So for only $147 CAD, I picked up my first fast prime lens and corresponding adapter from EBay. It's an old Canon FD manual focus 50mm f/1.8. Some pretty historic stuff huh. The lens itself only cost me around $40 shipped. The Four-Thirds system's 2x crop factor means that this lens will give me an equivalent 100mm focal length.

It's quite a bargain, considering that the only native fast prime available for m4/3 right now is Olympus' 17mm f/2.8 pancake lens, which goes for over $350 CAD.

Not to mention that I've just opened up a new (old) world of legacy Canon FD lenses to myself.

I shipped the purchases to my Canadian address, so there's a good chance I won't get to try out the lens till I get back at the end of August. But if I'm lucky and the items arrive within the next week, then I might ask my mom to bring them up to Singapore with her when she comes to visit next week.

Either way, I'm excited to give this lens a run for my money in low-light conditions. f/1.8 is a lot faster than my current kit lens, which starts at only f/3.5. And it's a full two stops faster than my point and shoot's f/2.8 lens.

Part of me wishes I could have picked up the 50mm f/1.4, but I have a feeling that that auction would have ramped up in price near the end. On KEH.com, I see that the f/1.4 is often more than double the price of the f/1.8.

Though, with the purchase of this, I may have to hold off a bit longer before I can pick up the Lumix G Vario 45-200mm kit zoom. (I don't think I will pick up a cheaper manual focus Canon FD zoom in this case).

So some how, after work today I went with my Vietnamese friend to meet her friend at Sentosa who was visiting from Vietnam. Her friend's sister and one of their cousins was also there.

And amidst all the Vietnamese that was flying back and forth, I had a small bit of encouragement when noting that Mandarin suddenly doesn't sound super foreign anymore - at least when compared to listening to Vietnamese.

When going around Sentosa, I couldn't understand a word of their Vietnamese, but didn't feel as lost when I heard people around us shouting out short phrases in Mandarin like, "huh? No one's at home?" or "Sit in the back!"

I suddenly realized just how much more lost I'd probably feel in Vietnam compared to China or Taiwan. At least, hopefully there is a difference. I mean, at least I could try to force some conversation in Mandarin even if it's abysmal. But the same cannot be said for any other languages...

We'll see how accurate this theory is when I'm in transit in Beijing in three weeks time. Hopefully I won't be as lost as I was in Shanghai earlier this year.

With less than 30 days left in Singapore, it's been a bit of a strange realization that I will soon be heading back to Canada.

In a lot of ways, I'm looking forward to going back. The thought of traveling down 400-series highways at 120 km/h is comforting, as is the thought of riding in GRT buses or GO Transit trains. Tim Horton's donuts are something to look forward to, and above all, just being around old friends and family once again.

I want to roam around The Real Canadian Superstore located near Dundas and Trafalgar, and I want to eat at the Harvey's at Bayview and Cummer.

It will be nice to see Union Station again, and it will be nice to drive on the right-hand side of the street.

It will be nice to sit in Bubble Tease and drink now seemingly expensive and not very tasty bubble tea with UWCCF people. It will be nice to eat sushi buffet in Markham with TLCF people.

The more I think about going home, the more things I begin to miss about home.

But at the same time, there is so much in Singapore that I know I am going to miss. I will miss the lady on the intercom who tells me to stand behind the yellow line and to report any suspicious looking persons. I will miss being able to get from one end of the city to the other in an hour. I will miss the fact that all phone calls across the country are local ones. I will miss chicken rice and I will miss Hokkien mee. I will miss curry puffs and goreng pisang. I will indeed miss the food.

And on top of that (and most especially), I will miss a lot of the people I have met. I will miss the young adults at ENCS. I will miss my coworkers. I will miss other exchange and full-time students from NUS. And of course I will miss my family.

The past 7 months have gone by so much faster than I would have imagined. But should I have expected anything more? Time in Toronto and Waterloo passes just as fast. For sure I should have known that my time in Singapore would go by equally quickly.

The good news is that I just discovered today that my 4A term in Waterloo starts one week later than I originally thought.

I could use a bit of quiet and rest after the hustle and bustle of studying and working in Singapore.

In just four weeks, I will be packing up for the long journey back to Canada. In just four weeks, I will be saying good bye to the land that my parents once called home (the land I nearly called home). I will be saying good bye to the people whom have made my stay here so very memorable.

What other posts will I write in the coming four weeks? What else will I experience here in Singapore in this final month?

Trekking in the garden

Went out to the Singapore Botanic Gardens today with some of my coworkers.

I don't know how good the above photo is in terms of composition. I just thought that the low angle was quite different from a lot of the other photos I took during the day. This photo was actually shot on a whim blindly.

