I won’t bore with the stories, so I’ll just post pics

It is such a hard life watching the sunset sipping on cocktails…..

Some of the wonderful colours produced from the 4 sunset’s we saw on our trip.

Sooooo many people come out for the sunset as you can see below.

The many faces of the local kids of Boracay Island

This was probably one of the nicest bars we were at on Boracay – Bamboo Lounge.

Finally, something that caught my eye and couldn’t get over the qualifications required for the job position – “College Graduate” for sales? I guess that is the reality of the Philippines.

Download it your computer, it might take a while, but if you enjoyed Saturday, this slideshow will be worth the download

Its roughly 13mb’ish, so for those slow Internet connections, it will be a while.

Make sure you watch it with sound, as its the same song that Karen walked down the aisle to!! (ie. tear jerker )

Bloody hard!

I have now got mad respect for the real wedding photographers out there, it is one hell of a day, but that being said, it is probably one of the most rewarding feelings when you see the faces of the bride and groom when you chimp with them, no words can describe the feeling.

For my first attempt at a wedding, I have an real urge to do more and more (whether or not I have enough talent is a different story )

So congratulations to the new Mr & Mrs Sor. Ray & Karen, it was a great honour to be a part of your day, not only photographically, but to also be part of the bridal party.

Congrats

Here are some quick pics from yesterday (massive work, to go through all the photos).

Do you like it Karen?

The cuteness… Tiana – the flower girl

Some of the make up

Groomsman and Groom

The beautiful bride – Karen

Maid of Honour – Nubia (brides sister)

Bridesmaid – Ayesha

Bridesmaid – Meo

Bridesmaid – Anna (grooms sister)

Ray and Karen share a momemt

Bride and her maids….

awwww

I have outlined what I have done in the following post.

Disclaimer: I will not be held responsible for any damages that you may incur on your P-3000/P-5000, if you choose to follow the procedures outlined in this post, you agree to do so at your own risk and I will not be held liable for any of your actions

The following things are needed to complete the hard drive upgrade:

• A 1.5 hex screwdriver
• A really fine phillips head (it’s labelled “00″ on my set) and another one the same size you would use for computer parts (it’s labelled “1″ on my set)
• A 2.5″ Parallel laptop hard drive to the size you want (I use a 120gb Fujitsu laptop hard drive as the P-3000 ships with a Fujitsu hard drive and I thought it would be better to stick with the same brand)
• A USB2.0 (or firewire) external hard drive enclosure (it is not necessary, but it does make things a whole lot easier)
• Acronis True Image 10 software (you could probably use Ghost or any software that clones/backs up a hard drive, but True Image was used from another tutorial I saw for the Epson P-2000, and its relatively easy to use)
• I would highly recommend you backup all your images on to a computer or another hard drive and delete them off the Epson P-3000 before cloning the hard drive, so you have a fresh, factory default clone of the hard drive.
• Windows XP SP2 (this is what OS I am currently using, I don’t see why this couldn’t be done on MacOSX or Windows Vista)

Disassembly

First thing’s first, you need to disassemble the P-3000. We’ll start with the side that has the SD and CF slot in it. Using your hex screwdriver, take the two screws out on each side of the unit.

Flip the unit over and you will see another hex screw, take that screw out.

Open the battery compartment door, take the battery out and take the two screws out.

When you take the cover off, there will be a speaker that is connected to the main unit, I couldn’t take it out of its slot, so I just took the two screws off the speaker

Turn the unit so the screen is flat on desk and you will see two rubber pieces on the unit, take these rubber pieces off to reveal five more screws, take these screws out.

Once the five screws are off, there are three more screws that holds the back plate. One.

Two

Three

Take the back plate out and viola! The hard drive is almost exposed

Before you can take the hard drive out, you need to take the housing off the hard drive, there are six screws on this side that needs to be taken off.

Four screws to be taken off this side. There is one screw that has a metal plate in front of it, the plate can easily be bent so the screw is exposed.

Like so

Once all twenty five screws have been taken out, gently take the IDE connector off the hard drive.

Once taken out, you are now ready to back up the drive.

Backing Up the Hard Drive

Put the original 40gb Fujitsu hard drive into a hard drive enclosure. When plugged in, Windows XP automatically detects the drive, showing two partitions, EPV_SYSTEM and P-3000. Start up Acronis True Image 10 and select Backup to start the wizard.

Click Next.

Select My Computer and then Next.

Here you will see all the drives on your computer, but you want to select the disk that has the P-3000 drive on it, this this case its Disk 3, make sure both partitions are selected, and then Next.

If you have just installed True Image, you will get the following screen, just hit OK.

Select where you want to save the Image and then Next.

Select Create a new full backup archive and then Next.

Select Use default options and then Next.

No comments are really needed for the Image. Click Next.

A summary of what is being performed. When ready, click Proceed.

Operation in Progress.

Once completed, click OK and you are now ready to restore the Image.

