Hello March

Dear fellas,

It's the fourth day of March and before I say "where did March go", I thought I had better planned out what I'll be doing this month.

I have a lot of stuff to do, like make 10 bags for a sale, finish up my applique patterns and learn to use my new camera.

I have been using Canon S100 since Feb 2012. It's a very light, compact camera. I bought it when it first came out and it worked great for a few months and then it stopped working. Turned out it was a manufacturing fault and I had the lens changed and it worked but I always felt the images looked not as good. Last year, I noticed the Auto mode stopped working. All images taken in Auto mode turn out blurry. Can you believe it? The Auto mode doesn't work! For such an expensive compact camera, I felt really let down by Canon. The one good feature about this camera is that it takes great pics in low lighting condition. The warranty has expired so I don't know if I want to pay to get it fixed. This camera has other modes which still work and I use the manual mode when taking pics of my bags so I don't absolutely need another camera.

When I say I use the manual mode when taking pics, I don't mean I really know what I'm doing. I am one of those people who goes completely blank when cameras are concerned. The S100 is quite dummy-friendly. I barely have to change many settings to get my images. If your settings are wrong, something will keep blinking and you just change your setting until it stops blinking. Haha. That's pretty much how I used the S100.

This is my new camera. My dear hubs bought it for me. It's a entry-level dslr Nikon D3200, so not the latest model. Because of that, the price is really good. In fact it costs just a little bit more than what I paid for the Canon S100. I have no experience with dslr so it's quite challenging. For a compact camera, what you see is what you get. There's no assembling. For a dslr camera, it comes in 2 pieces - a camera body and a lens. And yes, you need to attach the lens to the body. The manual is of course written in Greek. I discovered youtube is the best place to go to learn anything. After putting the lens in the camera body, I had to attach the neck strap which I felt was totally necessary as I was so afraid I would drop the camera. And it is a heavy camera. The advertisement says it's light. Liar! It's freaking heavy.

One thing I found out about dslr cameras is you're not encouraged to look at the screen when you take pictures. You're to use the teeny little window. Ever since I used my first digital cameras, I have always used the screen. I thought that's what the screen's for. So what's the screen for then? Well, you're supposed to look at the information like aperture, ISO, shutter speed and a bunch of other stuff. Yep, exactly. After watching an intro to photography explaining aperture, ISO and shutter speed, my brain exploded. If I don't want to be stuck with the Auto mode or the semi auto modes, I figure I better learn what numbers go best with what speed. Because unlike the S100, nothing blinks at you if you get it wrong.

I tried snapping a few pics using the Manual mode and the first one came out pitch black. Oops. Yes, the classic I forgot to remove the lens cap. After removing the lens cap, the images still came out very dark. After watching a few more youtube vids and falling into deep sleep many times, I managed to take a few better images. Worse goes to worse, I can always use the semi auto mode - Aperture Priority to take your photos. Here you can let the camera select the shutter speed for you. For me, I find figuring out shutter speed is the hardest.

And how's the weather been like for you? It's been hot in Singapore. And dry which is a change as last year it rained a lot. We even had a few bushes burst into flames. Oh, a bit of haze has come back too. It's almost like last year all over again except without the rain. I haven't continued with my jogging as I had hoped. I just felt too lazy and too tired and too old. Growing old is hard man.

But I've enjoyed going to the swimming pool. I'm still able to fit into the gigantic swimming costume I bought in January last year. Last year we tried going swimming regularly but the rain made it hard. This year we tried harder and I hope to keep it up. Today we went again and hubs took a few pics of me with his iphone but he forgot to turn on the hdr so I'm a bit in the shadows which is a good thing as I still haven't lost the past few years' Chinese New Year weight.

I hope you have a lovely March!