Wolfheinrich's World

Thank you for those who has taken the time to provide some valuable feedback to me regarding the Hikari Photo Studio upgrade (in reality, just an exercise to fine tune my Nikon D5000 for indoor photography by using the Nikon Software Camera Control Pro 2.5 along with my Cowboy Studio light umbrella set) , special thanks to figure.fm comrades Otaku Dan, Rochefort Schubaltz, Tequila and Koshiko for providing valuable opinions for me to improve my Hikari Photo Studio.  I spent the better part of today making various adjustments based on those feedback and I’m back to report the progress I have made so far!  For comparison sake, most of these shots feature my lovely daughters in nearly identical pose throughout (it’s difficult to get them back into the same pose if I were to move them just for the sake of moving them around >.>;;;).  Though I did try to spice things up here and there!  Anyway, enough of talking, let’s get to the shots!

So I started off with the Day white fluorescent since it has the 79% lead from the survey yesterday at figure.fm.

While it may be slightly better than the auto white balance, but the tint of amber/yellow is bothering me somewhat so I know I have to do something to get rid of that yellow tint….

So I went into Camera Control Pro to try to fine tune some white balance settings so I can maximize the ability of my Nikon D5000

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Ok!  The time to retire my Sony Cybershot DSC-F707 has finally come.  Especially after my trip to Japan, the limitation of the 128MB memory was painfully obvious.  While I think I somehow managed to take a few “decent shot” with this camera,

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In response to Danny’s call for our imaging equipment, I thought I would ride the bandwagon again and try to seek some advise from the camera otaku lurking in figure.fm.

I am actually a little embarrassed to show my “imaging armory” (more like an aging niche weapon!). But since I have just gone outside to take some photos for my dollfie daughters, I have discovered a major pit fall and “some” advantage with my current setup and would like to take this chance to seek some advise from some camera otaku here!

So here is my setup, ~ 8 years old 5 megapixels Sony DSC-F707, with a Sony VCL-M3358 close up lens and a no name wide angle lens. The camera come equipped with
Carl Zeiss
f/2.0-2.4 to f/8
38-190mm equiv.
58mm threads
6-blade iris

It’s not anywhere close to a DSLR but I have always found it to be sufficient over the years since I have been doing indoor shooting most of the time and have access to my computer to download the pictures when I run out of space…. since this camera is so old, it’s only compatible with first generation memory stick as shown in picture (a whopping 128 MB!), my only memory stick of that generation, it’s capable of storing 99 pictures at 2560X1920 resolution with standard quality…. I am guessing most of you already realized what my problem is… without the luxury of a netbook or a notebook computer (I gave up my aging P4 notebook to my brother some months ago, now I wish I would just take it back!) with me, I am a sitting duck once I used up my 99 shots >.>; I would still be fine normally since when would I need to used up all 99 shots anyway, but I am so wrong.

As I begin to discover, the near infinite possibility of Dollfie Photography, it not some scenery (where it stay still) or people (you can take them to look at your camera). A slight turn of the head would make a world of difference in Dollfie Photography, so I had to resort into taking many shots of the same pose and hope I would at least get one or two shots with the correct angle. May be I am just not skillful enough but compounding with the space limitation, it’s a huge problem for me.

However, I still believe this camera is fairly decent for what’s it’s capable of doing, it’s just that space limitation and the thought of investing on a new “whopping” 128MB or 256MB memory stick isn’t very appealing to me.

And this is one of the shots I took over the weekend…

I think the quality of the lens is still decent even though the camera is close to 8 years old.

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Today, I would like to bring you another edition of Otaku Project, which is more or less a continuation of the last project Ikea Dioder Cable Management.  During the last project, I decided to finally clean up the wiring mess that has been hiding behind my entertainment center for better part of one year; and by the end of the project, I was able to clean up that whole mess and organized it into a manageable form, mission accomplished!  However, the victory was short lived, I soon realized that I really wanted more than 6 outlets to be controlled by one outlet strip so I decided to stop by HomeDepot to shop for a new outlet strip.  As I was browsing through the whole selection of outlet strips, big and small, something really caught my attention.  The Belkin Conserve Surge Protector with Remote Switch.

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A collection of nice looking Saint Seiya Zippo Lighter has popped up in my radar screen.  Anyone remember Saint Seiya or Knight of the Zodiac as it is called in the US?  It was a big hit way back in the mid-80s.  Back then there weren’t many good anime to choose from, I had to apply to special rental club in order to get access new release Japanese Anime; fan subtitle, Internet? They didn’t exist back then lol.  Saint Seiya was a big enough hit that TVB decided to license the series and dub the entire series in cantonese.  The animation did not finish the Hades chapter back then but it was recently release as OVA

Rumor has it that Saint Seiya will be going online some time in 2009, so as Dragon Ball, I am sure more will be coming.  MMO is certainly becoming more main stream gaming than ever following the sucess of World of Warcraft, and to a lesser degree Final Fantasy XI.  There is huge revenue potential if they do it right.

Priced at 10000 yen each and can be pre-order at Hobby Search

A little over a week has gone by and the highly anticipated -Holy ARK- has arrived in my doorstep.

I have never owned an Ipod before so I don’t know what to expect, but my initial impression is pretty good.  See detail review here: