These days, I tend to do my blog posts the following day, just cause I usually work till really late and don’t have the time to prep for the image that I wanted to post. I guess it’ll get better when my project (due in June) is done.. Anyway yesterday I had my favorite Chirashi Don (mixed sashimi rice bowl) at Ichiro Tei Japanese Restaurant with Alice for lunch. I finally remembered to bring my camera with me so here’s the picture of the awesome food.

But the main thing for the day was that I finally got a flash for my E-3 DSLR. I had been wanting the bigger version of the flash (Olympus FL-50R) but it was too pricey plus I’m not always doing flash photography so I decided not to buy it. These days I tend to take quite some outdoor photos for Wendy so I figured I should really get a flash, maybe the smaller version (Olympus FL-36R) of it (Olympus has 2 flashes, big and small). Peter was able to get it for me at Futureshop for a much cheaper price since he works there, so I decided to go for it. Ended up being about $200 + tax, which is a pretty good deal. I’ve actually never seen a real digital flash before, when I looked at the user manual I was a little overwhelmed by the complexity of it, like all sorts of different settings, and tilting the flash in different angles would give you totally different results…etc. Oh and I also tried the wireless function of the flash, you can actually place the flash somewhere else, and then wirelessly trigger it through the camera….it’s so cool…. I guess I have so much to learn now but, it seemed to be quite an interesting thing to know about….and hopefully will also help in other areas of photography that I take, like macros. See the picture of my flash with my camera body, it’s so frigging huge!

At night I had cake at Berry Good with Wendy. I tried their Black Forest cake (which is one of the kinds that I always asked my mom to get for my birthday parties), it was pretty good. I kind of forgot how it’s supposed to taste since I haven’t had it for so long, but I liked the one I had. Wendy got a Strawberry Shortcake, which even though I wasn’t sure what a shortcake was, tasted pretty good. Berry Good remains one of the best places for late night dessert cravings.

Today’s the first day..of 2009. Time passes way quicker than I thought…guess I should think positively though on the first day of the year. Anyway, last night I didn’t go countdown or anything related but instead I went for snowboarding again (on Cypress)…lol, with Davinder. We went for the “Night Owl” time frame again and since I bought a “Ski Pass” last time I went up I paid $30 instead of the regular $38 It was snowing very hard, and the visibility was marginal but the snow condition was AWESOME. I tended to stop more frequently on the runs just to sit down and enjoy the powdery, soft snow. Even though I didn’t do a lot of runs (did 14 last time) I enjoyed it a lot not only for the soft snow but I also got to try one or two of the blue runs (intermediate level) that I’ve never done before. They were full of bumps and stuff which caused me to fall down for quite a bit but it was fun and tiring. I picked up some new skills like braking when going down fairly fast and making narrower turns. Overall it was a pretty worthwhile trip.

I hate my fucking BlackBerry cellphone, it kept on dying. I put it in my pocket when I snowboard and maybe some moisture or something got into it, some keys stopped responding. I had to open up the casing, had it in front of my heater fan for like 30 minutes, and it started working again. This is probably my 4th BlackBerry phone and yes, it died 3 times for the exact same reason. This thing sucks (as a comparison I put my Canon SD1000 digital camera into my other pocket and it DIDN’T die)

Today I sold my Olympus E-520 DSLR and also the Zuiko 14-54mm lens that I got free with my Olympus E-3 purchase, for $750 (I love Craigslist) I could have sold it for maybe $50-$100 more but oh well, guess it’s still good. The transaction went pretty smooth and the lady actually owns a E-500 looking to upgrade to the E-520, so while she was testing out the cam, her husband and I started a conversation over diesel cars since he also drives a diesel car (one of those old Mercedes Benz). Now I got some cash to pay for my $5xxx VISA bill for the month….

