For sale - Canon flashguns - pristine condition

I have four barely used Canon flashes for sale. They are 420EX, 430EX, 2 x 580EX2. I am inviting sensible offers for them. If you wish to make a bid, please use the comment form below and leave contact information. What you see is what you get and these flashes all work perfectly. Selling to people in the Columbia South Carolina area. Terms of business, personal meeting in a public place and cash. Prices negotiable. Buy 1, buy 2, buy 3 or buy all 4.

Werewolves Beware

There's a full moon up there and I photographed it with a simple Canon XT (8 megapixels) and a 70-300 lens. Getting the exposure right was another thing entirely. That took multiple attempts until I hit on the right exposure as the camera's meter wanted to make the whole scene a mid grey which meant that the moon became a white disk with no details.

Sadly my 300mm lens and 8 megapixel sensor isn't going to produce an image any bigger than this. I do wonder how much better this would be if I used a film camera and one of the 1,000mm mirror lenses that abounded in film days. In our conversion to digital we have lost so much variety in lenses. We have concentrated solely on the shorter lengths with the maximum commonly available being 400mm. That, of course is far too short for a lot of the fun stuff.

We have also lost our handy-dandy exposure tables. Had I been doing this in the days of film I would have had access to an exposure table that would have told me that the lunar surface had an EV of f11 and 1ISO. It would have then told me adjustments that should be made for various phases of the moon. There were whole guidebooks of exposure values for various scenes. They're almost impossible to find now though. Thus, it's back to experimentation.

The lunar image above is 595 x 482 pixels. That, off a sensor of 3456 x 2304 pixels. That's 1/27th of the image area. A longer lens would have increased the moon's size on the image area. Certainly we could use a sensor with more pixels but that's not really the point. The point is that a 300mm lens is too short for good moon photos. 400mm is not really any better.

What we need ideally is a telescope and a T2 adaptor to put our camera onto the telescope. Sadly, few of us have telescopes and fewer the ability to set the telescope to track the moon. The moon really travels quite fast and it gets faster the longer the telescope you use to view it. The lunar motion is very different from stellar motion so most astronomical tracking mounts won't work.

This is a fun project for somebody out in the wilderness with loads of time, some tools and the enthusiasm to put lots of effort into taking really good lunar photos.

Happy Christmas to all my readers.

It's that time of year again. It seems to come every year. We have people buying expensive gifts and spending more money than they normally ever would on things that people don't really need. 

The spirit of the holiday has been all but lost in today's world. Originally, the 21st was the winter solstice - when the day was the shortest. This was celebrated as the turning point of the year from when days would become longer. Later, this was hijacked by the Christians and Christmas Day was celebrated as the birth of Christ, despite the fact it was in February. This was done in order to attract the Pagans from Paganism into Christianity.

I'm not a great celebrator of Christmas. I like a little that reminds me of Christmas but don't like to go overboard. I like a Christmas tree and Christmas cards. Christmas food is good too - at Christmas. This Christmas I didn't feel like putting up my 2 foot tall tree and decorations so I bought a 6 inch high LED tree that runs off a USB power supply. For me, Christmas is about the people I know. It's also about peace and quiet.

The photo above is my little $4 LED Christmas Tree that I have on my desk. It changes color so I put my camera on a tripod and took ten photos of it as it changed color. Focus was set on the first image and locked for all the rest. It reminds me of Christmas and is up from now until 12th night. I celebrate Christmas from December 25th until January 6th. For me, it's more a continuation of family tradition that anything else. I think back to the Christmases I had when I was very small. I remember those happy times. 

I Looked first at miniature trees in November and saw this one (below) but it had gone when I bought mine, which was a shame as I prefer it.

So, to all my readers, a happy Christmas. May you receive everything you wished for others last year. May all my readers have a happy, peaceful Christmas with a safe, profitable and healthy New Year. May everybody survive Christmas and bounce back rejuvenated for the forthcoming year. May those that I don't get along with or haven't got along with whomsoever they may be, go forth in peace and tranquility.