Restoring the Hard Drive

Take the original hard drive out of the enclosure, and plug the new one into the enclosure, Windows XP will detect the drive, but won’t have a drive letter for it as it has not been formatted yet. If you are using an old drive, make sure you delete the partition using partition magic or something similar so you have an unformatted disk. Start up Acronis True Image 10 and select Recovery to start the wizard.

Click Next.

Locate the Image file and click Next.

Select Restore disk or partitions and click Next.

Select the partition you want to restore first. Restore the P-3000 data Partition first and click Next.

Select the disk you want to restore the image to, if you have a brand new disk, you will see the disk has Unallocated space, select this disk and click Next.

For the data partition, you want this to be a Primary type partition (I haven’t tried the other settings, but this is the way partition magic read the disk, the P-3000 partition as Primary and the EPV_SYSTEM partition as logical) and click Next.

Select FAT32 and click Next.

Resize the P-3000 partition so you have roughly 690mb left for the system partition (the system partition is 650mb, but the extra 40mb of space isn’t going to hurt). Using a 120gb Fujitsu hard drive, I have 111.1gb allocated for the P-3000 data partition. Once resized, click Next.

Assign a drive letter to the P-3000 partition. I did this because the first time I tried restoring, I selected No thank you, I do not want to assign a letter and when I plugged the Epson P-3000 into the computer, I was not able to see the P-3000 partition as a removable storage device (it only showed the two memory card readers), I then tried assigning a drive letter, and it worked perfectly. Ideally you want to assign D: and E: (for the data and system partitions), this is because when you plug in the device, and the drive letter is already taken by another device, it will automatically, assign it to the next available letter, if you assign the drive with a Y: and Z:, it will always be Y: and Z:, because chances are, you won’t have drives on your computer up to Y: and Z:, call me pedantic, but I prefer to have it in sequence. If you already have D: and E: assigned to something else on your computer when trying to restore it wont allow you to use those letters, just change the drive letters of those drives (using disk management, which is in computer management, found in administrative tools in the computer panel) when you restore the Image, and then change it back after you’ve restored the Image. Once assigned, click Next.

Now its time to restore the EPV_SYSTEM partition. Select Yes I want to restore another partition or hard drive and click Next.

Select the EPV_SYSTEM partition and click Next.

Select the disk you want to restore the image to, you will see the disk now has the P-3000 restored and there is 690mb of Unallocated space, select this disk and click Next.

As the EPV_SYSTEM is being restored, select Logical and click Next.

Select FAT32 and click Next.

Resize the EPV_SYSTEM partition so there is no more space on the hard drive. Using a 120gb Fujitsu hard drive, 111.1gb has been allocated for the P-3000 data partition and the EPV_SYTEM parition has been allocated 690.3mb. Once resized, click Next.

Assign the next available drive letter for the EPV_SYSTEM, I have assigned the drive to E: for the reasons outlined previously. Once assigned, click Next.

Select No, I do not and click Next as all partitions have been restored.

Select Use default options and then Next.

A summary of what is being performed. When ready, click Proceed.

Operation in Progress.

Once completed, click OK and you are now ready to re-assemble the P-3000.

Plug the newly restored larger hard drive back into the IDE connector and before re-assembling everything back, put the battery inside the P-3000 and confirm the P-3000 boots up with the new hard drive.

Re-assemble the unit, power on, check the drive capacity, and presto! You now have 111gb on your P-3000.

Here’s the mini review..

Build and Ergonomics

I have never used an Epson multimedia device so this is my first experience with the Epson P series.

The Epson P3000 is solidly built. I previously had a Hyperdrive PD70X and that felt like a toy compared to the Epson. The unit fits on your hands perfectly and the buttons on the right hand side of the unit are easily accessible with your thumb, the unit is perfectly operatable with your right thumb – nice work from Epson.

When SD and CF cards are inserted, the cards are flush, so there’s no chance of accidently bumping the card, this was a pet peeve I had with the PD70X, it would only fit the card half way.

Screen

The 4.0” screen is absolutely amazing. The colour is vibrant and images are sharp. The LCD is quite bright, but user adjustable. It would have been nice if the screen was widescreen so when viewing movies it would be shown properly, but this unit really is designed as a photo storage display and not playing movies. The unit supports both SRGB and Adobe RGB colour space.

Software

As of the current firmware (V01.10.01.00), the Epson supports all Canon DSLR raw files bar the new Canon 1D Mark III, I have emailed Epson to see if they will release a new firmware to support newer camera’s, but I haven’t received a reply just yet.

edit: I still haven’t received an email from Epson, but I’ve managed to get a hold of a Canon 1D Mark III and Canon 40D raw file and I am please to say both those work on the Epson P-3000 with the firmware V01.10.01.00 – September 8 2007.

Apparently previous models weren’t able to zoom on raw images, but you can definitely zoom on raw images on the P3000, you can zoom to 50% and 100% only, but with JPGs, you can zoom at 50%, 100%, 200% and 400%.

