I Lost My Heart...

In San Francisco. Tony Bennett found it, but won't send it back. Bummer, dude...

I also lost my charger, download cable, and flash stand for my Canon 430 EX II, 600 RT. Nikon Sb700, and 910 flashes. That's a lotta losing, but I am careless when I go out to do strobist shooting.

Fortunately Promaster have come to the rescue - they have just sent us a supply of the multi-mount flash stands. These have thee shoe positions with locking holes for the standard flash hot-shoe and a 1/4" threaded hole in the underside for the light stand or tripod. it is a proper brass threaded socket too - good and tough.

Now the loss of the charger is also solvable with a Hahnel universal charger and the cable can be safely dispensed with now that I have a Hoodman RAW STEEL USB 3.0 card reader.

But it still leaves the problem of Tony Bennett...

Curse You Western Australia - Curse You For Your Fine Weather

Did goe to the parke yesterday and was greatley amused.

The Vauxhall Owners Club was having their annual " Show and Shine " display. The venue was a local riverside park and the area was coated with picnickers, little dogs, and aged British tin. It was also coated with the bane of the photographer - bright noontime sunshine.

Perth does not have the advantages that Melbourne has - if you are a photographer there and you find that the light conditions are unfavourable for your subject, you can go have a cheap cappuchino and come back in a half hour and it will have changed. We get neither the cheap coffee nor the convenient scrim of cloud. We have intense bright sun blasting down on us.

Witness the shadows on the Vauxhall cars - I've softened them up a little with photoshop Elements but they are still black as an ironmonger's heart. As the sun was overhead - it WILL do that at noontime, despite repeated requests - it makes for some pretty unflattering lighting. Had I included scantily-clad models with the cars it would have been worse - dark eye sockets and shadows under all the prominent features. Ick.

If I was using the Nikon D300 outfit with the the SB700 flash on-board or at the end of a coiled cord I could have directed light into the undersides of the cars and all would have been well. The Little Fuji X-10 I used has a small fill tube but it would never have done anything outside.  It did improve interior shots for one of the Vauxhall drophead coupés but that is close range stuff.

Answer in the future? And an answer that you might like to pursue for your own field photography...a Hahnel Combi-TF set. The radio signal from the transmitter on the Fuji would go to the receiver with one of the Nikon SB700's. Putting this onto a small Manfrotto studio stand would allow me to step away and have the fill come from wherever I wanted. It is not going to be a TTL connection, but a quick test for the power level should sort that out.

A little more gear to take with me, but a pretty good way to cope with Old Sol.

Wireless, Cordless, Or Radio? Olympus Owners Take Note.

If you are fussy about it you can call it wireless - if you are easier call it radio. The thing will be the same in any case - control of your Olympus camera at a distance, with no cord in between.

If you are using an E-P3 or E-P4 or the OM-D you might need to shoot from a concealed position or away from the camera while it is on a tripod. Both the Hahnel Giga T Pro and the Hahnel Combi T will do this - they quote a range of 100 metres on the packaging. Attach the receiver to the hot shoe, plug the control cable from it to the side of the camera, and press the go button.

Why two different controllers? The blue box contains the one to use if you want the additional facility of firing a flash gun at a distance. You reverse the connection - transmitter on the camera and receiver under the flash and away you go.

The yellow packaging has the clever timer and interval controller in the trigger - but it doesn't do the flash thing. Use this one if you are going to do star trail photos or speeded up pictures of flowers blooming.

If you are going to insist on using the Nikon, Canon, or Pentax systems you can also get these products. But this posting is just for Olympus users and we won't mention that, okay?

Wired or Weird or Wobbly

Now that the new legislation has gone through and photographers in Australia are legally able to take star trail pictures, waterfalls, and other long exposure subjects - with the appropriate license of course - more people will be heading out with their tripods and cameras.

The problem of triggering the thing off without shaking it will still exist, however. The day of the old cable release has largely died - only the Fuji and the Leica enthusiasts will need the old mechanical type - but some form of electrical release is still needed by everyone else.

You can do it with a simple switch - Hahnel make perfectly good wired releases, as do Nikon and Canon. The advantage of these is certainty of action and freedom from battery power. The downside is that some people tug on them or forget where they are in the dark...and pull the whole camera crashing to the ground in a pile of fragments. This is rarely a good thing.

Wireless remotes that run on IR impulses are sweet little things, about the size of cockroaches. You point them at the appropriate spot on an IR-equipped camera and press the button. You can't expect them to work at too great a distance, however, and you need to remember that you will lose them due to their small size. If you can't find it in the camera bag, look down the couch cushions...

Radio remotes are the go - Hahnel and Promaster make quite a range of these. They say they'll work out to 10o metres, but the transmitter is really tiny so maybe a little less range would be safe. In any case, you escape the wire trap, they work around corners and in bright sunlight, and they don't cost the earth. if you want to do timed exposures or interval work, there are even fancier versions with this sort of thing in-built.

Highly recommended for anyone working with long exposures.

Power To The People - A Battery Of Chargers

Here in Australia there are only three common items to be found in every hotel and motel room - a bed, a Gideon's Bible, and the camera or i-phone charger from the last occupant.

We get calls daily from people desperate to replace lost charger. The variety of different batteries and charger blocks produced by the various manufacturers precludes having one of everything available at short notice. Indeed, some cameras have long outlived the production of their chargers.

The answer has been the Inca and the Hahnel universal chargers, They can be configured to stuff electricity into nearly all batteries - with some exceptions in the Sony range and in some of the newer Canon professional batteries. You generally just drop the AA or AAA cells into the tray or manoeuver the Li-on block onto the blades and let it go for an hour or so. We use 'em all the time here in the shop.

If you just need to do AAA's scoop a couple of the INCA chargers out of the $ 1.99 bargain bin near the door. There are 4 batteries in there as well as the charging block, and the charger doubles as an LED torch or power block for USB devices. $ 1.99 - you couldn't get a punch in the eye in a waterside pub for that price.

If you need to power something up out in the bush and you have your motor car nearby, you can put a can inverter into the drinks holder on the center console and plug in the Powertech  can-size inverter. It can put out 150W steady or 450W at a surge. it also has a USB port to power up tablets. Mind you, if you need to take a lot of tablets in the bush, it is time to slow down, watch the flowers, and smell the bees...