Plummeting prices

Today I looked at the Nikon J1 in Best Buy. The reviews all stated that ISO control was automatic. There are an awful lot of automatic features to the camera but largely the reviews are complete nonsense. I saw that it was possible to get every manual feature on that camera you could possibly desire by rotating the dial from "Automatic" to "Manual". It seems that the reviewers are incapable of identifying this simple step. This is not the first time I have encountered reviews that were horribly wrong. The review of my old Canon S1 IS was pretty heinous. I remember it claimed I could not do things that were quite doable.

I noted that the J1 came out in 2012 at $649 and has slowly dropped. I saw one listed on the B&H website for $220. It's a camera that does interest me and I would like to have one. I'm not so sure I'd pay that much for it though. I certainly would never have paid $649 for it. I've never tried a smaller format camera. I see no reason why a smaller format camera should not work as well as a larger format camera for prints the size most people want.

Going back to the refrain I always seem to hear "but what if I want it bigger", all I can say is "what a crock". Aside from the fact most printers only print to 11x14 maximum, where would anybody hang a print that size? Most people live in small homes with no room to hang anything massive. I won't go into how many megapixels per inch are needed to produce a great photo. That's an argument that leads nowhere.

There seems to be wide variation in the price of the J1 and it also seems to vary according to the color of the camera. Thus far it seems to be the red that is the least desired and thus the cheapest. The crazy thing is that there are to date 7 colors:

• white
• silver
• black
• red
• pink
• khaki
• beige

I just don't know who on earth would want to color match a camera and all its lenses. If I had a red camera and a khaki lebs happened to be cheaper, I would go for the khaki lens. With colors like that, it's going to reduce resale value tremendously. Who's going to buy a red camera if they can't find a red lens?

My biggest concern about the interchangeable lens compacts is whether they're better than my existing compact (an elderly Canon S1 IS) or whether they're a cross between a compact and a digital SLR existing in a no-man's land between the two. They're neither one thing nor the other. My S1 IS still takes a decent photo and although it has had a repair, has no faults. Unlike most cameras, it even runs off AA batteries so I won't have any problem feeding it if I suddenly find myself photographing Lord Lucan.

Genesis 1.3

As it was written, so let it be. In Genesis 1.3 it states "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." In Genesis 1.4, it states "And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness."


This is the construction of an LED light panel that exhibits both Genesis 1.3 and Genesis 1.4 (somewhat bizarrely).

The original plan was to house the LED panel in a project box with a translucent white diffusing screen in front of them (which is why I painted the circuit board white). It transpired that the project took a long time to build during which period, the wiring was largely rectified. Thus the project was never truly brought to completion. My desires changed also. I had wanted to have two light boxes set up so that I could do bauble photos. My original idea had been to have a couple of flashlight bulbs in project boxes with the interiors painted white and diffusing screens in front. As always I fancied a more technological approach because I'd heard such great things about light panels. The result was a project that took so long to complete that really it was abandoned when a pair of project boxes and flashlight bulbs would have been half an afternoon's work. As always the KISS principle applies - keep it simple.

Building the board was pretty simple - I just soldered the LEDs on rows and then interconnected the rows with the cut-off ends from the LED wires. Then I just soldered a pair of C batteries to the board with a switch. It was time consuming and since the LEDs were mail-ordered via e-bay from China, they probably weren't by any means, the best LEDs available. My experience of things from China has been very varied. 

I have probably commented before that I bought an LED light bulb from China when they were brand new on the market and thus horribly expensive. I never really used it and in the end put it in my hallway here as a light. It wasn't all that bright but it worked to illuminate the stairwell, even if it did light everything in a deathly blue light. 6 months after I installed it, some of the LEDs went out. A week or so after that, they all went out. It was a shame but it was from China. A couple of times I've had things from China that weren't up to expectations. 

