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.

After all that waiting for Spring to come I finally got a chance to go to the Queen Elizabeth Park yesterday! All-I-can-take pictures of flowers and plants. It was such great great weather, blue sky, warm, not too windy. I grabbed my Sigma 105mm Macro and my Zuiko 12-60mm zoom but I ended up using the 105mm macro 99% of the time. It was actually my fist time being able to test out my macro lens to the max, i.e. being able to take as many shots as I could, on as many different kinds of flowers as possible, under a maxed out nice sun/weather. It was real fun to walk around the area, search around to find the prettiest object and framing angle, and also to look at how different people enjoyed the sun with their friends and family (it was packed). I guess the best views were the fields of tulips….they’ve made sure that the flowers were planted at the best location and arranged in the best patterns - I could totally see the effort. Loads and loads of tulips. There were also all kinds of other varieties of flowers and plants, that caught my lens’s attention. I’ll be going back soon for the next round of blooms.

Here’s a collection of the photos I took

Oh, last weekend by the way I went to the Granville Island with Wendy on a nice day. We always like to walk around the area not just for the abundance of art / gadgets / street performance, but also the great, fresh food and produce. It was quite cold and windy but the day was nice. We stayed inside the market most of the time, and went out to take some nice sunny shots as well. We had some tasty pot soup with baked bread covering the top of the pot. Also had icecream at the usual place we go for it. We wandered around the area and got to some places we’ve never been before, where there was a mini lake and a lot of ducks and pigeons. It was a great day.

I just sold my Fujifilm F50fd digital camera that I got from Ebay like 3 weeks ago…lol. Sold it to a guy on Craigslist for $350, not bad at all~ Reason selling it was to invest in this Canon G9 camera, much higher end than the F50fd even though both are 12 megapixels (here is a review, here is another one with sample images.) The F50fd was overall a great camera, slim, handsome looking, powerful… but the image quality was worse than expected so not too long after getting it I was already in search of a replacement 8O. After couple dozen hours of research, I ended up picking up the top-of-the-line Canon G9, which is a 12 megapixel with a 6X optical zoom and an image stablizer. Turned out to be one of my best decision made this year, the image quality is stunning. Great color, accurate focus, good low light performance (ISO 400 with not much noise), and solid steel sturdy body. Macro performance is amazing too, I was placing the lens as close as 0.5 cm from an object and it was able to focus with ease! Movie taking quality was great compared to the Fujifilm F50fd - color was accurate and I was able to zoom in/out during recording.

I’m looking forward to utilize my new camera to its max during my next vacation to China in the coming month!