sunset.

for the past 2 or more years, i didn't have the luxury of going out of town 'coz my wife and i were blessed with a baby boy after waiting for almost 7yrs since our marriage... and another one came along 11mos after the first one :)

i like shooting sunsets... since i can't go where there's a great view of sunsets yet, the view from our house will have to suffice. here's a nice shot of our neighbor's tv antenna :D :

when shooting a sunset, its better to take lots of shots with different exposures coz that wonderful mix of colors will fade right before your eyes... here are two samples of a sunset shot 1 sec apart with diff exposures:afterwards, just pick your choice :)

tomorrow, my kids' pics...

supermacros can be done with A40... now what else can we do with a p&s digicam...taken on october 08 of last year while a storm was headed our way. 3 sec exposure/ISO50.

A40 is capable of a 15sec exposure and it can be used to 'catalog' the constellations.

Here's Scorpius :
and Sagitarrius:

btw, i'm not a fan of Canon and i do not work for them either. i'm just a plain old dog having fun with a point and shoot camera...

- dogears the phoDOGrapher

<-- in loving memory of Baker the Labrador unRetriever who is now having a good time in doggie heaven :)

Time for a guest digicam :D
Last week my officemate bought an Olympus C8080 [the price was slashed down to the PHP equivalent of ~USD500 from the original msrp of USD899]. It's a well-built digital camera with tons of features! Olympus introduced this model back in 2004 but it is still a formidable and worthy model when compared to the newest and latest bridge digicams. The manual when printed btw will consume half a ream of bond paper :P and that I think was the main reason my officemate let me play with it for a couple of days... :D
The features were intimidating at first but I got used to it very quickly. I like the short cut buttons the most -> quick access to the focus, resolution/size, flash and metering modes. Before this explode to a full blown review of the C8080, I'll just post some pics taken from the Olympus C8080. Full reviews can be found in the Internet, www.ecoustics.com is a good place to start.
Took some test shots the first night but some of the better pics I got was from the second night...

The C8080 on my tripod [taken with A40]:
Basketball court near our house - 5 sec exposure:
A shot of Orion with 15sec exposure, note however that C8080 can do BULB mode (18mins - oops, 8mins max lang daw pala sabi nung me-ari :D ). Unfortunately I wasn't able to take a good test shot with the BULB mode coz it was always cloudy in our area when the camera was with me :
Part of our main door at night :D

And here's someone 'texting' inside the bus, taken on my way to work the following day:

It was fun toying with the C8080, it felt like a DSLR and the quality of the output are pretty impressive.

Took the opportunity to shoot my canon A40 with the magnifying lens from my Leica slide projector :) This is the tandem that I use to make those SUPER macro shots :D

have you heard of 'gripotography'? well, here are some samples:

it was the morning of 30jan and i was playing with my two boys in the backyard... spotted the faucet... and it prompted me to experiment with some SUPER macro shots. opened it a bit to let some water drip from it but when i started shooting (in macro mode), the area is not very well 'lighted' yet so the fast shutter of 1/500 resulted with very dark/dim pics. aborted the experiment and waited... finally some time in the afternoon the sun was directly above the backyard and it was shining bright on the faucet! eureka!!! hence the pics :P

took this shot during a 'despedida' gathering. this candle was on a table and it's purpose was to distract the flies trying to land on the food :D