Preparing for the beach volleyball competition on 10 Dec 05 at the Clementi Heartland. Photo taken from 4th floor Blk367 overlooking the court.

Isn't it cool to find your neighbourhood with a beach volleyball court? Bikini babes right at the heartlands playing beach volleyballs. But on second thoughts, will this become a novel idea doomed to fail? I mean, how many bikini babes can we see in the heartlands, especially when you have a couple of blocks overlooking next to it. Besides, you need to book this place from Clementi CC (which is like a mile away) as the gates are locked. Since when did you last book the "sand" at East Coast for a game of beach volley? Wonder how much would it costs too. If it's cheap, maybe can book to build sand castle also, when there is less traffic at the Clementi road. (Wait, that means it will be under the hot afternoon sun)


Today's the grand opening for the event and yesterday night people start to reserve carpark lots for the big shots. Talk about kiasuism. Those overpaid minister cannot walk a few more steps, die die must park in front of the court.



Location of the new heartland white elephant beach volleyball court.

Updated:

Nice clear view of the competition held today at the beach volleyball court in Clementi.

Tagged: singapore clementi beach volleyball

Smart Zoom
Digital cameras in the past had precision zoom (or digital zoom) that just blow up the picture by cropping and enlarging the image. Smart zoom actually lets you digitally zoom into an image size smaller than the 5mp maximum and yet with little or no loss in image quality. Smart zoom, when coupled with this megazoom camera results in outrageous zoom (48X in total).


No zoom, image taken at about 1.5m away.


12X optical zoom taken at same position. (Shaky hands here affected the image quality.)


48X zoom (12x optical, 36x smart zoom) in VGA mode (640x480)

Who needs a telescope when you had a camera like this. Sucre started to worry for our everyday privacy after she saw the capabilities of this camera. Thankfully, I stay at the top floor so it effectively reduces the probability of being watched.

White Balance
Besides offering 5 preset white balance settings and auto white balance, this babe comes with a manual white balance. You just show the camera something that is white and set the white balance against this white object, the camera will adjust other colours respectively. Though I know nuts about white balance (I don't take many photos under weird lighting conditions), I decided to play with this feature by telling the camera yellow is white.


Original photo with auto white balance showing the colours of the book nicely.


"White balanced" photo that seems blue-shifted. (note, the yellow used is from the same book)

The effect is not as dramatic as I thought it would be. That the yellow part of the book will become totally white or something. Perhaps the difference was too big for the camera to correct for. Anyway, since yellow is a warm colour, to correct for the warmness the image became cooler (bluish) so it works to a certain extent. I will be looking forward to a day, if ever, when I had to use this feature.

I think that's about all the stuff I had explored for this camera and I won't be adding on in the near future until I discover some more fun stuff or interesting issues with my H1. In the meantime, if you want to read a professional 13 page review of the DSC H1, you may read it here. While those who are looking for professional unbiased review may go here. The merit of this site is that they only list the pros and cons found with the camera and do not give a score for the camera so it is an unbiased review.

Tagged: singapore digital camera dsc h1

Who strikes more terror, terrorists or air marshals protecting the innocent from terrorist? An American who lost his marbles (he claim he had a bomb) was gunned down by terrorist air marshals even though the poor sod's wife was yelling the fact that her husband was mentally sick, according to ContraCostaTimes. The marshals fired when the poor fellow refused to listen to instructions and reached his hand into his backpack.

After 9-11, it's Terrorist 1 - Americans 0, what an own goal!

In other unrelated news, KennySia, a Malaysian blogger was rounded up by local MRT marshals for taking two photos too many in the station. The MRT marshals threaten to call "Police" when he refused to listen to instructions.

Luckily, the latter issue was pretty harmless and annoying at best. But both came from efforts against terrorism. Are we targetting the innocents more than the terrorist? Had we became the very terrorist that we swore to fend ourselves from?


Tagged: singapore war against terrorism

Had you read Tomorrow.sg lately? Seen the burst in comments and the hoo haa about all the trouble brewing because some editors thought they need to do some service to their deceased editor by setting up a fund to *gasp* maintain her weblog? And all the mess they made by making public the photos and identity of a supposedly private person editor who passed away? Well, like what the superheroes in comics always believe, great powers comes with great responsibility. Therefore I can understand why the editors, granted with "powers" would be eager to "save" the world when there's trouble. Problem is, Tomorrow.sg is crossing into too many areas that they should not have crossed to.