As you can see from the quick cell-phone photo, half the LEDs in the expensive Chinese LED bulb have gone out. When I had a good look at the thing, it was all glued together and impossible to disassemble to fix without destroying it. I now have a CFL in its place.

I am not the only person to have problems with LED lighting. Generally it seems the LEDs will last a long time, dimming to half their specified brightness over 40,000 hours. The circuitry behind them is what seems to fail first - after possibly 800 hours. There's more of a case for low-powered halogen lighting or even krypton lighting.

Photography jobs

Today my thoughts went to photography jobs. There was no special reason for this other than today I had a job offer (which I accepted) that gives me more hours in a location 2 miles closer to where I'm living (albeit in the other direction). Of course it's a few more hours but more importantly 25% better money. This makes a huge difference to me. Maybe this coming year I might even have to pay tax!

So, thinking about jobs, especially photography jobs, I came across a website advertising photography jobs. I found one on which photography jobs were advertised. Most of the jobs had start dates of 2004 - 2011. The site had not been updated since. This is one of the big problems with online job sites - there's no knowing whether the advertised job is genuine or an attempt to get an email address or to steal an identity. Similarly there's no knowing whether it's an agency playing games. In my 46 years on this planet, I have yet to find an employment agency that was worth bothering with.

If you're thinking of embarking on a photography career, ask yourself a few questions. I suggest starting with:

• Why did Sears portrait studios go out of business?
• Why did Picture Me vanish from the local Walmart?
• Why do you never see people being photographed at Olan Mills?
• Why did The Chicago Sun-Times dispense with all its photographers?
• Why do all the photographers in the studio in your local mall earn minimum wage only?
• What career progression is there in photography?
• What do all the local photographers do for their main income?
• How many people in your area are trying to peddle photography?

I can answer most of those questions - there's no money in photography. There's no career progression in photography. There are hundreds of people flogging photography and failing. There are more people claiming to be professional photographers than have actually earned any money from it and a quick check of the Yellow Pages, Chamber of Commerce and online will tell you roughly how many people are flogging photography. It is not an never can be a main income when everybody with a cellphone has a camera and when really excellent cameras can be bought in Walmart at Walmart prices.

Photography is a confidence trick. It's an avenue down which many are lured to be mugged and robbed blind. It's almost like somebody pointing a gun at you and saying "give me your wallet". In order to participate you have to buy a ton of stuff - cameras, lenses, flashes, camera bags, tripods, studio stuff, advertising, business licenses, insurance and a whole host extra. If you think you're going to get away for less than $10,000, think again. This will likely get you no income at all. You have just been robbed by the camera industry which specializes in giving hope to the poor, the destitute, the low-income people by saying "with just a camera you can make millions". It's as bad as pointing that gun at you and saying "your money or your life".

Image piracy fears

Today I was looking at a spectacular photo of foliage. I would love to have been the person to take the photo but sadly I wasn't the photographer in that particular instance. I'm afraid my photos are far more mundane and ordinary. This is probably one of the color combinations that I'm most pleased with. One day I dream of finding a nice valley with colorful foliage and a water mill at the center. I'm afraid that photo has been done many times over and graces many travel books though.

That leaves little really to better. I don't try. I don't compete - there are so many photographers out there, many of whom are so absolutely obsessed with photography and taking the perfect image that they have no real lives at all.

What I find sad about all the people that take photography too seriously for their own good is that they don't realise the limitations. These are the kind of people that go to every single camera club meeting, yearning to learn more about photography and how to take the best photo without ever realizing that they are just Joe Average. These are the people that become real bores at a party or an event that feel they must photograph everything and everybody; the kind of person that turns up on a 2 week trek through Kenya with 50lbs of camera gear and maybe a change of underwear. They return from their safari and proudly display photographs that the average tour guide could have taken with an all-in-one zoom compact. Of course they're all tweaked for gamma, saturation, contrast, levels etc but they are no different from those taken with a zoom compact and given the same treatment. 

