I got married in between my last post and now, which explains the long absence. Somewhere in between, Karen and myself disappeared for a fortnight to South Africa. We landed in Cape Town, toured the wine regions, and then drove, via Knysna on the Garden Route, to Kwandwe Private Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape. Everything was organised by &Beyond, an agent recommended by Paul and one I’d heartily recommend to anyone else thinking of travelling there as well.
A lot of people have been bugging me about this… so here it is, finally…
Hung out with TC, Erika, Hui Sin and Karen at the track today… it’s supposed to be a stag party, but it kinda turned into a double date =) If anything, I caught some pretty good pics from the top of the Bay Grandstand.
Went with Karen to send Shirley Surya off today … So I took my camera along to snap some pics while waiting at the airport… I always wanted to shoot T3, just never really got down to it. One of these days, I’ll go by early in the morning when it’s all empty (5am?). That’ll be pretty cool…Details in the descriptions and meta tags.
Snow Leopard was delivered right on the dot yesterday and I’ve been giving it a whirl. As expected, the system apps are a fair bit faster, and everything feels quite a bit more responsive. But I digress.
While doing a mass export of photos from Lightroom 2.0, I noticed that the fans had wound up quite a bit, so I poked into the Activity Monitor (somewhat like Windows’ Task Manager).
Lo and behold, I found Lightroom using well over 100% of the CPU! So… what’s up? Is there some secret sauce in Snow Leopard, or has the Activity Monitor gone bonkers?
Nikon just announced an update for 2 lenses which I own : the 70-200mm f2.8 and 18-200mm. In both cases, the VR was upgraded to VRII, supposedly giving a 2 stop increase in stability over the older version. Not sure whether the optics are better though.
There isn’t enough going for these 2 updates for me to upgrade to either. Their predecessors were too good, I suppose.
I set up a google alert some time back, that emails me whenever my name comes up … and was kind of amused to discover another Dale Tan’s blog. I mean, I’ve always figured that there were at least 2 other “Dale Tans” out there (one in KL, one in the US), but today, I discovered the blog of the one in KL. Not only is this guy in the creative industry, he also happens to own the same camera body and flash (Nikon D80 and SB800 respectively). I also happen to have the 70-200mm on his wishlist.
Random interesting article for budding photographers: Pay vs Exposure - Is it a valid trade-off?
Moral of the story - no matter how much of a novice you are, if you’re on assignment, make sure you ask for appropriate compensation.And when you do this paid job, be professional. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Photos taken over our really great weekend! (P.S. It’s obvious that I didn’t take the shots at my own official proposal to Karen, so many thanks to my Big Broom for those wonderful pics!)
