I'd Like You to Meet My New Best Friend

... her name is Panasonic Lumix DMC TZ-15.

Say "cli-ick"!

Okay, the above picture isn't very good but that's because it's a just a mirror reflection and my room's rather dark. Wait, saying my room is dark is understating it. It's right in the middle of the house with no windows or doors which open to the outdoors - that means zero natural light. In a way though, it appeals to my morbid sense of aesthetics and my personal preference to do any work at night.

On the other hand, I think I'm beginning to wilt.

I haven't been playing with it as much as I should (lots of reading to do, see) but here's a couple of pictures I took last week,

Taken through a car's windscreen - on a moving car (and you know it's moving pretty fast 'cause it's yellow light).


A Malacca River I hardly recognise. I'm loving the 16:9 ratio, baby.

As for the features, I'll just read off the box here, okay?

• Leica DC Lens [Whatever that is.]
• Mega O.I.S. [I think it has something to do with image stabilising because there's a little cartoon beside the words depicting what looks like a shivering camera.]
• 10x optical zoom [Finally, something written in English! It's one of the reason I chose this baby here. I like photographing animals - and trying to slowly creep up to a squirrel really takes a lot out of a man. Plus, I heard that no other compact in the business has this much firepower.]
• Wide angle, 28 mm (35 mm EQUIV.) [I don't know what the numbers mean but WIDE ANGLE!!! WHEEE!!!]
• 9.1 megapixels [The downside of this is each picture I snap takes up at least 3 megabytes in the memory card. And no, I don't want to lower the size. I got 9.1 megapixels and I'm going to use each and every one of them. So there.]
• 460,000 Dots 3.0 inch Large LCD [Makes my old 2.5 inch look like a postage stamp.]
• Face Detection [I usually turn this off because... let's put it this way; how many pictures in my blog actually contain faces?]
• Digital Red-eye Correction [But red-eyes are coooool!!!]

There's also a sundry of little features which I think I read somewhere while leafing through the manual like having this ability found on many recent DSLRs to preserve highlights while brightening shadow area (something I manually perform to the best of my ability with Adobe Photoshop with pictures from my old camera). If I understand my photo lingo, it means that my skies are no longer a featureless, white facade. Oh, there's also an option to record high definition videos and the ability to zoom while filming. Sweet, but ultimately quite useless for me because I don't shoot videos.

A lot of people asked me why I didn't get a DSLR instead - which I'd like to, by the way - but look people, I'm not made of money. Besides, I want a travel camera - something pocket-sized which I can whip out at a moment's notice - not something you can potentially win a cage match at the WWE with by repeatedly introducing it to your opponent's head.

Anyhow, time to get back to my books, kids. I wish I'd feel stoked enough to write proper articles again soon. I have a 'Dear X' letter I have been planning to write with X being 'the Chinese People of Malaysia' and a rant about McDonald's heinous crime against humanity. At the moment, I have both feet squelching in the doldrums.