Sanctus Nocte

Ok, I didn't know what "Sanctus Nocte" means nor I could pronounce it properly. All I knew was there will be some music concert from the band "Salvage" which CC (a friend of a friend) will be taking part.

The event was held at "The Warehouse Project" at Maradana on 29th December 2010. The venue was an actual warehouse, but a really cool place. The music was more Christmassy than I thought but it was good :)

Salvage (CC and the crew)

A guitarist

I got to know the meaning of "Sanctus Nocte" only after the event and it turned out to be "Holy Night" *sigh*

Flash Diffuser

When you want to take pictures in a low light environment your camera's built in flash pops up and it provides more than enough light to take the photograph. And when you use the flash sometimes the results go terribly wrong!

Simply the flash brightens things too much and it adds lot of bright white areas in the photos spoiling the natural colors of them. There are other ways of avoiding flash and capturing more light; you can adjust the shutter speed, aperture and ISO sensitivity, etc... but sometimes you can't reduce the shutter speed because you'll simply miss the shot. Since Shutter speed is high you have to put the aperture to the highest (e.g. f2.8) to capture more light as possible. And you won't be able to increase ISO too much because it could add noise to the image. So here is a trick I learnt; it's adding a "Flash Diffuser". You don't have to purchase one; you can just create one for you. Just see below article and see the results for yourself.
http://content.photojojo.com/diy/diy-film-container-flash-diffuser/

My camera has a built in flash and I wanted to try this trick on my camera. What was hard to find was the old white film container. No one uses old school cameras now; everyone is in the digital age. So I went to a studio and got some empty film containers for free. After coming home and checking my camera I realized that I need not to cut the film container but I can use it directly. Here is what I did; Just pop the flash and insert the flexible film container directly covering the flash and its mount. Cheap, very easy and works pretty well.

Jingle with a Bang; rather not!

Well this Christmas eve we decided to head down to Blue Elephant hoping to have some good time. Yes there was a theme party there called "Jingle with a Bang" but it turned out to be pretty boring when we walked in.

Blue Elephant used to be one happening place a couple of years back but it was closed down for most of the time thereafter. I can’t even remember how I got to know about this particular party and to make things even uncomfortable I’ve never heard of the radio station that the party was sponsored of. We were thinking of going to Silk but for some wired reason we didn’t :(

Coco Citrine

Have seen a new restaurant opened up at Battaramulla for about two weeks but never had time to go there, and the rain made everything even worse. "Coco Citrine" looks amazing from the outside and today I went there and the inside is even better. The location is an old house which they have converted to a restaurant and it's stunning.

It's a decent place to hang out and the food is reasonably priced compared to Coffee Bean or Barista. However I didn't see lot of items on the menu, maybe because they started only a couple of weeks back. But you can surely eat something and chill out at "Coco Citrine".

Hot Chocolate and some cookies

Link(s): Coco Citrine

KIK Launch Party

Elephant House, a subsidiary of the John Keells Group has launched a new soft drink called "KIK" as a competitor for Coca Cola. The Official Launch Party was held at John Keells Head Office at 3.00pm on 1st December 2010.

Since I had no other work that day and because I was invited I thought of attending the event. Well I'm not really impressed about the drink but the launch party was good. We got free food, drinks, T-shirts and many more :)

Link(s): Get a KIK