Hello everyone. i haven’t been blogging lately because there isn’t much to talk about. things have been pretty quiet, albeit hot, over in my neck of the woods. Um…recently i dropped off my camera at the Canon Service Center in Irvine after delaying a bit due to a slight sticker shock at the expected repair bill. I eventually sucked it up and went to drop it off, pleasantly finding out that the cost of repair was $70 less than what I was expecting.

I picked up the camera today, and it’s basically a brand new machine. The shutter mechanism was replaced along with a few other items that had been worn out. Apparently, I’ve been putting the camera to some serious use and all the wear and tear finally caught up with it. The Canon 30D’s shutter is rated at 100k images before things start going wrong. I don’t know how many images I took with the old shutter, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I was close to that ballpark. Either way, all is well now that I have it back in my hands. A bonus was that they cleaned the whole thing, inside out…so now I have a crystal clear sensor as well as a spot-free viewfinder. (yay!)

The whole experience has gotten me to think seriously about investing in another body. If something were to break down again while I was on assignment, it would be completely unacceptable to not have a back-up plan. For the time being, I will look into renting (or borrowing) a camera for various assignments until I’m able to get another.

In other news, I bought a Shootsac. There was a $30 off coupon through Twitter the other day and I couldn’t pass the opportunity up. To be honest, it feels a little bit like a man-purse. It’s definitely fashionable, and I’ve yet to take it out to see how it performs, but I’m sure anything is better than my stone-age system of running back and forth to my camera bag to switch lenses. More on this as I break it in.

A few weeks ago, Sandy and I met up with Brian (www.briankhang.com) & Helen and had dinner in Little Tokyo. Sandy & I took B&H over to our favorite shabu restaurant, aptly named Little Tokyo Shabu Shabu House. The wait is always at least half an hour or more, but this particular weekend was really bad…1.5 hours! There was a cultural event going on right around the streets of Little Tokyo (Nissei Week, i think it’s called) so there were alot more people there than usual.

We had plenty of time to kill, so we all went walking around. Brian had brought his camera and pretty soon it became an impromptu photoshoot with Brian taking advantage of the blocked-off streets (for the parade) for some casual portrait shots. It was fun and Sandy was definitely happy since she says that we never have any photos of ourselves (most of our pics are of her, since I’m usually behind the camera.)

Here are some of our favorite shots that Brian took. Thanks again Brian, now we have something we can hang on our walls!