It was Wendy’s birthday on the 26th (last Sat). I prepped gifts and home made dinner (sirloin strip steak) for the night, and home made chocolate mousse! Even though the main highlight was the dinner, the steak turned out to be overcooked a bit, and the chocolate mousse wasn’t hardened enough but the spaghetti was awesome. I also bought sea salt and cheese (chunky ones) to level up the dishes. It was a fantastic night and I was particularly happy since I wasn’t able to celebrate Wendy’s birthday with her for the past 2 years and finally, this year I could stay with her.

The next day (Sunday) we rode the new Skytrain “Canada Line” from Richmond to Downtown, got off at the Waterfront Station. The ride was cool, got to see a lot of roof tops (since the rail was quite high up) from Richmond Centre area all the way to Bridgeport. Upon crossing the river the train went underground for the rest of the trip. We revisited Mink Cafe near the station since I was craving for the blended iced mocha and Wendy wanted the Chocolate Fondue - we ended up getting both of them =D Yummy~

Today I read this book “The World’s Top Photographers and the stories behind their greatest image - Landscape”. It’s a book that I requested from the library. WOW, what an extremely great book! I saw some of the coolest, prettiest landscape photographs I’ve ever seen. It’s a book with photographers from 38 of world’s top landscape photographers. I actually read through every single page of the book (which is quite rare) as there was so much to see. Each photo is paired with a description from the actual photographer, about where and how the photograph was taken. I felt like I’ve learned a LOT reading them. I realized that timing is very important, with sunrise/sunset being the best time for photo taking - almost 80-90% of all the shots in the book were taken either during dawn or dusk! Also a lot of the coolest pictures were taken before/after a storm or heavy rainfall, where the waves and cloud formation were in the most interesting forms.

Some of the photographs I liked the most are from these pros: Michael Frye, Yousef Khanfar, Colin Prior, John Shephard, Michael Fatali. Putting the links to their sites here for future reference.

I also saw quite a few pictures that was taken in the national parks in Utah and Arizona where I’ve also been to - I guess I have no choice but to revisit these parks sometime in the future, to capture whatever that I missed during my last visit..! Apart from Utah, some of the places that I must go sooner or later are: Yosemite National Park (beautiful mountains/waters everywhere), Yellowstone National Park (to see the colorful geysers, and the White Dome Geyser which erupts every 15 min!), Mono Lake in California (very interesting stone formation in the lake), Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (to see the crazy lava flows next to the shoreline), and Deadvlei in Namibia (dead trees thousand years old standing in a white desert).

Last night I saw this crazy thing where a falcon/hawk attacked a pigeon, immobilized it and then ate it, right outside of my front door…! Of course my first instinct is to grab my camera, flash, and shoot away. It was extremely difficult to focus due to the lack of light (it was around 7:30pm I think), I had to use a flash light to do auto-focus, as manual focusing didn’t work at all. I was able to take a couple sharp picture but the rest of them turned out to be either blurry or just looked bad. Pretty cool. Here is the rest of the photos.

Also borrowed a bunch of photography related books from the Central Library yesterday, as I had requested a hold for one book and I had to go and pick it up. I wonder when can I actually start reading them as work is piling up and I barely have time to do anything else…

I finally found the peanut butter M&M’s, at the Shopper’s Drug Mart near Richmond Centre! The filling isn’t as smooth as the ones I bought at the M&M’s World in Las Vegas, but it’s close. They are so super tasty and I can’t stop eating them! I’m finishing this pack soon and need to get some more maybe tomorrow.

It’s of course been lots of working the past couple days, didn’t really do anything special other than playing on the piano practicing some songs, and went to Chapters (again) to read a few more books. Some of the books I read during last week:

Understanding Close-up Photography: Creative Close Encounters with or without a Macro Lens - Bryan Peterson
Full colour book with lots and lots of great tips on doing close-up photography from the author’s own experience. I was surprised to learn that “macro photography” is actually very different from “close-up photography”, and people (like me) tend to mix these terms up - macro photography refers to photographs that are at least 1:1 in magnification, so anything less magnified than that is considered to be close-up, not macro. The book talks about all kinds of tools and setups that you can use for close-up photography, namely extension tubes, macro lens, telephoto lens with macro function, reverse adapter for prime lens, macro ring-flashes..etc. Also talks about some essential skills for photography insects, and various other objects. Very informative and well illustrated book that I think is a must-read for anyone that is interested in close-up/macro photography. I want to get a reverse adapter for my Zuiko 50mm ASAP!

Rick Sammon’s Digital Photography Secrets
This is a very interesting book, that is just not like any other books. Loaded with 100’s of tricks and tips on how to shoot certain type of photographs, such as lighting, location, time, framing, creative ideas, action shots…you name it. A lot of these ideas were new to me so it really made me think. Can’t really name every single trick in the book as there were so many of them but I’m sure when time comes, I will be able to recall some of them. This is actually a good point - it’s always impossible to memorize everything in a book, but just by reading them and knowing some of the ideas (if not all) is still extremely beneficial to the mind.

A Bloom A Day - Ron van Dongen
Herbarium Amoris: Floral Romance
These two books are both full-color illustrations of the close-up/macro shots of many many different types of flowers and plants. Very very nice photographs, some of them were speechlessly stunning. I noticed a lot of the shots were shot with a solid background color. Black was used to make the flower stand out and also creates a sense of mystical beauty. Other colors were used to complement flowers with other different colors. In one of the books the author mentioned that he liked to use old t-shirts with solid colors as the background, quite interesting. It’s much easier said than done though, provided that you need a way of placing the background behind the object (maybe some sort of tripod + clips? Or an extra pair of hands), and that you need to make use of the flash as lighting will probably but diminished due to light being blocked by whatever that is used as the background. I think it’s quite difficult, maybe I’ll try it at a later day, but now I guess I’ll stick with shooting with available light, with good DOF to create an out-of-focus background.

3AM now just got off work - been working on the project for the past maybe eight hours.

A better thing that I’ve accomplished today was to return the wireless router that I bought last week (D-Link DIR-655). I decided to give this D-Link wireless N PCI adapter a try and I bought it today. The PCI card was super easy to install, and the slim profile was perfect since my graphic card spanned across two slots so if the adapter was a little thicker it probably wouldn’t fit. Once I got it set up, I looked at the connection speed and it was a whopping 300Mbps! I was getting a merely 100Mbps with my old D-Link USB wireless adapter DWA-150, even though it was D-Link’s current top-of-the-line model. Pretty puzzled as to why the difference is so huge, probably because of the three antennas on my new PCI adapter having a much stronger signal. Anyway, as for the problem with wireless connection being dropped, so far it has happened I think twice. I’ll see if it drops a lot at work tomorrow, hopefully it’ll work magic.

Time to head.