Miniature Rojak Buah?

Was at the newly reopened SS2 McDonald's earlier today and took this photo of SS2 with my HTC Desire from the new outdoor seating area (and uploaded to Twitpic on-site):

After reaching home, I had a thought of trying to digitally apply some tilt-shift effect on the photo. I did not use any specialised software but instead used the freeware Gimp (the free Photoshop for poor people who don't want to pirate and have no money to buy Adobe's brilliant program). Here's the result:

Interesting that by blurring the top part of the photo to achieve this miniature effect, a big "Japanese flag" was produced as a side-effect. It was actually a signage with Chinese characters in front of the reddish circle. :P

The Nikon Temptation

I've been tempted to buy a Nikon DSLR for years starting from the time of the D40 to supplement (or replace?) my Lumix DMC-FZ30. Am not sure how long more can I hold on to my Vulcan-like emotional suppression from the temptations of Nikon with the current entry level D3100 and/or as they belt out the delicious D7000 in a matter of weeks (in Malaysia).

Over the years, my dilemma remains the same. What lens would I buy to complement my eventual DSLR? And what DSLR (cheap body or expensive one which would take longer time to outgrow?) would I buy to complement the lens? A chicken and egg thing in photography world, I suppose. I love wide angle because I never had any from my FZ30. I always felt I needed more wide angles. My exploration into wide angle lenses led me to the Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 but that wouldn't auto-focus with the D3100. And then, I came across the even wider 8-16mm variable aperture Sigma lens. Even wider but at a higher price.

At the current point of time, I'm most likely going to settle for a D3100 body and the Nikkor 16-85mm variable aperture lens. A cheap body with an expensive lens (and also the kit lens that comes with the D3100) and to save up more money over the next few years to build up an inventory of lenses. The ultra wide angle Sigma would be at the top of my list...

... or could it be the Nikkor 70-300mm VR lens? I've been pampered by the long zoom that came with the FZ30 and couldn't get the telephoto reach out of my mind. Maybe I could settle for the slower autofocus consumer lens from Nikon - Nikkor 55-300mm VR? Or should I be bolder and go for the latest 28-300mm VR?

Maybe I should just forget about all of them and settle for a single D7000 with the 18-105mm kit lens. HMPH! A D7000 has a body complicated enough that I would not get bored of unlike the simpler D3100...

What a lot of thoughts... perhaps I could hold out on any purchase for another eternity...

Carnivorous Android

Not meaning to promote Android nor demote Apple, I find the image below amusing while at the same time, not liking the taste of one OS attacking another OS.

Image via an article from Android Community.

Falling In Place

Have you ever felt at times that everything would just mess up on bad days and on some good or ok days, things tend to go your way? Today seemed to be an ok, not a good nor excellent, but ok day for me. Work was piling up as I was outstation for work very often the last two weeks but schedules for meetings for the rest of this week were all automatically set up without clashing with one another.

I did not even need to intervene or reschedule them. I did not forget I had one meeting and then accept another in the same time slot. Pretty interesting and I am talking about no less than 6 meetings throughout the week. I wouldn't have realised this in normal circumstances but it just came to me when I was having a quiet and late dinner alone just now. Hmmm...