I've really never gotten into Pinterest until Withings started a contest. I signed up, submitted a photo and now the contest is live. Check out the photo that I took of Norah Renée along with the Smart Baby Monitor. If you think it's worthy, please repin it! As of Sunday tonight, she's in 3rd place.
Hey, and if you wanted to buy this awesome monitor, use can always use my Amazon link provided here. It's awesome and my wife and I love it!
When I asked a couple of friends through Facebook or Twitter on their opinions on a specific camera choice, I got an overwhelmingly response. They all gave great insights coupled with personal experiences and I just wanted to post my experience and my gratitude. First the twitter story.
Now a post from a great friend from High School.
I'm actually shooting with an Olympus Pen EP-3
(with misc panasonic/ oly/ third party Micro-Four Thirds lenses)
The NEX-7 is a nice camera, but Sony's native lens selection is kind of lacking. It's worthy of praise because you can use old manual lenses that benefit from Sony's focus peaking. Also, due to the large APS-C sensor size and flang mount in relation to a streamlined body, the NEX lenses are designed to be inherently big. It feels like handling a smart-phone with a soda-can attached. Kind of defeats the purpose of a smaller form factor when there's little to no native compact pancake lenses available. Plus, they try to bury every feature in the menu screen, requiring a proprietary learning curve... if only it worked like an apple product.
The OM-D EM-5 is pretty much an evolution of the EP-3. A compact Micro-four thirds camera with some "raise-the-bar" type features like the 5-axis stabilization, weatherproofing, fast rate viewfinder etc... The stabilization provided some extra stops for low-light hand-held shots. (Great for non-flash shots when your child is an infant, and better hand-held when the little one takes off running) In the flesh, this thing is pretty small. It's about the same size as my EP-3 sans the view-finder hump. I'd say MFT cameras had a lot of catching up to do in the last couple of years, but the current generation MFT cameras are the shit.
As for the full-frame 5D's:
No one will argue against the Mark III as the current industry standard. (And some confess: most of the time it's just to appease the clients). As a matter of fact, I was introduced to the smaller MFT cameras from a bunch of guys who have to lug around 5D's for a living. From a practical standpoint, the Mark III is a big investment on just a body when most of us don't get paid to do this. Not to mention, once you get the essential full-frame lenses you'll be lugging around a lot of equipment, averaging the cost of a Hyundai under the baby stroller. Try to chase your toddler around with all that.
To conclude, you should base your decision on what you like to shoot and the overall system. The body is pretty much dated in a year or two since the consumer camera industry is as, if not more fickle than the computer industry.
^Being a gear-head, I'm sure you already know all this but I figured I'd share my thoughts anyway. Good luck with the camera shopping man, there's a lot great choices. Just make sure you do it soon so you'll have a handle on the hardware before the baby starts to grow up quick.
Let me know what you go with and if u have any questions on the MFT side of things. And read up...we're all biased in some way.
The beginning of this year brought on an onslaught of weather to the eastern seaboard and of course, I got to fly into it, around it and enjoy the flurries. I really can't admit that I it was all joyous work, but it's all in the job description. It's what we are trained to do and must do to bring you safely from Atlanta to who knows where. Here are some shots; one with snow, one at night w/ the moonlight + Venus, and two others one of Atlanta Downtown followed by the Atlanta airport at night viewed from 11,000 feet. All these shot below were taken in the month of January.
Since I was fortunate to have two awesome flight attendants with me during a 40 hour stay in Allentown, Pennsylvania, we rented a car early morning and ventured out to three different vineyards, a chocolate factory as well as the local mountain to check out the slopes. The vineyards were quite awesome, friendly and the various ambiances' were definitely different from the traditional ones here in Southern California. For one, we don't have Ice Wine nor a freezing lake next to a cottage. Peep these.
Sometimes, when I'm sitting in the back of a plane, non-revving, I'm able to snap some awesome up close pics. Here is the airTran Atlanta Falcons themed Boeing 717 and one of Delta's newly modified 767 with winglets! What do you think of these?
Something even more cooler...two of my very good friends, Kurt, who happens to be one of my groomsman and also shares the same birthday, July 28th, had his first child, Jakob with his lovely wife Krysti. Check out the happy father and son!
Well, here I am again trying out, not only a new service, but a new device that my friends and I are planning to develop for. So far, in the last 72 hours, I have crashed the new phone multiple times thus not allowing me to accurately time the battery life using the built-in "usage" calculator. It's frustrating alright and sometimes the phone is just a little too slow. One gripe with using the contact sync feature with Apple's buggy-shoulda-been-beta mobileMe software package is the 5 seconds that I have to wait while trying to pull up one of my buddies. I can't say that I'm sold on it the "Exchange for everyone else" and will probably cancel it after the free 60 day trial. It's nice to have a calendar and photo library sync up but I can't justify the $100/yr just yet.