The P-3000 is pretty easy to navigate through the menus and everything pretty self explanatory. There are 8 menus:

• My Music – a collection of your music files
• View Rated Files – displays all photo’s that is rated
• My Videos – a collection of your video files
• My Photos – a collection of you photos
• Backup Files – this is the location of where your files go to when you copy your memory card over, each directory is sorted by current date and folder number eg 30072007.001
• Memory Card – allows you to browse through your memory card without having to copy the files into the unit.
• USB Device – allows you to browse/copy another USB device, eg thumb stick or USB hard drive (unfortunately I wasn’t able to browse any of my external hard drives, it seems the Epson P3000 can’t power an external hard drive the doesn’t have its own power source, if I still had my PD70X, I’m sure you would be able to copy straight to it as it has its own power source, or if there’s another Epson P3000, you could copy straight to it, it did see my thumb stick quite easily though and I was able to browse and copy to it).
• Settings – need I say more?

Multimedia

The P3000 accepts the following video files: MOV, AVI, DivX, ASF, MPEG1/2, MPEG 4, unfortunately from my initial tests, the P3000 doesn’t seem to play any divx files that are encoded using AC3 audio.

The P3000 accepts the following audio files: MP3, WMA, WAV and M4A (I’m not even sure what that file is :S)

The one thing that disappointed me about the P3000’s multimedia capabilities is the sound, the maximum volume is a joke both with headphones and through the external speaker, the external speaker is only a mono speaker, it would have been good to have stereo speakers, but as I’ve mentioned, this device really is designed as a PSD, anything else is really a bonus.

Bottom line, it has decent multimedia features, but if I wanted to listen to music, I’ll grab an Ipod and “portable movies” just doesn’t make sense to me on such a little device, maybe music video’s but not really movies. For music video purposes, this unit is quite reasonable.

Battery Life

From the time I’ve had the P3000, I have only tested the battery life in terms of how many GB’s I can copy onto the unit before it dies on me. I managed to get 47gb copied on to the P3000 before I got the message to charge the battery.

I copied 22gb’s before the battery icon showed half, I got to 36gb and the icon showed ¼ left and every time I copied a card from that point onwards, I got a message saying “battery power is low, backup may stop before completion”. I kept copying until I reached 47gb and it just shut down.

47gb is pretty much just copying 2gb cards over and over, so there wasn’t much photo viewing or anything like that, I would imagine, the battery life will be much less if you were viewing and copying photo’s over the course of a week or so.

That being said, 47gb off one charge is bloody good, I managed to get 20gb off one charge from my PD70X, once I get the third party battery that I’ve ordered, I’ll test it out again and see the battery life on that.

Speed

The only cards I have at my disposal right now are my 2gb Ridata PRO 155x and 1gb Sandisk Ultra II cards (I’ve ordered 4gb Extreme III’s but they are still in the mail).

The P3000 is definitely nowhere near as fast as the PD70X where it could almost copy 1gb/min. In my tests, I copied 2gb worth of 20D raws 3 times and they both were around the 5:40 – 5:45 min mark. I tried 2gb worth of 5D raw+jpg and it was the almost the same results as the 20D files (between 5:40 and 5:45). The same card was copied on to my computer and it took 4:21 mins using a normal USB 2.0 card reader.

When copying the 1gb Ultra II’s, it took roughly 2:20 mins to copy the whole card over.
These figures are not scientific, but I copied the 2gb cards about 20 times and the 1gb cards about 4 times and during those times, all the cards copied roughly seconds from each other.

Like I said, I don’t have access to any Extreme III or IV cards so I’m not sure whether or not the speed of the cards will make a difference, but I’ll update once I get my cards.
While the P3000 isn’t super fast, it’s definitely not as slow as the P2000 from the review’s I’ve read online.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m happy with this unit, there is a premium price tag on this device, but like with everything you get what you pay for. The screen is unbelievable, its easy to use, it’s fast enough for my use and the battery life is quite good. Sure it’s no Cowen (for video’s) and its no Ipod (for music), but the multimedia features on the P3000 is what I believe an added bonus considering I purchased this device knowing what I was using it for – photo storage.

What’s a review without pics

I tried, 5:1, but that was a no go my hands aren’t solid enough yet for handholding 5:1, 3:1 maybe, but not 5:1

Still learning about portrait work, here are some of the ones i think Melanie and Apa will be happy with

Only problem is I don’t tend to process as much as I should, oh well…

Finally got to test out the new Canon MPE-65mm with Canon MT-24EX twin lite flash, awesome combo.

Story is, I got home last night from work, opened the door, and the spider was just there underneath the door bell, so I quickly ran and got the camera so I could “test” out the new lens and flash.

After a few shots, I was seriously shivering as these things look massive and scary as hell on the little tiny viewfinder.

After a few attempts, I think a got a few keepers.

Hope you enjoy, if you aren’t scared of spiders, maybe these pics will change your mind