What started as a bulletin for local bloggers to contribute for their five minutes of fame now became starving for local contributions. (see my previous rant about the quality of posts in tomorrow.sg here). A count of the posts frontpage on tomorrow.sg on 7 Dec 05 at 11:30pm shows 6 posts from online news sources such as CNA, 2 posts from editors, 1 from a forum, 1 foreign blog on SG, 1 foreign blog not related to SG. A farcry from the glorious past where there is better quality and quantity.

Perhaps paddychicken was spot on when he commented on tomorrow.sg 4 months ago.

Autocracy
Under an autocracy, the selection of articles would be carried out by a self-appointed person or persons, as they see fit. The merit of this system is its simplicity. It draws its strength from the reputation of its editors and in this case, the presence of individuals such as Mr Brown is clearly a boost to credibility. Some countries have benefited from the wisdom of enlightened autocrats and Tomorrow.sg can gain in the same way, but this is highly dependent on the expertise and reputation of its team. With no clear agenda (either individual or collective), it is unclear what direction this model will head in.

Batteries
Digital cameras are beasts when it comes to the amount of juice needed to power it. Both my GP and Sony 1600mAh NiMH rechargeable batteries don't last long with this camera. I used up 4 batteries while playing with the camera on the first day and another 2 more subsequently. I took over 12o photos in that time so it lasted about 40 pics a pair. Perhaps the battery didn't last as long due to self-discharge as more than a week passed since last charged. Luckily, I have 5.5 pairs of NiMH batteries. (0.5 because one Sony battery was so old and rusted I had to discard it)

The 2300mAh NiMH batteries provided seems much better, the battery bar yet to drop after 20 shots. By the way, the free batteries are 2500mAh which should last much longer than any of my other batteries. Yet to try alkaline or lithium batteries since they do not recommend the use of those batteries.

Update 10/12/05: Battery bar still full after 80 shots or so. The 2300mAh battery seems to be able to last quite long.

Macro Mode

Program mode at 5 megapixels with low flash, resized and compressed.


Programe mode at 5 megapixels without flash, resized and compressed.

Macro mode is cool, I could see the dust on my Ferrari and water droplets on the can clearly. Even the reflection from the TV could be visible on the can. I think the resolution for macro mode could be smaller than 0.02mm per pixel. In simple words, I could take a photo of my hair and study the hair condition since our hair could be more than 0.1mm thick

Wide Angle Conversion Lens

Twilight mode, resized, normal lens


Twilight mode, resized, wide angle lens

Yes, I got a wide angle lens since I got a nice discount when I buy it with my camera. It costs S$250 originally and it did increase the area capture by about 80% just by counting the pixels to estimate. There is a problem with the wide angle lens though, something that I did not anticipate even when I tested it before buying. The lens covered the built in flash causing a shadow to form when taking pictures with flash so you will need external flash with the wide angle lens. (will put up a pic illustrating it soon).

Update 8 Dec 05: Shadow problem with wide angle lens


Wide angle lens casting a shadow on the image when flash is used.



DSC H1 with the wide angle lens attached.

Tagged: singapore digital camera dsc h1

So, I ended up with a Sony DSC H1 thanks to the recent promotion and their free gifts (512mb memory stick pro, extra batteries and S$20 accessories voucher - I knew I will end up with a free gifts loaded camera). The complexity of the cameras in the sheer number of buttons (16 buttons and 3 dials) required to access all the functions of the DSC H1 almost overwhelmed me. But thanks to my experience with the P3, I had no problem shooting photos in auto mode as they work almost the same.

So here I am, taking my free time to slowly explore the various functions of the H1 bit by bit and documenting those findings in this multi-part review. (I don't know when I will stop).

Note, most photos are resized and compressed to save time uploading so the image quality seen here may suffer a bit.

Image quality

Program mode at 5 megapixels, resized, wide photo (no zoom) and compressed. Objects about 1m from the camera.



Same picture as above, zoom in view of object, click on image for original size, compressed


Same picture as first one, zoom in view of game cartridge, original size, compressed

The overall image quality is good. The camera was able to pick out the details of the cartridge quite well as I could make out the type of game it offered , though the pictures on the cartridge were not very clear.

12X Optical Zoom

Same cartridge as above, taken at same position, same mode but with 12X optical zoom, resized.


