Just a couple of days ago I got a Nikon D60 and a heap of accessories as my graduation present from my parents (thanks Mum and Dad!). Been playing with it a lot, especially with the excellent SB-600 speedlight.

Tonight I was at a friend’s place where I took about 150 shots, mostly of people. I was using the speedlight as a bounce flash, because I hate the harshness of direct flash. Most of the shots looked great in camera, but when I got the memory card into my laptop to have a closer look, many of them were underexposed, some terribly. Fortunately for me, I had been shooting in RAW all night. Long processing time and big file sizes suck, but they suck a whole lot less than having a bunch of otherwise great photos being unusable because they’re too dark.

I have learned a valuable lesson tonight: If you can, shoot in RAW.

It was fascinating to hear that the Phoenix Lander (lots of good info on Wikipedia) had successfully arrived on the surface of Mars, some 680,000,000 km away. But 680 million km is quite hard to fathom, what with our relatively small reference scales (and not just our diminutive size as humans – even the Earth fits some 53,000 times side-by-side between here and Mars).

(more…)

and so the cycle loops again
how many more before the end
and will I still have a friend left then?

The beauty of the sunset is lost on the one
struggling to break the surface
let alone stay afloat

Today I added the 100th quote to my quotes page. If you haven’t already, you might like to check it out. Voila.