Everyone wants to get into photography these days.

A fairly good set of manufacturers were represented today: Canon, Nikon, Sony and Panasonic. Funny how none of us sported the same brand. Still missing some representation from other manufacturers... we need people to pick up at least Pentax/Samsung and Olympus DSLRs to be more complete on the consumer range of cameras (joking).

It was a good opportunity for me to continue to practice shooting with a DSLR-type camera. One of the things about using a camera with a DSLR-sized sensor (e.g. Four-Thirds and up) is that at large apertures, focus mistakes are a lot less forgivable.

I sometimes find that a lot of my images appear softly focused, or out of focus, or focused on the wrong thing. A lot of this is out of habit of me always shooting with the aperture as large as possible, as I would typically do with my point and shoot.

The thing is that DSLR-sized sensors will result in a smaller depth of field than those found in your typical compact camera. And with that smaller depth of field, poor focus is a greater issue.

So now aperture-priority actually means more than just forcing the aperture wide-open. It also implies stopping down the aperture to ensure a larger depth of field when required.

Of course, my rather slow kit lens of f/3.5 is more forgiving than say a fast prime at f/1.8 or f/2.8. But the depth of field I get with f/3.5 on the Four-Thirds sensor is much smaller than the depth of field I get with f/2.8 on my point and shoot.

Initially, I'm wondering if I was actually taking better photos with my point and shoot than I am with the Lumix G1. Not sure why. Still not used to the form factor? Or maybe I just took more photos with my point and shoot.

A lot of my photos are a quite blur/soft. Some are quite clear though, which leaves me to assume that it's a problem with my technique rather than the equipment (plus a lot of the sample G1 images I see online are very crisp). It's probably a combination of the smaller depth of field and me not holding the camera as steadily as I was holding the point and shoot.

You know electronics are playing a bigger and bigger role in photography when manufacturers provide firmware upgrades for lenses.

Perhaps yet another strong sign of this is the fact that software correction is becoming more prevalent and debated about with respect to higher-end consumer cameras.

Some purists are quite peeved at the whole aspect of software-corrected images coming out of some of Panasonic's recent cameras such as the LX3, G1, GH1. (Perhaps other manufacturers too, but I haven't followed)

Having no history in photography but a background in engineering (well to be truthful, I'm still working on my degree), I find myself not terribly concerned.

Sure software correction of image issues may be a bit of a pain once it hits the consumer's end in The Gimp or Photoshop, but I would believe that it's not as big of a problem for the first-party engineers.

My reasoning being that the engineers who design the lens know about the optical characteristics of the lens to probably a decent extent mathematically (I would hope?). With accurate knowledge of the distortion that the lens is suffering from (as in mathematically, not just "oh there's a visible barrel distortion and some chromatic aberration"), the engineers are better equipped to solve for the inverse transformation of the distortion with that much more accuracy.

In a way, it's signal theory 101. After converting your system to the frequency domain, if you have your Y(s) = H(s)X(s), where Y is your output and X is your input with transfer function H, you can then recover your input by simply dividing Y(s) by your transfer function, H(s). Then just take the inverse Laplace transform to get you back to the time domain. As long as no signal aliasing has occurred, you should be back to your original input.

So over-simplifying the engineering design process, all you theoretically need to do is to determine the H(s) that is being applied due to the lens, and you can then apply an inverse transformation to the resultant output to recover your input.

Of course, the actual solutions for such a distortion correction problem may not be as straight-forward as I have described, but the idea behind it should be sound.

Having worked in a company whose bread-and-butter business is now digital image projection, I know that digital image correction is used in industry and produces very pleasing results.

The fact of the matter is that you can save a lot of engineering design effort by leveraging the computing power of today's software and hardware. (And in certain industries, even huge savings in manufacturing costs can be realized with the lightened accuracy and precision requirements).

So it's really not all bad, in my opinion. The key thing to note is that the algorithms to digitally correct for distortion is not done by a graphics artist sitting in front of Photoshop tweaking image settings until a favourable result is achieved, and then his work-flow automated into your digital camera body. Rather, the correction is most probably done by an engineer who knows to some extent the mathematical distortion that is occurring such that he or she can solve for the inverse system and apply that mathematically to the resultant image.

And mathematically, it doesn't take much effort or space to store transformation information. In simple cases, all you need is a matrix.

The encouraging thing about this is that math is usually not as subjective as a human being tweaking settings in Photoshop or Lightroom. For all practical engineering purposes, 1.0 + 1.0 always equals 2.0, sin(pi) always equals 0, and sqrt(-1) always equals j (hello, we're engineers, i is current).