The specs that made me happy, for two years, at least.

The specs that'll make me happy now.

Not much of an upgrade (I want a MacBook like everyone else), sure, but I’ll take whatever I can get my hands on. Also, I must note that since Day 1, there’s something about the Aspire 4710 that ticked me off: the white keyboard. This new one has black keys, and that’s one less negative bling I have to worry about. It looks sleeker, and performance-wise, it should be much better.

Secondly, to further address my problems with storage space, I got myself a new external HDD this afternoon: a 320GB Western Digital My Passport. With this unit alone, I can end my worries about not having enough space on my laptops and whether or not I should burn and delete entire folders of photos and recorded movies. Now, I could just transfer everything into this small box and think about backing them up on DVDs over weekends.

My passport to near-limitless storage.

I’ve been generating an awful lot of data the past weeks because of my camera – which I use on a daily basis – and at last, I’m free to shoot whatever, whenever, without the worry of running out of disk space on any of the two laptops that I currently use.

This is how my workspace looked like today; it's going to be a much different setup soon!

On a side note, because of this, I’m flat-out broke and will have to eat crackers for lunch these next couple of weeks.

Nightshow.

But I was tempted to let the camera roll for a few more seconds, so I also got this:

Lightshow.

I got the other shots I needed; after that, I packed up and left. I just am not in the mood for art tonight.

Back to the old Mercury (Typograph) theme.

Finally theme-shopped yesterday for a new Shootdelay design, but in the end I just decided to revert back to the old Mercury layout. It’s also the end of Shootdelay’s daily photo updates; starting now, I’ll be uploading albums instead of single photos, but not on a daily basis.

For the “new” entries (albums), see: June Snapshots: Metro Manila [#02], The Streets of BGC (Night), Drive from Batangas to Manila, Blue Coral Resort, Batangas, and IMMAP Rocks.

I should be able to take photos on a regular basis now, as wherever I go, my camera goes. It’s just a matter of when I get to post them on my photoblog.

Okay, in summary, this is what I have right now:

1. Lumix FZ28. The little bugger can shoot in HD, and from previous tests, the quality’s very good. So it’ll do. It has a bad microphone, though, but I won’t have to worry about that because I plan to take out the audio anyway and replace it with flowing music all throughout.

2. Dad’s 20+ year old tripod. Truth is, any tripod will do. So this is good enough.

3. Acer Aspire 4710. My crappy laptop can’t even run Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Stupid piece of junk. One more reason why, at least for me, that Sony VAIO’s one to covet. Oh, did I mention that it’s already loaded with a lot of important files? It only has some 3 gigabytes of space left, and just so you know, a 3-4 minute video in high definition can take somewhere around 600 to 800 megabytes. How many samples can I fit into my laptop’s crappy space? I’ll probably need to buy a lot of blank DVD-Rs. Bah. We’ll see about that.

The old Acer 4710.

4. Windows Movie Maker. What that fuck, I ain’t using this shit for any crap.

Solution: The camera and tripod are okay, and there’s nothing I can do about my laptop. As for the video editor, I’m already downloading the 30-day trial version of Corel VideoStudio Pro X2. If it lives up to the CNET Staff’s review, it should be enough. I’m not really looking for something fancy, just an editor that can handle HD videos.

I haven’t thought about anything else (with regards to the tools I’ll be using to produce the video) after that. Should Corel fail to deliver, that’s when I’ll start thinking about a different plan. For now, while I’m downloading the software, it’s just me and the storyboard.

Thing with my Acer Aspire 4710 is that it has become too slow, too full, too stupid for my needs. The other one, the Compaq, isn’t really mine. However, I do realize that it’s just something I want, and I’m not ready to spend yet with the thousands in cold cash I need to pay my mom for my recent camera purchase.

So what do I do? I take a goddamned shortcut.

There’s a video contest out there giving away a Sony VAIO laptop and a Sony Cyber-shot camera. And I’m ready to join the fray. The personal challenge: to plan, write, shoot, and edit a five-minute video of myself, by myself, following the contest guidelines.

I’m not sure how it’ll turn out. As you may already know, my Lumix FZ28 hasn’t even reached its second week with me, and it’s doubling as my first decent video camera. I do have some experience in editing videos, but I’m not really good at it. I don’t know how to act. I’ve never made a real storyboard. In a nutshell: I’m a noob.

Isang trip na mas malupit pa sa pantitrip ng mga pinsan kong babae.

But I want that laptop. The camera isn’t bad, either; I’m pretty sure that should I win it, it’ll have its uses.

We’ll see. I’ll post my progress here and I’m hoping people would give their feedback on what I should be doing, if I’m doing anything wrong. We’ll see, we’ll see. Hmm.

After only a few shots (and Jek’s lone shot), the guard shooed us away. He said we needed a special permit to shoot inside the campus. WTF! So we left for Eastwood.

Xavier Hall.

We visited Tita Lucille’s new condo unit, shot a couple of pics, then left. It was a very short, not to mention unproductive, night. But fortunately for me, the night wasn’t over yet.

Eastwood Jyl.

Eastwood Poste.

Remember the night when our Meralco lines went haywire? They found out what caused it (the friggin’ meter), but not before our electricity went kaput again, and this time, power was out the whole night. With only good old candles lighting the dining area, I decided to take the Lumix for a candlelight spin.

Jules / Apoy #1.

Jules / Apoy #2.

I was supposed to take pictures of the FZ28 with my mom’s Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX10 but it was way too dark with the electricity out last night, so I had to wait until morning to take a photo:

Camshot (pun intended).

The FZ28’s first day with me was so-so, but that’s okay. We’ve got years of shooting to go.

That concludes the Hunt for the Backup Camera. Here are the links to the previous two entries: The Hunt for the Backup Camera: Part 1, and The Hunt for the Backup Camera: Part 2.

Coming in October: the Hunt for the Entry-Level DSLR!