Lumix DMC-FT1 and Flickr Pro

The haze that sheathed the earth with shades of grey since yesterday morning heralded a kind of bad news – the first e-mail of the day I opened from Haensly meant our meeting next year may have to be called off, but after slobbering through the bad news, we’re still strangely optimistic. We discussed the future all but briefly, but we still kept our expectations at a reasonable level – I’ve learned to manage expectations very well throughout the years to provide me a shield of sorts against rampant disappointment, but sometimes, I found this act to have rendered me to be quite apathetic.

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Sunday night at about 10.30pm saw me, Esther, Heng, and Kai eating supper at the Western Stall of Tien Tien Fatt – aglio olio for me as usual – before we went to our usual haunt at Tanjung, where Shawn dropped by at midnight. Then at 1am Esther and Heng adjourned to my house after Esther fetched Kai back, and after failing to set up my phone to play Fight Club through my telly, we eventually watched it from my laptop, and though the watching experience wasn’t as good as I had hoped, my 2nd time re-watching what I personally felt was the best movie of all time was still brilliant all the same. It was only at about 4.30am that we finally finished watching it and the rest went home.

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The idea of leaving for Melbourne brought to mind the fact that I wouldn’t have a compact camera with me since my family would want to use it, which sent me scurrying the Internet and searching for “waterproof” and “HD video” brought me to Panasonic’s Lumix DMC-FT1 – I also finally considered getting a Lumix after seeing fantastic shots from Chris’ Lumix. I was supposed to meet the seller today, but it was brought forward to yesterday evening and off I went to meet him with my dad and youngest bro in tow.

Welcoming my new compact camera into my arsenal of photography equipment that basically does and has everything that I needed (I considered bright orange, but I thought it’ll be too flashy and it’ll practically scream STEAL ME to thieves, so I settled for this nice shade of green) – waterproof up till 3m (not having to use anymore really tacky waterproof camera bags like I did in Laos which resulted in many of my pictures having ugly black circular marks is just beyond cool), shockproof up to 1.5m, shoots in HD, has a 28mm wide Leica lens, allowing you to choose between resolution ratios of 4:3 (emulating Four-Thirds cameras), 3:2 (emulating DSLRs) and 16:9 (widescreen), and the list goes on.

Got it for RM1270 for the camera and the screen protector (that costs RM20), which comes free with this cool black leather pouch and a Panasonic 4GB SDHC card.

This camera won’t replace my DSLR at any costs – whenever possible I’d prefer to shoot with my DSLR rather than using a compact, but there have been times when using compacts would be reasonably sound: hiking – mountain and rock-climbing, rather – at Bukit Tabur (carrying my ridiculously heavy Canon 450D while attempting a death-defying hike was just stupid), kayaking through a river in Laos or tubing at Vang Vieng, caving at watery Gua Tempurung, among others.

The evolution of my compact cameras thus far, discounting the yellow film-based Konica or Kodak camera:

Fujifilm FinePix S5000 (went out of commission) > Sony DSC-W50 (lost at Station One SS15, a place I’ll never return to) > Canon IXUS 850 IS (giving it to my family) > Panasonic Lumix DMC-FT1 (hmm, notice that I’ve been using different brands each time lol!)

One of my first few test shots with my new camera:

Pardon the extremely dirty mirror.

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Thank you Chris, for gifting me a year worth of a Flickr Pro (not many pics publicly available yet – hafta wait till I finish uploading everything first or something as I’m allowing only friends and family to view my pictures for now) account two nights ago – I was exclaiming over my ingenuity of thinking about using Flickr Pro to backup nearly 50GB of my photos on Plurk, particularly when I’ll be away to Melbourne for a year and want to protect my photos wherever I am in the world, and this seems like a pretty good idea. Not to mention the fact that I could share pictures with my friends now (how easy they could download my pics has yet to be found out) – no more hassle of coming over to my house to copy pictures to their hard drives/thumbdrives, etc.

But I digress.

It was completely unexpected, a surprising but pleasant gesture – and I couldn’t thank you enough buddy. :) I’ve always often think that the world is nearly borderless now, and how halfway around the world a few years ago I found someone who turned out to be a really good friend.

And how halfway around the world I found Haensly.