GX GARNERINGS

What's wrong with this photo?  And why is that? This is Sunday.  Ask someone you love a tricky question and have fun. Answer: The hairy body part under her armpits.  Why?  The mysterious hairs are of my tights!

^Highland Reservoir, the biggest of its kind in Hong Kong   What is the difference between a restaurant and a reservoir?  To most Hongkongers, the difference may not be a conscious one but definitely an obvious one.  It is in the pronunciation.  Cantonese, the mother tongue of Hongkongers and the Southern Chinese, doesn't have  the "r" or "v" consonant sounds.  Worse still, Chinese (including Cantonese) is monosyllabic with, interestingly, one exception * .   Saying aloud the multisyllabic English words doesn't come naturally to a Cantonese speaker. ^There are two hiking trails snaking to the east and north along the reservoir.   Taking the one to the north leads you to at least a four-hour trekking over the mountains and on the beautiful beaches (DON'T swim there cos the undercurrent has killed a dozen of swimmers including the uncle of my friend).  This is almost the splitting point. * The exception is t...

^It was the aqua-blue colour of the plastic bottles which catched my eyes. I stood there shooting for five minutes and was glad to be ignored by the passers-by, thanks to the unassuming appearance of the GX200, affording me the following paragraphs. Bottled water gives a false impression of cleanliness, or at least they are touted as such by the ads. ^As if you don't know, a notion in the west has it that turning the shutter speed to 1/30s can freeze the motion of a person walking at a norm pace past the lens. Now, by the photos here, you get an idea of how fast a pace people in a frenzy big city like Hong Kong move along the street. Paradoxically, the soft drink manufacturers most likely get the water out of a place to finally have it bottled and sold to another place, with the cost of the plastic materials be borne by the buyers and the environment. This is the least thing we can call clear. This Australian town which bans bottled water pioneers an exemplary act which the who...

Through the Lens - a study in newspaper photography from indipimp on Vimeo . This documentary (13'51") recounts newspaper photojournalists in Queensland, portraying a selection of classic photographs and the men and women who shot them. Some specially education recordings are 6'25" Brief demonstration on using the grandpa-class camera. 9'17" The importance of patience and luck: "I stayed in the rain…." 12'08" An inspirational talk of experience: "I don't shoot until I see the photography"

Did I miss something other than Ricoh GXR?  This is as surprising as when this morning I bumped into a teenage boy coming in the lift car with an expensive Leica M9 hanging around his neck in an ostentatiously casual way. Any idea? Source: mono-log

There are two sides to every argument.  So no matter how well Nevin put it yesterday about not to pixel-peep just to tickle our curiosity, we all have curiosity integrated to us to be tickled every now and then, especially when a new camera sees the light of the day. Today's treat is a peeper-friendly site, dkamera.  It is a German site but you don't need to know the language for its highlight which is shown in the first photo above. Go here and you'll land on the bildqualitaet (visual quality) page, where there are two pull-down menus for choosing the cameras to be compared for the image quality. Underneath the pull-down menu, there are three selection buttons, namely, day-shot (tag), nigh-shot (nacht) and flash-shot (blitz).  The pull-down windows for ISO and image format are self-explanatory. So peepers will wind up with various combination of 100% crops below the camera mugshot for peeping.  Clicking on the crops will bring you to the full-sized ph...

^The kids are peeping in an oil lamp in which a bug has gone.   Just because something is good, doesn't mean that it has to be invented or used.  MS PowerPoint is one (boring for your viewers, painstaking to prepare for your boss), pixel peeping is another. With due respect to the testers contributing their time to analyse the pixel peeping results with meticulosity, I again wonder what we are driving at with the comparison result after the latest online encounter with another tester doing the same for Canon S90 and Ricoh GRD III. Comparing shots taken by different cameras is one thing, but comparing them through pixel peeping is quite another. Do we look at a winning photo and say, inter alia, "Oh, this is a great photo for I have just pixel-peeped how crisp and clear the fifth tile counting from the bottom of the wall of the second last building perching on the highest hill in the background where the palm trees are, thanks to pixel peeping, suffering from bug ...

Today is more than the day which marks the first anniversary of this blog because we've been some weeks past it. Having watched the above intriguing video (He shot himself a photo everyday for 2356 days), I was inspired to reflect on the past year of blogging here. I started out with a humble hope of writing occasionally and getting maybe ten readers for each post. The first month passed, and the scenario was very different. The hit rate was like 200 to 300 a day, which fuelled me to write more regularly, i.e. daily. It was still the first month when posts started to be done daily. I questioned myself in the head, "Will there be enough topics to carry on for a month?" Now, this is more than 12 months. Since 31 October 2008 the total hit rate is some 80700 or 6200 per month (as of today), with readers ranging from Taiwan to Tunisia. Sometimes, we've got visitors from unknown origin but the tracker suggested probably a ship (I was keen to think it a submarine) o...

"Let me take a breather," says his belly button. Have a restful Sunday.