I’ve been testing out my Canon 70-300 lens again and this time I chose pretty much the furthest possible visible object – The moon. When I saw this image I was just amazed by what this lens is capable of! I’ve seen lots and lots of pictures of the moon before but there’s just something really special about taking your own pics as I’ve never done this before. We see the moon with our naked eyes on most nights but all we see is a ball with a few shades of grey. It’s just fascinating that all this detail is there, just that we can’t see it.

For this picture, I had pushed my equipment to the absolute limit, taken in the full 300mm 18MP raw on my 60D. However, what you see here is already the 100% magnification. But I’m really happy with the result =)

Also here’s another HDR I took down at Lane Cove National Park during sunset

Recently I got into papercrafting after seeing the really inspiring Princess Zelda life size model. Drawing from my cardboard display experience, I thought it shouldn’t be too difficult but rather more time consuming since it all required manual labour. So I decided to take the challenge and secretly build a Starcraft battlecruiser for chibi =). I gave myself 1 week for this project as I couldn’t take the risk having chibi enter my room because I knew I was gona make a big mess and she’d find out for sure! So off to work I go and there wasn’t a single minute to waste.

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I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, at last Burpy has covered one of my favourite OST’s of all time – Corridors of time! Good things take time and are certainly worth waiting for like Super Robot Taisen OG2. Arranged by non other than the Burpstar himself, this in my opinion is by far the most impressive cover I have ever seen. Listen to it without watching the video and it sounds like several different instruments playing together. What makes this cover so good is that it stays true to the original OST (like all his other covers), almost like a replica, but all done on a single acoustic guitar. How he does the drum beats, bass notes, and melody notes all with just that right hand of his is beyond me >D.

Thanks to Burpy for fulfilling my request and I think all Chrono Trigger fans totally need to see this. He’s sent me the tabs which unfortunately I won’t be sharing but I’m going to try learn it minus the drum beats which are impossible lol.

I just finished watching Infinite Stratos and am in a post series depression state just like the Fate Stay Night days =(. Beforew I started watching the series, I had no expectations of it whatsoever, heck, I didn’t even know what the series was about. I thought ‘hey, girls and mecha, can’t go wrong with that!’ and boy was I right!  However, the series turned out to be NOTHING like I had imagined!

The series turned out to be more a comedy than mecha action in my opinion and that happens to be fine with me!

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I had always been curious about what life is like on a cruise ship since I was a kid. Those grand majestic floating machines were the closest things to Gundam battlecruisers that life has to offer. I had many questions such as how stable will it be at sea? is it even possible to rock such an enormous object? What does the interior feel like? How do they squeeze 2500 people on board? how fast does it go? and the list goes on. Well after my trip with Chibi to New Caledonia on board the Pacific Pearl, many questions were answered.

I’ll start off with a bit about the motion:

I was extremely excited as I boarded the Pacific Pearl. It was unlike anything I’ve ever ‘been on’ and it was hard to believe this thing could actually move. In the port it was as stable as an island, you could not feel any sort of rocking or listing. Our cabin was quiet, so quiet I thought I was inside an apartment complex with double glazed windows. However as the ship engaged it’s thrusters and propellers, things started to change. The Pacific Pearl departed Barangaroo and made it’s crossing slowing under the Harbour Bridge and out into the open waters. I could start to feel minor motions and vibrations as the ship picked up speed but nonetheless very very steady. Then came day 3 where we encounter 6 meter swells! the rocking can be described as PRETTY BAD. Try to imagine yourself inside an elevator that continuously movies up a floor, back down, then up again and repeats itself for most of the day, yeap that’s how bad it was. The motion was so bad that Chibi and I had to skip 3 meals and stay in bed the entire day. Luckily the rest of the days were pretty smooth with swells of 1-2 meters. The sea really is an amazing place and to be able to pound our ship like it did in day 3, it can truly be a monster.

Now onto the cruise adventure!

The Atrium of the Pacific Pearl

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It’s photo shoot time again! This time I got to experiment with some really exciting new gear and techniques. Originally we planned to goto Milk beach, a beach hidden by cliffs and bushes but due to the distance and heat, we ended up going to Shark Bay which was packed! It’s Aussie day after all so it wasn’t really the best time for a photo shoot. We had to move locations once more and ended up on Vaucluse beach which was nothing short of…well..plain. Despite that we had a great time with the whole beach to ourselves.

A new gear was introduced to this session! It is the Canon 70-300 f/4-5.6 IS USM tele zoom. This lens was really fun and produces some really sharp images. (Also very useful at the beaches as well…if you know what I mean). Today was forecast to rain but thankfully most of the day was a steady bright overcast sky which was perfect for portraits =). The IS is absolutely fantastic, I can’t imagine a tele lens without this feature. You can clearly see the shake reduction through the view finder, it’s like magic. Like other reviews I’ve read, extending it all way to 300mm does result in a softer image, but still pretty sharp and good enough for my needs. I won’t hesitate to zoom all the way if I need to.

So here are some of the pics of the day, all taken with the 70-300.

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