Squash and DOTA...TuT, TuT, TuT (Totally unrelated Things)

I fared so badly at DOTA earlier today that I didn't even manage to kill a single opposing hero throughout the entire match. Talk about being very bad at a game, I believe the appropriate expression would be "n00b".

Anyways, I'll be heading to the Curve at Mutiara Damansara tomorrow to watch the semifinals (or is it the quarterfinals) of the CIMB Malaysian Open squash tournament. Should be interesting to watch the game live instead on the tele, having been a fan all this while and did play squash during my primary school years, courtesy of the Royal Malaysian Navy's excellent sporting facilities in the Lumut base.

Some would find it hard to believe but try asking any other Navy brat and you'll find that we had access to a stadium (which used to host the Perak state team's home games when the Ipoh stadium was under renovation), tennis courts, badminton courts, squash courts, an Olympic size swimming pool with the coolest/scariest/indifferent things at that time (depending on individual preference and the height he or she is jumping off)...diving platforms!

Back to tomorrow's plan. I will be bringing the D40 along as well. Hehe.

Now with DSLR for Greater Justice!

The pictures taken earlier of my Gashapon/Figurine collection with my camera phone didn't turn out great, so I retook them but this time with the Nikon D40. Much better. Pictures below (click to view larger versions):

Borg Cube

My Furuta Star Trek complete Alpha and Beta sets

All made by Kaiyodo except Robocop

Robocop

Nintendo characters abound!

Resetti...Amok

Redd... sniggers

The 8-bit brothers

The original photoshoot is in the post before this. Click here to view.

Flickr Badge

I've uploaded some pictures that I've taken with the Nikon D40 to my Flickr account so basically they are sharing space with the pictures that I've taken with my camera phone. Anyways, it turned out that making a Flickr Badge (like the one you can see on the left) is pretty straight forward. Kudos to Flickr for a nice way to embellish my blog :)

Anyways, don't forget to read the post below, and get tagged doing it!

Shooting with a D40

I've been fooling around with a new Nikon D40 DSLR camera all night long and all I can say is that it is a very nice camera to use. The camera is pretty simple to operate, and despite only venturing to manual focus and some other stuff, I never felt once like an idiot using the camera. Picture quality is impecable and the kit lens is quite adequate for the time being.

So far I managed to dig up two problems, but fortunately these are user related (therefore easier to fix compared to a hardware issue). My shot composition is still pretty poor and I have shaky hands, both of them resulting in pretty lousy shots on my behalf but hey, learning is a life-long process and I am pretty much determined to get the hang of shooting great photos.Here's a sample of what I took, a shot of a gashapon, more specifically Mario in his kart.

On to something else, but not too far off. I've commented unfavourably on people who make noise like empty cans about LCD TVs (but don't own them in the first place) and I'll do the same for those who comment like airheads on DSLRs. You can go on babbling about megapixels, tech specs and all that jazz but I've something for you: size doesn't really matter, it is how you use it.