It has been more than two weeks since I last blogged here.

I’m back now and is finalising a rather long user review of the Canon PowerShot SX1 IS.

In the meantime, here are some pictures from my Borneo trip, taken with the SX1 IS, with minor post processing.

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The photo below is emailed to me by a regular reader of this blog. The photo was taken during a heavy rain in Sibu, a town in the Bornean state of Sarawak. He had asked me to share my thoughts about the photo.

First of all, I don’t really know what to say except that point-and-shoot cameras are a particularly bad performer during gloomy weather because you can’t force them to take photos at high shutter speed.

That said, depending on the effect you want to achieve, it is not entirely a bad thing to have a picture blurred out by the rain.

I have not been very successful myself in taking photos of rain. Below is one of the photos I’ve taken during heavy rain — the camera managed to capture the weather nicely but missed the rain completely.

How I wish that tiny drops of rain could be seen in the picture to give the gloomy weather a more dramatic effect.

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Since time immemorial, mankind has been grappling with one of the not-so-great posers of all times, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” They never once paused to ponder the question, “Was it not the duck which crossed the road first?”

Even the great Einstein, smart though he was, when posed with the question about the road-crossing chicken, was rumoured to have answered, “Well, that depends on the observer’s inertial frame of reference.”

Had he paused for a moment and thought carefully about the question, his famous equation of E=mc2 would have ended as E=md2, with the letter “d” for duck and not “c” for chicken.

By the way, I took this picture as I was driving towards Pandasan in Kota Belud from Kota Marudu during one of my trips back to Sabah, my home state on Borneo Island.

I would like to assure you that there were no ducks injured in the writing of this article. The duck in the picture managed to cross the road safely.

Or was it not the road which had safely moved under the feet of the duck?

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Boats and trawlers moor quietly near the Pasir Panjang ferry terminal, south of Singapore. Seen in the distance is an Apache combat helicopter, patrolling over the seas.

The helicopter had just flown pass when I switched on the camera. After the camera’s agonisingly slow start-up, I finally managed to frame this shot but the mean chopper had gotten away, leaving only a tiny spot on the frame, reducing the beast-machine into a mere dragonfly.

Would have been better if I had managed to capture the chopper as it was flying above the boats. It would have been dramatic… it would have been as though the Apache was preparing to rain fire on the boats and trawlers below.

But you can’t have the best of both shots, especially if all you’ve got is a point-and-click camera.

One day, I hope to shoot a picture of a Cougar helicopter — or any other combat-capable helicopter — patrolling over some boats over Malaysian waters…

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