Photo Friday, Day's End

A slice of birthday cake and a cup of Trader Joe’s coffee at “day’s end.”  Posted especially for Photo Friday (and anyone who likes cake and/or coffee).

One of the things I like to do each year is take a picture of my home office.  It’s like those people that take a picture of themselves every day of the year, but at a much higher interval.  Now that I look at the transition from last year, it looks generally the same.  I’m not Vern Yip so it’s not an interior design masterpiece.   At the very least it’s relatively neat.  The chair certainly needs an upgrade and by the end of the year I hope to build another PC.

What’s exciting is that the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver (Feb 12th) and Chinese New Year (Feb 14th) are coming up at the same time.  The Olympics are always exciting (especially the last one in Beijing), but I’ve always believed that Chinese New Year is more meaningful than the “standard” Gregorian New Year.  I’m sure I’ll have something interesting to say (and maybe some pictures of my cooking) when the time comes a month from now.  Anyway, Happy New Year and good luck to the NY Jets who went to the playoffs as I typed this up!

Most of you probably know that I’ve been the photographer for the Princeton Chinese Language School in Princeton, NJ for the last two and a half years, but recently (for my birthday) I decided to upgrade my camera for the first time.  My current photos were actually being taken with my brother’s Canon Powershot A610, but I’ve owned my Canon Powershot A85 since 2005 (and his A70 since 2003).  I was originally targeting the popular Canon Digital Rebel XSi, but considering the price range for just the body and the kit lens, I felt it just wasn’t the time to make a huge jump upward to a DSLR.  Actually one of the main weaknesses of the Powershot A series for me was that the zoom was not any more than 4x optical zoom and I couldn’t get a close-up enough photo a lot of the time.  This is where my new camera comes in, the Canon Powershot SX10 IS.

I hadn’t even known about the S line of Powershot cameras before my dad showed me the model at the Best Buy just before Christmas.  Apparently the S line (and now SX) is Canon’s line of “super-zoom” bridge cameras which debuted in 2004 with the S1 IS containing a 10x zoom, but to my surprise the current model (SX10) sports an even larger zoom at 20x.  The purpose is supposed to be to sit between the normal point and shoot cameras and the DSLR cameras as sort of an all-in-one solution.  Besides the insane zoom lens (which equals 28mm to 560mm on the standard 35mm lens scale), it retains all the neat features of the A-line like the flip-out screen and ability to take AA batteries, but also incorporates typical DSLR features like the flash hot shoe, full manual control (f-stop and aperture control), and a digital viewfinder.

Since I haven’t actually gotten a chance to do an event for the Chinese school yet, I only have a couple indoor shots so far.  I’ll see if I can get a few outdoor shots tomorrow to stick on here to give a little better representation of what it can do.  Anyway the first shot above is a 0x zoom shot from my desk to the whiteboard while the second is a 20x zoom shot focusing on one of the magnets I put on there.  The third shot is my Xbox 360 I took from across the family room (about 10 feet away) at 20x zoom.  So far I’m pretty impressed about the entire product.  The price was really reasonable at $324 from Amazon.com and far less than what I was expecting considering all the features they pack in there.  Especially since stacking the price of the XSi with a telephoto lens would run me about $850 (and would weigh more and take up lots of space), I’m happy.  Of course I know that the image quality is technically never going to reach the potential of a DSLR, but I’ll leave that as my next step up down the line since I haven’t yet learned how to master the point and shoot’s features.  For my purposes, the SX10 is practically everything I need for a beginning photographer without needing to overspend for features I won’t be able to appreciate until years down the line.

As I couldn’t finish this post before the New Year, I decided to add this video I capped while watching the NBC coverage of the Times Square New Year’s celebration.  Happy New Year Everyone!

The first two pictures are of my old messenger bag that my dad gave me before our vacation last year to California. It’s done a pretty good job for something we got for free. The new bag just has more pockets, padding, and divisions inside for better organization. It also has one of those shoulder / chest pads so it won’t hurt if I carry a lot of stuff inside.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnJHGxTzUyQ

Yay I finally got my Nintendo DS Lite in the mail today! I ordered it through eBay for my first ever purchase there even though I’ve been searching through there for good prices on lots of different things, but never found a good deal. The version I got was the Onyx (black) version of the DS Lite although initially I wanted the Polar White one. Late in my search, I found out that the white version got yellowish over time because of skin oil, so that was immediately axed as a choice leaving me with the black version.

I should be getting the rest of the accessories within the next few days, including the Hori Screen Protectors, the M3 Simply flash cart, and a Kingston 2gb micro SD card. As some of you might know, this is all in preparation for my trip to San Francisco, California. I’ll also be bringing my iPod Shuffle, Microsoft Zune (with lots of episodes of Perfect Strangers), and a Camera so I won’t be bored on the flight. :D