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.

I was trying to take pictures of a water droplet dropping onto the surface of water. I had totally no clue how it should be done, even though I’ve looked at a couple nice ones on Google Image. I just grabbed a wine glass, a water funnel (for releasing the water droplets), and placed a black colored cardboard behind the glass. I experimented it a bit by using different DOF (changing F stops), using different shutter speed, different flash power…etc. Finally got the setting that seemed to be producing the best result: 1/250, F8, auto flash power (tried manual, either too bright or too dark).

After taking around 20-30 shots I started to grasp the right timing on releasing the water and pressing the shutter button on the camera. I then took a couple more shots, re-adjust the focus, took couple more shots…and ended up with something like this:

I think it’s pretty nice for my first try… I think it will be easier to control in terms of lighting if I own an external flash. The built in one is just barely doing the job.

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