I'm flying again quite a bit and with the initial award for August, it looks like I'll be able to keep up the commute or head out for another out of country adventure. I need I save some money up for the holiday season but who am I kidding anyways? Life is on another upswing and as long as I can keep up the positivity, it'll be smooth sailing.
I'm going to be Twitter-ing more often and even uploading some mobile photos that can be found on my facebook profile. Facebook released a handy little native app so depending on whether I keep it up will determine the continuation of trelijah. The name is probably going to change again...introducing eliPhone...maybe. :)
I woke up early around 6:00AM Saturday Morning still in a daze from moving / driving the entire night before from Daytona to Atlanta. I pushed the snooze button just once because I knew that I had to get going in order to get ready for a day's excursion to Cuernavaca. Little did I know what I was about to go through.
Some people that I met in the terminal were quite nice and some advised me to drive, some to not drive and some just thought of how cool it was to be traveling the way I was doing it. My day's itinerary went like this: Fly to Mexico City (9:45 Eastern - 12:45PM Local --> 4 hour flight), land and find the rental car place which I booked through Expedia, drive from the City to Cuernavaca without a map, somehow find my girlfriend, hang out till 3:00 in the morning, drive back to the City, catch a flight to Orlando and ten connect to Atlanta, take the shuttle back to my car, change into my uniform, head back to the terminal and operate my ship to that night's overnight.
I got first class which was great but instead of sleeping, I messed around on my computer and read a book. I should have slept especially with a long road ahead of me.
Everything went as planned, but there were bumps in the road which included driving 24 kilometers in about 1.5 hours just to get out of the City, driving 1 hour to Cuernavaca, getting lost for about 30 minutes in the city of Cuernavaca and asking a police officer to draw me a map which he did so willingly. I arrived around hang out with Adelle and her friends, have dinner, go out Salsa dancing till 1:00AM and then get about 1.5 hours of sleep! It was all worth it in the end!!! Adelle's friend were so inviting and awesome to hang out with. Driving around Mexico in and of itself was an adventure. I did think though that I had it in me as long as I could be aggressive enough. I drive a little 5 speed Chevy something that isn't offered in the US because i don't think that it'll pass crash tests it's so small.
Here's a picture of Adelle and I about 1 hour later in front of a library of sorts in the Zocalo of Cuernavaca.
He's is one of the few signs along the road of welcoming me back into the city after a 1 hour mountainous drive from Cuernavaca at 4:00 in the morning. It was nice not having to deal with traffic but filling up the rental car was a hassle let alone trying to find the place that I had to drop it off of.
I got onto the flight without any problems, first class, ended up in Orlando and saw that an AirTran flight was leaving almost immediately, so I was able to catch a ride on them also in 1st class but the savings in time was spent on the taxiway due to delays for weather. I still arrived at the time previously planned for, shuttled, changed and headed right back out. I also got to catch the last 5 minutes of the Chargers game in the rampers' lounge and what an ending!!! GO CHARGERS!!! Final Score:
Do you guys like these long blog entries or would you prefer shorter ones?
Here are some pictures of Adelle making it to the top of the mountain / pyramid. Yeah for buddy!!! Oh yeah, for those who don't know, Adelle is on volunteer mission where she helps out in an orphanage and also gets to tour around Mexico at the same time. She's been there for two weeks now so communication has been sparse. Can't wait till you get back babe!
We finally have a picture of all of us that live in the Atlanta Crashpad.
We have a nice little family and it was nice to finally get a picture. It's too bad that we never had one of the original bunch. This is already the second generation of housemates. We lost two guys (one to SkyWest and the other bought a house with his wife down in Grantville, GA) and gained a wife. In the photo starting with the back row from left to right is: Manoj, Justin and Myself then in the front from left to right is Lindsay, Matthew, Eric and Michael.
The dynamic is quite awesome and I wish that I was around more to enjoy everyone's character. I live in a loft on the second floor which is quite spacious, but without walls. It's fine really just either really hot in the summer or cold in the winter. Because I commute from San Diego, I haven't been spending that much time there at all and this weekend ended up being a blast.
Last night consisted of many drinks into the early morning followed by yet another night (tonight) going out for drinks in Buckhead. Good times guys! Tomorrow will pretty much entail watching football all afternoon so that should be fun as well. Go Chargers!!!
