
  
• blown highlights till kingdom come
• subject out of focus and blurred
  

These photos exist because people do not take time to evaluate and edit their shots. Instead, they go and shoot like a machine gun, download every single photo into their computer and dump the lot into facebook and starts tagging everyone. Also, I cringe everytime I see crummy photos from mobile phones.

My question is why some people bother to post photos filled with blown highlights, under exposed like a black hole, subject blurred beyond recognition, and crossed eyed out of focus? is it perhaps a form of art? or people just simply didn't think it was a bad shot?

I dont buy the excuse that "I'm only using a compact camera". Today's compact cameras are pretty sophisticated and are very much capable of taking great shots. Here's the thing, you need to learn to use your camera properly, know what it can and can't do, and keep practising.

June

New photos posted on Smugmug. Attended a Citizenship Ceremony on Queensland Day, and had a birthday dinner with a couple of friends at Koh-Ya, a Japanese BBQ restaurant in Fortitude Valley.

Both event wasn't easy to shoot, as one was taken during the day with high contrast between subject and background. The other was taken in low light conditions up to ISO6400. I've decided to set picture control to D2X ModeII for portraits as the skin tones are more accurate. My keepers rate is still pretty low. I'll need to brush up on my skills and techniques in handheld low light shots.

GIgapixel photo of the world's tallest building

Check this site out, all 76 image stiched to form the Burj Dubai. It is an amazing super sky scraper topping out at 818m! Not only the world's tallest building, but the world's tallest structure ever!

Flash in day light!

Some photos taken from last saturday in a day trip to Montville-Lake Baroon-Maleny up in Sunshine Coast. It was a clear and sunny day and I wanted to capture both subject and background detail. But they are at opposite ends of the exposure, so I had to use the flash to fill the subject and let the camera automatically expose for the background. Camera was set to aperture priority mode and stopped down between f8-f11 to achieve greater depth of field between subject and background.

Not exactly a fan of the flash, but I had no choice otherwise I would have had blown highlights all over the background! Blown highlights cannot be recovered from post processing because there is nothing to recover from a whitewash. It's just white, 255!

The latest is the greatest!

I used to be part of the ratrace for the latest and greatest in computer technology. Started with an Intel 80386 processor, then the Intel Pentium processor with a measly core clock speed of 133MHz with Windows 3.11. My last desktop was an Intel Pentium III processor running at 500 MHz overclocked to 585 MHz on an Intel 440BX chipset motherboard, the best of its kind in the late 90's.

Back in my primary school years, I can still remember the first time I went online in the mid 90's, the internet was new to the place where I came from and none of my school friends knew what it was. I asked them "Can your computer access the internet?" I received a blank look from them and they had no idea what I was babling about. Accessing the internet back then wasn't as straight forward and extremely slow. Soon I found linux from the world wide web and installed my first non-windows operating system, Redhat Linux 5.2 in 1998. Since then I became an avid fan of UNIX based operating systems and open source software.

Now here I am typing on a fairly old machine, an Intel Celeron 1.7 GHz on Windows XP. My specs are lightyears away from what technology has to offer now, Dual/Quad core processors with DDR2/3 memory, PCI Express graphics interface, SATA2/3 drives, and running on 64 bit!

Lately I had the urge to upgrade my ancient machine, but I had to ask myself a couple of questions;

• Is my current system sufficient for my needs and applications?

I don't play games on my machine, it is mainly used for internet browing and post processing of photos. Sure it is not the fastest, but it is adequate for me.

• Is my computer broken?
  

No, if it ain't broken don't fix it.

I can easily upgrade to the latest and greatest computer if I wanted to, but it will be obsolete in less than 6 months. Don't get me started on Apple computers, they have one of the best operating system in the world, OS X has a long history with UNIX! But it stops there. I can't justify paying a fortune for a Mac computer when the hardware will be obsolete in 6 months. If Apple sold its operating system individually, I will be in the queue. But that is unlikely to happen because Apple already has millions of zealots that are willing to dosh up the cash for the latest and coolest Apple gear.

Windows 7 may just give Apple a run for their money. I tried Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 and it looks very promising. But my graphics card is not fully supported hence no Aero feature for me. So I shall wait for now and be content with what I have.