The package from PA arrived and I got my Classic Mario Sound Drops!

It's the classic noise, the buttons are hard and make a satisfying click when you press them. Hopefully WZ will like playing with them.

But the shot clocks... are just sad.

First.. I got 2 of the same kind!!! MCH!!! Second and most importantly, they DON'T MAKE A PEEP!! No sound at all!! So it calculates how many button presses you can press in 10 seconds, but no sounds mean... WZ won't give a dam about them.

BAH!

I wanted to look for a diffuser for my flash, on the advice of my friend he asked me to just use a bloody card first and learn up my technique, and lo what do I find online? A Better Bounce Card!

And I wasn't sure how well it worked since indoors, in a house with a low ceiling it was hard to tell the difference between a bounce flash or a diffused flash. But then I got this pair of shots at the Visual Studio launch today.

On the left, no flash the scene is lit mainly by the blue screen behind the person. On the right, with the bounce card. The effect is nice, the blue lighting is still there and yet it's not a harsh flash spotlight. Picture I didn't get, a shot with normal direct flash at the stage.

Considering all I use was a piece of photo paper with 3 cuts... COOL! Now to find that foam material the guy was talking about in the website, think I can find it at some arts and crafts or scrapbook shops.

For my Sony A350 I got this SanDisk Extreme III 2GB Card.

And it was working out great for me. As for the card reader, well I was just using this old thing which I bought a few months ago.

It worked out great... until my card was almost filled with pictures, then Windows Explorer began to act unresponsive when browsing the card's image folder. After some digging around I realized what was happening, Explorer was trying to load the image's thumbnail and EXIF information in order to display. But due to the fact that we're talking about hundreds of image files whose file size is 5MB, the cheap ass card reader just couldn't take it. That's when my friend told me to pick up the San Disk Extreme USB Reader.

I was skeptical at first but since hey... he's a pro and I'm just a noob in photography so... Anyway, to me I always thought that it didn't really matter how much faster a card reader is. But then again I wasn't dealing with large quantity of large images. The reader costs about twice as much as a chapalang reader.

But... it works.. fantastically. Explorer is able to retrieve and display the thumbnails and EXIF data without hitting any speed bumps!

Who knew there was an actual reason for getting a branded card reader? :P

edit : On a side note, the kit lens of the A350 doesn't seem to be well suited for product Macro shots. So I guess I'll have to keep the Sony H1 for that duty!

One thing after buying a DSLR is that the user usually gets roped into buying a lot of accessories like lenses, flashes, tripods, etc. etc. There's where the pain factor of owning a DSLR comes in. Well I'm not planning to take this up as a serious hobby, so I decided to stick to the essentials for my initial splurge. The 1st thing that I knew I must have was a flash!

So this is the entry level Sony Flash HVL-F36AM. With it I'm able to take flash shots as fast as the camera is capable of. Which is about 2 shots per sec with Live View on.

The next thing I needed to get was a bag considering the fact that Sony gave NOTHING in the package of the A350 other than.. camera.. lens.. So I got this.

The Lowepro Fastpack 250, it's a nice bag. Not too big, and spacious enough to hold all the stuff I need.

It has a side opening design, and it's enough to hold the camera, the flash, AND my video camera as well! So I can carry my full documentation equipment.

The top portion of the bag is a pretty spacious pocket, enough to hold all my gadgets and doodads, and laptop charger.

Yup.. the bag has a compartment for a laptop. This makes it the most ideal bag for me since obviously if I go anywhere which I would take my camera I'd most likely want to bring my laptop with me. Or most likely, the eeePC if I'm going on vacation.

And the final piece of equipment was bought so I could position the camera for gadget shots.

It's a Gorillapod SLR Zoom! The real deal and not an imitation product, I checked out one of those clones and they just didn't posses the strength and build of the real product.

Please read and write XML using the proper XML read/write functions. Every major language should now already have proper classes or utilities to read and write XML. Therefore an XML chunk of.

<root>
      <branch>some node</branch>
</root>

should be no different to

<root><branch>some node</branch></root>

since they're exactly the same XML, but if you weren't using a proper XML reader function to read it, but instead waited for a new line, then obviously you wouldn't get the value you wanted in the 2nd chunk.

so please, use the proper functions when you're dealing with XML!