Moved
I’ve been spending time getting settled into a new flat and neighbourhood. It’s a great place to live and I’m really feeling the zen at the end of the day after coming home from working in the city.
I have grass and green things outside instead of concrete and asphalt. Living in the central city was great for convenience’s sake but it’s nice to go some place quiet and more isolated from that atmosphere now.
And I live within walking distance of places like this now.
Also, as you can see above, the beach comes with free complementary seating….
blue skies…
The view from my backyard is great.
Feels nice to be back on the north shore for now.
the late night noodle custom…
Lets say you find yourself at the inconvenient hour of 5:00am with the desire for a quick but filling meal of sorts. This is where we give custom to the late night noodle.
Firstly head down to the closest 24 hour asian convenience store. Luckily there are two within walking distance of my place. Secondly pick up the best bowl of noodles that you can find and bring them home for a boil.
Notice these convenient late night noodles come in a bowl with a handy utensil already supplied as well. As a bonus, it contains real* Australian beef! Now that’s a treat.
Next empty all included packets into the bowl. Apply hot water and music, cover for aprox. 3 minutes.
If you wish, you may at this point also stir in some random asian bean curd ingredients that you picked up on impulse while trying to find your way to the noodle section:
If you need assistance picking an extra ingredient, you might inquire of the underpaid cashier as to the taste and degree of spiciness of any given item which fails to have a language you understand on the packaging. Take note that the date stamped on the package might have already passed; this is not actually the expiration date but instead the production date of the said item. Or at least that’s the likely story the cashier gave me. I trust him of course!
After your ingredients are combined and your noodles properly stirred, you may promptly engage in that Ol’ time custom of the late night noodle…Enjoy!
*the use of the term ‘real’ in this article is formed on speculation by the author based on his previous experiences with beef.
fish egg soup
Shuzhen and I were really into eating at this late night Korean place a lot recently.
One of our favorites was the Spicy Fish Egg Soup:
The photo doesn’t really do it justice. Here’s a video of what it looks like when they bring it out, still steaming and boiling:
Only, we ate it so often lately that we’ve grown tired of it.
I’ll probably give it another go in a month or two. At least I’ll always have my staple Flat Fried Fish in the meanwhile.
an end in sight…
I went from having only two days off in a month to suddenly getting 4 days off in a row, which kind of panicked me. But I’ve spent portions of at least 3 of those days at the shop with Shuzhen so it’s not been that much of a break with nothing to do, as I thought it might.
During any free moment I’ve had, I’ve sought distraction; this to the extent of Abeyance to my obligations towards family and friends both.
But life has gone on…
To those in waiting…thanks for you’re patience; I will be in touch soon.
the busiest weeks
Last week was hard; this week, even harder.
the 2nd day of double shifts and I wasn’t feeling too bad yet. I was kind of happily floating out of bed and early enough that I had time to grab my camera and take it along for my walk to work. Though when it came, I fully expected the triple shift to break me (yes, that’s a 24 hour shift).
But for now my mind was somewhere in the abstract of my situation. It was a short moment of respite in which I had time to think and step out of my life looking back at it with a different sort of perspective than normally. In a word: Introspection.
I walked on, using the camera to pull me out of it and look outwards at the city I live in:
And the people living under it:
I still feel good. Soon I won’t have the luxury of time to be contemplative. But for now I soak up the zen of the moments in between the busiest of weeks.
I haven’t had the chance to use my Voigtländer Color Skopar 20mm f/3.5 Aspherical SL II for EF very much yet 
It’s a nice wide lens.
The few times I have used it, I haven’t had any problem the with manual focus. The focus confirmation helps immensely and being a wide-angle lens, a lot of the time you are just about in focus 70% anyway without even trying. But I am surprised by this lens’ focal range nevertheless. Close-up ability starts at 0.2m (by the way, I realized just recently that I’m suddenly becoming more comfortable with the metric system than the Imperial one I was raised with after 6 years of living in New Zealand!). f/3.5 has less DoF than one might realize as well.
As for criticisms, I have noticed soft corners wide-open but these are definitely minimized at f/6 – f/7 and above. Being a wide lens, there tends to be a bit of distortion towards the edges as you would expect with a wide-angle. There are modules for CS5 and LR3 out there. These also help with the vignetting which is quite present (though the vignette is sometimes desirable for effect when you want to draw focus to a centered subject).
Personally I love wide angle distortion so I tend not to crop.
Though, I am shooting a wedding this weekend and I’ll probably have to do some module (and thus cropping) correction in photoshop.
Normally I might be worried about bringing the 20mm Voigtländer as my sole Wide lens into a professional shoot, but I’m doing this one in conjunction with a 2nd shooter who’s going to be using his 16-35mm L lens to back me up so I’ll be somewhat keen to try on the Voigtländer and see how it does in a professional shoot!
Disconnected
I got lost in my thoughts as I was walking to work. I was trying to remember the timeline for a certain memory and what year it happened in, whether it happened before the first time I came to NZ or after, etc… As I reviewed this, I suddenly started to recall a lot of other memories and events and eras of my life and thought to myself, I have lived a lot of life. There is a lot to feel sentimental for. In some ways, I wished I could return to some of those times and places. I remember reading in a book recently where one character asked another, “Do you miss it, do you wish you could go back?”, with the other character replying, “I do, but as with anything, if I went back, it would be different now.” Things will never be the same. That happens all the time and it’s hard to let go. Weighing the memories of my life, there’s a lot of history. I miss people, places, situations. There’s no way to go back to those. I wondered if I should feel old with all these memories. I didn’t. I just felt disconnected.
