Ahhh… School’s over and yet it isn’t… With school technically finished, all that’s left is our HSC and and then it is a few months of freedom!!! (with one month of worrying about our results…) But in that intermediary between graduation and studying for my HSC, there’s room for a little fun, and so we decided to celebrate a bit with a little trip to Ribs and Rumps at Macquarie Park, among other places, and I’ve spent some time experimenting with some photography and with a new Digital Audio Converter one of my friends bought.
Ribs are good… Ribs are amazing…
Ribs are expensive…
Ribs and Rumps is a well known and established steakhouse here in Australia, most well known for it’s well… ribs and rumps… And they do some pretty good ribs…
What they aren’t as famous for however, is their coffee… Otherwise, they’d be ‘Ribs and Rumps and Coffee’ or something… This ‘flat white’ I ordered had foam that almost looked like you could make a nice coffee and meringue dish if the foam was egg whites and sugar. =P
Macquarie Park is an established business park with many large corporations, both international and domestic, locating their operational headquarters here. Sony Erricson is just one of them.
On the lines of technology, my friend Geoff has been doing some research into Digital Audio Converters and Amplifiers to complement his Alessandro MS-1is. His research led him to the above; a relative newcomer in the space, ‘Audinst‘ is a South Korean brand, currently selling international through eBay, the Audinst HUD-MX1 ($179US) has had glowing reviews, and like many new ‘unknown’ and ‘cheap’ Korean/Chinese brands, has been praised for it’s value for money.
Again, I was skeptical as to the magnitude of improvement I’d experience using a DAC with low impedance pairs of headphones such as my Creative Aurvana Live! (RRP $169AUD) (32 Ohms) and my Shure SE420 ($350AUD) (22 Ohm) IEMs and Geoff’s MS-1is ($109US) (32 Ohms). At the moment I’m giving them some time before I make a final judgement (giving the amp some ‘burn-in’) but at the moment, I’m finding an unsubstantial ‘improvement’.
Meanwhile, something that has been causing a bit of a stir in the Photography community today, was the above post by Nikon to their Facebook fans. The resulting outrage by Photographers (Nikon as well) to this statement has been both hilarious and depressing at the same time. I as a Canon user, who uses a camera more for fun than what people would consider ‘actual photography’, wholeheartedly disagree with this statement that “A photographer is only as good as the equipment he uses” because I know there are people out there who can do amazing things with what some would consider ‘the crappest of equipment’.
Whether this is a publicity stunt by Nikon, or whether it’s just some statement Nikon thought would generate discussion about photography in general within it’s fan group, they’ve certainly caused a lot of anger in the photography community.
Speaking of photography, thanks to Canon Australia and the tutorial video below, I discovered the somewhat magical concept of inverting a lens to do some macro photography. (Above is an inverted lens on part of small icon from my Zune HD’s OLED screen)
I tested it out a bit on my Nanoha Uniform Ver. figure by ALTER which I am yet to photoshoot, lighting, aperture, focusing and stability are things that need to be adjusted and are harder to adjust due to the lack of automatic features by using an inverted lens, there are some pretty inspirational results for me. Though there’s still a lot I have to learn…
But there’s still (hopefully) a lot of time for me to learn about all that, and I still have a lot ahead of me.
But for now, I need to get my head down, and prepare for my future.
Leave a Reply