Got my Olympus E-3 yesterday! The top-of-the-line pro DSLR by Olympus~ I got it used off Ebay for around $1350, body only (it’s around $1600 new), but the deal also includes a Zuiko 14-54mm F2.8-3.5 lens (worths $400 new), a Olympus HLD-4 battery holder/grip (worths $200), and a couple other goodies like an extra battery, a diffusion filter, a HUGE camera bag (looks bad though guess I’m not gonna use it), a 4GB Transcend compact flash card, and a USB card reader. The whole thing would have costed me around $2500 new (after tax)! So it was really a huge savings. Now I just hope that the camera won’t die too soon, even though the ebay seller (she’s really nice) told me that it’s only been used to take around 30 pics of her kids (I did find a couple pics of her kids in the memory card, lol).

I’m still thinking whether to sell my current Olympus E-520 or not, if I do I’d probably sell it with the Zuiko 14-54mm lens that I just got (for free, kind of). Or maybe I can just keep it since it’s MUCH lighter and smaller to carry out for a casual photoshoot…

Anyway, I’m super excited now to start using this pro camera. I hope that I can produce some really outstanding imagery with it in the upcoming months.

Was reading some reviews on my camera today and realized I haven’t really done a formal introduction of it like how I did it for my last couple cams like Canon SD1000, Canon G9, Fujifilm F50fd. Bought this camera about a little more than a month ago off Futureshop, with a staff discount from Peter who works at Best Buy, ended up paying just $355+tax for it, including one lens. Super amazing deal. It’s named “World’s Smallest DSLR”, which is one of the reasons getting it as it’s no fun hauling bulky cameras around. And as usual I fell in love with the camera since day one not just because it’s new but it is also my first ever DSLR camera. I’ve been wanting one forever, have been wanting to get the Canon Rebel XTi about a year and half ago, but wasn’t able to afford it back then. This Olympus turned out to be so affordable so I decided to get it without second thought. The pic is the camera itself, with a flash attached that I got free from Peter.

Also there is the $119 tripod (on sale from $149, lol) that I got 2 weeks ago, the Manfrotto 728B made in Italy. I decided to pay a bit more to get a brand name just to make sure I get an OK quality and sturdy one, so I can keep it for a long time. I love this camera, have already taken thousands of pictures with it in the past month, and liking every single one of them. I’m looking forward to bring it with me to the San Diego one-week trip next week, and take tons of pictures at Legoland and the San Diego Zoo

Had to goto the Burnaby Active office today for a conference call with some client, so tired when got up at 8:30 in the morning so I had to drag my body alongside some cookies for breakfast and a $1118.xx check for this year’s property tax which I dropped off at the city hall on the way back…. $1118….gone… Well guess I’m used to all sorts of fees since I started owning this place…property tax, sewage/utility, maintenance fee, electricity, natural gas…..all sorts of crazy pointless fees to pay argh

Anyway I’m looking forward for tomorrow going down to Point Roberts in the States to pick up some packages that I ordered from Amazon.com. Supposedly I’ll be getting 2 packages, both are lenses: Zuiko Digital 8mm fisheye lens, and Sigma 30mm f/1.4 prime lens. SO happy! I have been wanting to own a fisheye lens probably since day one of buying my new DSLR camera and now I’m going to own one! Pretty sure the happiness that I’m going to gain from using it will balance off the price of it. And then the Sigma would be very nice to have due to its large aperture so I’ll be able to take nice shots in a relatively dark environment… so stoked to get them!

AHHHHHHHHHHH long time no post, a little more than a month…. so much had happen, will try to recap in the next couple days…

Anyway, just got this spare battery charger for my Olympus E-420 digital SLR camera. Got it from ebay and I’m pretty pissed at its quality. Like I don’t mind stuff being made in China but, this one just have the gayest design ever. As seen from the pic there’s this little plastic thing that sticks up near the lower end of the charger that holds the battery in place. It looks super flimsy and I’m sure it’ll break very easily say if I stack it into some travel bag with some other hard stuff. ALSO when you remove the battery you’ll have to push those plastic sticks back a bit in order to take the battery out…. the worst design I’ve ever seen in years. But anyway, I got them for cheap so I guess this is what I get for the money I guess as long as it works. If it breaks guess I’ll just get another one….lol. Now time to do a charge see if this thing blows up.