Same picture as above, zoom in view of object, click on image for original size, compressed

It's amazing what 12X optical zoom will do to your image. The graphics on the cartridge is now clearly visible along with the fine prints. In fact, the camera managed to catch those glittering line design on the cartridge. In fact, the poor printing quality of the cartridge could be seen on the image when zoom in to the normal size.

Also, the lenses move within the camera while zooming, so the lense barrel would not get longer as you zoom, thank goodness! Ladies, beware, there's no hiding your pimples and black heads from this mean beast.

Focusing

Toothpicks, focus using flexible spot AF. Picture is under exposure as flash is disabled due to close proximity to objects near the flash (a few cm away). The background toothpick is focus but the foreground one is blur.


Toothpicks, focus using multi point AF in aperture priority to focus on both the foreground and background toothpicks.


Toothpicks, focus using center AF in macro mode. The foreground toothpick is focus while the background is out of focus here.

The DSC H1 offers plenty of ways to change how you want your picture to look like for that added touch. Here, I'm experimenting the differences in getting the camera to focus on different parts of the picture. There are 4 ways to tell H1 how you want to focus on you picture, including a manual focus where you specify the distance from the camera. In manual focus, the camera zoom into the centre for you to set the distance accurately. I have to admit that I face some degree of difficulty using the flexible spot AF to focus on the first image. Perhaps the background toothpick was not sufficiently small or that the foreground toothpick were affecting the AF.


Tagged: singapore digital camera dsc h1

Went running with sucre today. First time in 6 months already, got to train for IPPT too (like I cared). Really should run more often than twice a year.

As a camera, my handphone is lousy, you can see all the noise even in day time shooting. Look at all the purple fringes around it too. Guess no more phoney shoe shots on my running days. It just look ugly. Besides, I have legs of a gorilla.

Gotta go play with my new lean mean photo machine.

Here's another photo, taken with my camera phone, from NIE library. For those teachers-to-be reading this. "Hey, here's where you gonna be for your training"



Tagged: singapore

I'm doing some research on which prosumer digital camera should I get to replace my almost 4 year old DSC P3. Digital camera technology had made huge leaps since I bought my last camera. My camera of choice initially was the DSC F828 but it is discontinued and replaced with DSC R1 instead. Sadly, R1 did not have video recording capability which is something I will definitely need. D-SLR would involved too much investment, I would rather have a camera that can do most of the work without the need to change lens.

As I owned a Sony DSC P3, there is a tendency for me to get another Sony camera (despite recent problems Sony have in the music industry) since I have memory sticks and card readers ready. But there are other brands that offer very attractive cameras (at least on paper) that is worth a second look.

On the top of my consideration will be the price-tag. I need to buy clothes and save up moolah for my wife and mistress (a.k.a. car) in the near future so I can't blow my year end bonus on boy toys alone. Unless I get a big fat bonus (one that is not prorated), cameras over S$1,000 are over my little budget. Hence cheaper cameras scores a point here (highlighted in yellow)

Shutter speed, aperture priority and manual tweaking of these settings are important to me to take nice photos, especially at low lighting conditions (which happens to be my favourite). However, all prosumer cameras included these aspects hence there is no need for comparison. The only part worth noting is white balance, which is an issue indoors. But I don't know too much in this area so nobody scores here.

Next, I want large megapixels, outrageous zoom and the widest angle without conversion lens. Samsung Pro815 seems to fit the bill, though the price tag doesn't. How about larger ISO for action packed photos or smaller ISO for bright daylight pictures? I will also need a macro mode to take nice closed-up photos of nature (usually the armies of ants feasting on my leftovers).

Rechargable lithium batteries may last up to 2 hours but can't compared to the endless supply from easily available AA batteries. But how long could AA NiMH battery last on a camera before the next recharge?

There are so many things to consider. Maybe I should just get the camera with the most freebies and save all the trouble.

Erratum: DSC H1 costs S$799 instead of S$729 since last checked

Tagged: singapore camera

Here's another series of photo taken using camera phone and merged together into an animated gif showing our cute xiaobudian cleaning herself after dinner with tissue enthusiastically

More photos from Sultan Shoal, this time is taken with my camera phone therefore the quality is poor as you can see lots of noise and strange colouring along lines where they merge. Plus, a little extra from google earth





Notice the strips of bright lines for the top two photographs? And the slightly grainy particles especially obvious along the sky


Night shot are very grainy as the quality of shots taken are very low, but heck, its only a camera phone.


Top view of Sultan Shoal from satelite. Cool right!

Tagged: singapore