BlogMunch

Incredible stop-motion animation - MUTO

Of all the things I am amazed by creative people on the web, stop motion animation is one of them. These animations takes sooo much time to make and the results are always inspiring. Here’s one I found today. From what I can see the creators just use white paint and markers to draw each sets. All their drawings are surreal art a la Salvador Dalí. The full website is http://www.blublu.org/sito/video/muto.htm. I embed it here so that I can watch it anytime I want.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Wow, incredible stuff…

Take a photograph and win a DSLR camera…

This is strange…to win a camera, you need to take a photograph and to take a photograph you need a camera. Hmm, a chicken and egg story???

Well, it is not that weird actually. Most of you have a compact camera. You phone should have a camera. Your laptop have a camera. So no excuse to not participate in the Smashing Magazine - Smashing Texture Contest.

All you need to do is take a picture of interesting textures (more examples here)

…And then zip it with all the relevant information. Finally send it to sven@xxsmashingmagazinexx.com. Remember to remove the “xx” in the email before you send.

…And you can win a Canon Digital Rebel XT 8MP Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 Lens. The winner will be determined randomly.

The dateline is 21st May 2008.

Upgrade my Photo Equipment…Part 2

Well, the last picture from my previous post is a bit misleading. Obviously it is a Sony DSLR. But from this DSLR body, there are 3 Sony models. Namely, the A200, A300 and the A350. The difference between them is the megapixels and Live View.

During the IT Show in March, I got very interested in the in the Sony A series. I got a feel of it and the shutter really click with me (pun intended).  I test out the Live view that is getting rave reviews on the web. It works great. It is almost like using a compact camera. For those who don’t know, it is quite difficult to get live view on DSLR because of the mirror. So Sony solved this by adding an additional sensor for the live view.

But since only the A350 and A200 is out then (I would really like the A300, best of both worlds), I decide to get the A200. First, I would like to train myself to use the view finder. Second, I don’t need the 14 MP on the A350. Lastly, with the extra money saved, I am able to buy the A200 with the 2 lens kit. The 18-70mm and 70-300mm.

As this is not a technical review, I will leave out all the other tech stuff for other professional reviewers. Just a few thoughts after using it for a couple of months.

As Sony have eaten up Minolta, now all Sony DSLR are compatible with all the previous Minolta lens. The BBB (buy, buy, buy) virus has infected me to buy a third lens. It’s the 50/1.7 prime lens.My favourite lens now. It’s a bit slow focusing and at wide angle, its soft, but at 2.8 above, I got great portraits of my kids.

The in-body image stabilization (Super Steady Shot) works so well that I never off it while shooting. It allows me to take sharp pictures at 1/30 shutter speed. Another feature that I use often especially during the middle of the day where shadows are cast is the D-Range Optimizer (DRO). It helps to open up the shadows while keeping the highlights. Just take note not to use it in high ISO range, the noise is really bad. Speaking of high ISO, I am able to get good pictures for printing at ISO1600. Below are 2 pictures I took while bringing my kids to the Zoo.

Overall, I am glad to upgrade to the A200. My F30 is not able to keep up with my kids and now the A200 can. But with them speeding up day by day, I am sure within the next 2 years, I will need to upgrade my equipment again.

See you then…

upgrade my photo equipment…Part 1

You might have wonder what I am up to these few months that I stop blogging. Well, I sort of take up photography. Not that I have my virgin camera for the first time, but I bought a DSLR (Digital Single Reflex Camera) to upgrade myself from the amateur photographer to an enthusiast photography.

I own the legendary Fuji Finepix F30 (look at some of the reviews and pics from dpreview if you  don’t believe me) before my current DSLR. Fuji abandoned the megapixels race to create this neat little camera which have excellent high ISO performance, normally only found in DSLRs.

Looking at my snaps, even the ISO 1600s is usable if you are only printing 4R photo. The noise control in the F30 is so  good that its ISO 400 looks like most ISO 100 pics for all camera at that time. Sadly, Fuji cannot withstand the the lure of the megapixels race and have since produce higher megapix camera (F50fd) that is not as good as the Legend.

So the next step up will be a DSLR. If you have read any information on choosing a DSLR, most would have recommend the big 2. Nikon and Canon. The reason is not mainly of fanaticism (though each group is quite protective to their brands), but of adaptability.

It is often said, when you buy a DSLR, you are actually buying into the family. All the different types of lens, flashes, remote control, teleconvertor, etc. Especially the lens. This is an area where the second hand market is very important. If you search carefully, you will be able to find mint lens floating around ebay less than half the price of the new ones. And they are extremely usable.

At the period which I decide to buy a DSLR, budget is important to me. So some of the models I look at is:

• Nikon D60
• Nikon D80
• Canon 450D (not out at that time)
• Pentax K200D
• Olympus E-510

It so happens that there is a IT Show in Singapore at that time, So I was able to hands on on each camera to have a feel. After dancing around the area, guess which DSLR I am holding now? Here’s a picture of it. More on it next time….

Tinker here and there…and some RSS troubleshooting

The first thing I do when I came back to BlogMunch is, of course, tinker with the theme. First I upgrade to WP 2.3.3 (Fantastico is still behind times and too lazy to switch to Simple Script). Then I switch to a simpler theme that you are seeing now, Codename “Statement”. Redoable is really a high maintenance theme and also quite a slow theme.

Disable some of the plugins that I am not interested anymore, like Adsense-Deluxe+, Extended Live Archives and Gregarious.

Write out yesterday’s post and publish it.

Here’s the thing about changing to a new theme. There are snippets of code you need to remember to add in. Like FeedFlare code, Goggle Analytics code and Similar/Related Post php callup. Not only do you need to remember to put all these code back, also you have to remember where to put them. I wonder how some blogs can change theme every month or so.

Troubleshooting begins…

That’s when I went back to my Google reader to see if my new post came up so that I can check everything is working properly. Nope, no new post. I then subscribe to the blog original feed at http://blogmunch.com/feed to see if it work. No luck there too. So both the feedburner and blog feed doesn’t work.

Log into feedburner to check feed status. Apparently, I have an error within the feed.

Source: http://blogmunch.com/rss2

   1. 
   2. <br />
   3. <b>Warning</b>:  Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/blogmunc/public_html/wp-content/plugins/illacrimo/functions.php:24) in <b>/home/blogmunc/public_html/wp-includes/feed-rss2.php</b> on line <b>2</b><br />

There are three extra lines on the feed xml file. Send my feed through the Feed Validator and confirm this error.

The first thing I do is to delete the illacrimo theme that might be causing the error. No luck there.

Then I download all my WP files through ftp to find the feed file so that I can delete these three lines. Not right either.

Search about this error on Google. Someone reported that to solve this error, you need to delete all extraous spaces before <?php and after?>.All my php files seems fine.

The answer is actually staring in my face. If you read carefully, the problems lies in the plugin section. I only though illacrimo as a theme and didn’t know it adds some plugin too.

Well, after that it si quite simple. I delete everything about illacrimo in the plugin and all my feeds works fine now.

This teaches me not to overthink things sometimes. Keep.It.Simple.Stupid. KISS