Monthly Archives: October 2005

A Toast!

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I went down to the office cafeteria for breakfast, eager to make myself some toast, when I noticed that the familiar Toastmaster 3000 was gone! In its place was a regular two-slotted bread toaster.

The Toastmaster 3000 (yes I’m making the name up) was a wonder of technology and innovation. It had two dials; one for speed, the other for heat, measured in British Thermal Units (BTU). Ooo wow golly gee! It’s sophisticated because it doesn’t measure in Fahrenheit or Celsius! Someone out there knew what these knobs meant, and fiddled with them, but I… I was just happy to place the bread on the loading tray, that would load it onto a slow conveyor belt which would heat it using hot lamps and hot metal filaments underneath. It would then land on a tray underneath. Voila! Toasted bread, not much of a wait!

If it wasn’t toasted enough, I could load it in again!


(I wish I took a picture of it when it was still there. *sniff*)

Now, all that was left was a regular toaster, with just a dial knob for time. It was set at its maximum, 5 minutes. I didn’t know what time to set it to, so I placed two bread slices and waited for five minutes. Oh wait, I pressed down the loading mechanism to activate it, too. 😛

By probably the fourth minute, steam was coming out! It was like boiling water! Whoever was using it before me was probably trying to match the color of his/her toast with the color of his/her coffee.

The cafeteria dude understood, so he threw it away and let me try again.

I set it to two minutes. Just nice. One minute (the minimum) was alright, too.

I wonder though, who set it to five minutes before this. What would he/she do with it? It would make the perfect prank for people who don’t fiddle with knobs. Hmmm.

AutoPASM

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I have a new toy, oh boy, oh boy! The Canon Powershot A520, one of the smallest, cheapest cameras with full manual control, meaning shutter priority mode (for freeze frame and slowmo effects), aperture priority mode (for focusing and blurring everything else) and manual focus. I found out about the new manual-controllable Casio Exilims a bit too late. 🙁


I can now use a small aperture to get the same effect in horror movies, where the victim is in focus, while the murderer looms behind. The camera then focuses on the murderer (and his weapon) with the victim out of focus.


Flash with long exposure makes for a very trippy Bobby enjoying the famed Hartamas Square “nine inches of love” Texan hot dog.


Smoke comes out from this temple. Guess what this is!


Guess where this was taken!


Sure you can take a picture of a moving fan with flash, but what about without flash?

This was done with 1/100 second shutter speed, aperture of F2.6, ISO200 and most importantly, a fan speed of 1. 😛


There was a fly. It was perched outside my window, watching every single thing I was doing.

I flashed it.

It didn’t move.

I used manual focus to blur out the light, and macro flash to flash only the fly and not the ceiling. Interestingly, the ceiling is actually white!

P.S. This is better than smashpOp‘s attempt; when he zoomed 12x with his Panasonic FZ-5, the camera couldn’t focus on the fly… and it went off focus until it disappeared completely from the view! Since he didn’t have manual focus he couldn’t get a clear shot of it. 😛

Finally, the coolest:


Fazri was in white so he was the perfect subject (I was wearing black). This was a 10 second exposure, with Fazri shifting positions every 3 seconds. To get this effect, you should shoot in a place with a dark background, with a bright light on the subject. You may just catch us reenacting The Matrix in KLCC Park on his blog.