Staying up late
My husband and I stayed up to watch the UEFA Cup Finals game between Barcelona FC and Manchester United.
It’s a good thing my boss updated me on the actual game schedule. I was thinking the game would start at 1am, but he corrected me and said it was going to be around 2:45am, on ESPN. The thing would be to have an early dinner, then off to bed with the alarm set to 2am. Plenty of time to shake the sleep off, open a beer and a bag of chips and position our butts in front of the tube.
Barca won, with splendid goals from Samuel Eto’o and Lionel Messi. VISCA el BARCA!!!
I’m going to catch up on my sleep now, and I don’t mind not having a sleep number bed. I’m just going to shut the blinds, turn the fan on high and zzz …
Plastic money
I’m not sure if SM Baguio have Honeywell Barcode Scanner devices installed in their check out counters. But one thing I may be forced to get is the BDO cash card for Maui to use when he is in Baguio. Much as I hate BDO and would not like to give them any business, necessity dictates that I get the most convenient cash card available to us. If I understood the Banco de Oro customer service agents I spoke to, I can deposit any amount of cash on the card and Maui can use the card at a BDO ATM or swipe it at the check out counters at the SM supermarket. However, it takes more than a week to be processed after I apply for one, so I was told.
Unbelievable. Other banks can provide me with an ATM card on the same day that I opened an account. I have till the end of the week to decide on this. Until I’ve decided on one, Maui will have to rely on cold hard cash.
Bokeh, not Bokya
Bokeh – (derived from Japanese word “boke”, meaning ‘blur’) – In photography, refers to the creative use of lens blur as a composition technique. The aim of bokeh is to deliberately blur the background or foreground (or both) in order to draw the viewer’s attention to a particular area of the photo. Bokeh is achieved by using a suitable lens with a large aperture setting, which in turn produces a narrow depth-of-field. It should be noted that some lenses tend to be more suited than others for achieving such an effect.
While I was scouring the photography textbooks for the meaning of bokeh and trying to get my camera to display it I ran into all sorts of problems. The main one being I couldn’t seem to get my camera to get bokeh, and all I was getting was bokya (trans. failure). Then late one afternoon I managed a shot of hanging flowers with the sun behind the trees which were behind the hanging flowers, and there it was—bokeh.
This afternoon I was going through my Baguio photos from February this year and there they were—bokeh when I didn’t even know what the word meant at the time!
Photography is not Magic
Photography is not magic. It is a lot of hard work that can actually be fun if you like what you’re doing, and if you happen to be in the right mood, and it’s the right time of the day. I do know some people who are in the mood all the time, and have fun all the time, but I don’t think I’m good enough to be in the right frame of mind all the time. I do know that I like it, and that I am enjoying what I have been learning recently. I’m not about to go into hd stock footage but later on it may not be such a bad idea.
Some people seem to think that there are instant magic settings for a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera that will assure the user of crisp, crystal clear photos every time. They think that with a camera as big and as expensive as a DSLR will take great pictures all the time, regardless of the users’ skill. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In his article Magic Camera Settings, Thom Hogan (Nikon expert, writer, computer engineer, musician and a lot of other things), relates how people have several times asked him for his camera settings so they could use it themselves on a trip that they were going off to. It takes a bit of explanation, an exasperating bit as Thom Hogan seems to put across, to say why there are no Magic Settings (and as we Filipinos would say “walang himala!”).
No two pictures are alike. Two people standing on the same rock at the same time with their cameras pointed at the same thing will not produce the exact same pictures. This is because the light entering each camera, depending on its settings, will be different. And since photography is all about catching light, it means that different light = different pictures. If anyone wanted the same pictures of the outdoors, one could just go to nature stock footage and download some from there.
I’ve bookmarked Thom Hogan’s site on my browser–other than being a Nikon owner myself, I find his writing straightforward with a comfortable dash of humor.
About Me
