Evolution

It is the only explanation I can think of to account for the design change between the Nikon D7000 and the D7100. That or a spirit of spite in the Nikon design bureau.

If you set a Nikon D7100 menu to enable release by the manufacturer's ML-L3 infra-red controller and set the menu item that lets you fire the camera without a card in it. You can demonstrate the operation from an amazing distance - far further than I would have credited it. Full marks to Nikon.

However.

If you set a Nikon 7000 to do the same thing it won't. You must pore over the controls until you discover the firing control ring concentric on the left hand top of the camera - sure enough there is a little pictogram showing an IR remote. Then you rotate the ring to it. And then set the menu item to give instant IR release. Then check you have a card in the camera - IT WON"T FIRE WITHOUT A CARD. As I discovered trying to demonstrate this morning...

I can only hope that they will be this diligent when the next model of this fine camera comes out.

Quiet word to the Nikon designers: Spare a thought for the studio workers who want to fire a flash system but do not need to change their shutter speeds - and certainly never want to climb above the highest synch speed of 1?200 or 1?250 of a second. Do like you used to do on the D3 - give us a positive lock button or setting for the shutter speed so that we can't inadvertently change it with the heel of our hand...Please.

Do Not Touch - With Promaster

It is amazing the number of times the simple cable release is needed in photography - particularly now that most cameras do not take a mechanical cable release.

Apart from my Fuji, and your Leica, and a few others I cannot remember, most other serious cameras need an electric command to fire off. You plug something into a socket on the camera and then press a button on the other end of either a cable or a wireless link.

Promaster have catered for this sort of thing with a rather wide range of remote releases. They make them for a number of cameras; Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Pentax, etc and they can be had with either a solid cable or an IR link.

You can even get sophisticated timers that allow delayed triggering or interval shooting - time lapse photography is very much the in thing right now. Not confined to just scientific images either - the recent video of the Indianapolis 500 snail races was rivetting.

Here is a variety of their releases in their packaging. Note that they are also at a very competitive price. We like having such a large stock for different users.

Studio photographers: note the discrete use of invisible props for presenting the product to the camera. This is the sort of attention to detail that defines professionalism. Amateurs use soup cans...