Mommy let's take WZ to the park near our house, it's a small little park with a little pond.

Then there's the usual children's slide for WZ to run around and play in.

WZ might get distracted by the LRT that passes by over head every few minutes.

I'm sure that the high tension wires that run on top of the park won't do any harm

It's a pretty well equipped park there are some simple gym equipment things here. Like jogging machines, cross country skiing machines.

For sure they are just things that work, and don't have any fancy doodads or instrumentation.

But that's probably because it's a public park and it's better to make stuff that is simple and has a risk of being vandalized and broken.

That's a little on the lake walkway which we'd have to be sure to hang on to WZ if we want to walk on it.

And there are also some rules we need to follow, don't I don't get the bit about the blankets.

So.. what do you say mommy? Shall we go? What do you mean there might be too many mosquitos there? What do you mean WZ is too young to be playing on the slides? So... that's it? Ok... I'll go myself and to take some pics then.

Well.. I finally managed to see the Intel Classmate PC design in Low Yat today, aka the FTEC Smartbook.

At RM1199 with comparable hardware specs to a eeePC 4G, but with a sizeable (I think it was 40GB) hard disk instead of a 4GB Solid State Drive, its a good deal if you're looking for a something in the current popular vain of cheap ultra portable laptops.

But...

There is one problem with the Smartbook. It shares the same 800x480 native screen resolution as the eeePC. But unlike the eeePC (At least not in the one that was on display) It would seem like the Windows XP drivers don't come with the ability to switch it to a scrolling 800x600 display. Why is this important? Because most programs never expected to be used on a 480 pixel high display, so having the ability to switch to 800x600 is NECESSARY if you ever want to run Windows XP on the thing. Hopefully it's just a simple matter of finding a hack or a piece of software to do it.

If not.. remember folks, it's really not a great idea to run Windows XP on 800x480! You might find that you won't be able to hit some buttons in certain programs.

My next little project would be to make it so I can embed all these little Silverlight Deep Zoom albums on the page itself. Currently they don't lend themselves well to being embedded because the image loads whenever you hit the page, so it's a waste of unnecessary bandwidth if you're not interesting in viewing.

But one main problem is that mouse wheel events aren't captured when you go fullscreen in a Silverlight application due to how it works. So I'll have to see how to get around that user interaction problem.

The first album were some little snaps which I took while I was in Thailand... I failed to get any scenery shots cause I missed the river cruise, but I found something else to shoot! Check it out here. The shots here were all taken with the kit lens of the A350.

The 2nd album are shots taken when I took a little trip down to the Lake Gardens, most interesting thing I realised while I was there was that the Macro lens makes a pretty good lens for shooting normal things too! Check out the shots here.

In case you don't know what Deep Zoom is, what's you're looking at is the FULL SIZED image from my A350, use the mousewheel or the controls on screen to zoom in and out of the photos, and of course.. let them load properly. (and that needs to be included as help text on the control as well!)

Mother's Day photo log and notes on what mistakes were made when taking the shot.

Off to the little fish pond we go, with only the A350's Kit lens attached. This shot's mistake : Metering was taking by focusing on mommy's BLACK shirt, therefore to compensate what it though was a dark scene the camera used a slower shutter speed and let more light on the picture over exposing the shot. Granted this is really the first time I tried taking pics with SPOT metering.. maybe I should go with Center Weighted first till I'm comfortable with measuring exposure before taking a shot... hmmm.. but then again I'm taking baby shots don't usually have the luxury of time to measure exposure before shooting.

The main thing wrong here is of course the subject has the sun behind them and me forgetting to pop the flash to catch the details. Point to note 2 seconds after I take this shot, WZ's shoe drops into the pond.

Mommy said "Get a picture with the fish in it!" Luckily I was not using the 50mm or the background would be lost to bokeh. So, tlited the view screen down, held the camera up high and shot from above. Think I focused on the mommy's body instead of head though.

One thing I found was that the A350 produces dull images, or it could just be the kit lens since I don't find my 50mm giving me that feeling. Anyway, bumping the saturation up by one step solves that issue for me. When in doubt shot in RAW mode, then do the adjustments with the LightBox app that came with the camera I'm *pretty sure* whatever settings you apply to the RAW image in that program is the same as what you can apply in camera. So you could take a plain image in RAW mode, then on the PC, use the LightBox app to see what kind of effects you'd get if you shot in vivid mode, applied more noise reduction, etc. etc. Great learning tool. Of course that increases the time to consumption of your shots but it all depends on what you want to do with your pictures.

The problem with this shot is that I took it during the cloudy evening, so white balance is all wrong. In my opinion learning what is white balance and how to adjust it is the first step to taking nice pics, it's also easy to explain than aperture and shuttle speed (it makes white look white) of course I guess the Semi Pro would probably scoff at such a remark. But that's what I think lar.

This pic pretty much sums up why I bought a DSLR, point to note here is that the restaurant had the usual dim mood lighting. So it'd be hard to get a nice bright shot without using a flash, but I didn't bring mine with me using the built in flash was an alternative but that wouldn't have looked nice. And I only had the kit lens which doesn't have a wide aperture. But no problem, like the Semi Pro told me before I bumped up the ISO to 1600 and got this shot which makes the place looks like it's brightly lit.