The same kind of people then witter endlessly about image theft, image piracy and bemoan the fact that there's little to be done about people using others images online. This is true. In one of the most shocking bits of image piracy I have ever witnessed, somebody downloaded images of 0.3 megapixels and smaller, printed them to 6x4 and put them on tables as decorations at a function. No attempt was made to contact the photographer to ask permission. No attempt was made to acknowledge the website from which they were taken. As soon as an image is online, it is almost public domain. The law might say something different but honestly, how is Joe Blow the photographer in Boston, Massachussets going to prevent or profit from Solomon Grundy in  Newcastle-under-lyme, Britain downloading and selling prints of photographs for which the copyright belongs to Joe Blow? Is Joe Blow going to hunt every sales catalog and art shop in creation to find his work then spend vast sums of money on prosecuting somebody who probably doesn't even have any money? Seriously, this whole idea of copyright is cockamamie. It's a damn photograph. It's not as though any more effort went into it than a bit of walking and pressing a button. 

Would I be angry if somebody copied my photographs and used them on a website or on a huge billboard? No - I'd regard them as rude and uncouth for not asking permission. I'd get in touch with the webhost if it was a website and claim the copyright. If it was on an advertising hoarding then the manufacturer of the product would be suitably embarrassed by the fact that their agent had done that and would most likely settle quite reasonably. Other than that, every country has a copyright office and copyright is owned by the photographer the moment the photo is taken. As for monetary compensation, I have been paid for photos in the past. I don't regard it as my main aim in life to seek money for photos. In fact, I think photography is a joke profession used as an excuse by layabouts. "Why aren't you out there working?" "I'm a photographer and I'm waiting for clients". There's no such thing as a professional photographer. A professional layabout maybe. A professional workshy layabout more likely. Art does not pay and never has nor will it ever pay. This is why artists have the reputation for being poverty-stricken.

 If anybody wanted to use my images, I would hope they would just hyperlink them and provide a linkback. Actually, a linkback is probably all I'd ask for from non-commercial websites. I somehow doubt that a commercial website or an advertising company would want my photographs as I photograph things solely that interest me. 

I am hugely entertained when I hear about people complaining on "forums" (I already think poorly of forums and their users which is why I am not a member of any) about images being "stolen" and "used without permission". Invariably it's a different image or the image is of such low quality that they'd have to be mad to think it was worth money. People assign ludicrous values to their casual photos. A photograph of a streetlamp is worth exactly nothing. A photograph of a famous person is worth nothing unless they're dead. A photograph of a famous person with somebody they later deny having met does have value. A photograph of The White House is utterly valueless as 10,000,000 tourists will take the same photo every year. It only becomes worth something if the President's wife is in the window during a wardrobe failure.

People really need to wake up and see reality. 99.99999999% of photographs taken are worth nothing. They are of no value to anybody bar the person that took them. Thus, all this baloney about photographs being worth money is just that - baloney.

vampirestat, zombiestat, ADSENSEWATCHDOG, 7SECRETSEARCH, pornhub, Villainstat, Uglystat

So what are vampirestat, zomiestat, ADSENSEWATCHDOG, 7SECRETSEARCH, pornhub, Villainstat and Uglystat? They seem to be spam bots. I have absolutely no idea why I am suddenly getting loads of hits from them as I do not visit them. Sure as Hell though, I'm getting a ton of hits from them.

Yesterday, these are the hits:

250 vampirestat

74   zombiestat

290 ADSENSEWATCHDOG

976 7SECRETSEARCH

45   pornhub

65   Villainstat

679 Uglystat

I suspect I might have clicked on these annoyances at some time even though I have no memory of ever visiting them. Oddly enough they seem to hit this website but not any of my others. Thus it cannot be as one commentator suggested, a virus or malware. Aside from the fact that Macs don't suffer from viruses and malware like PCs do, I don't enter my root password when prompted.

Macs have a wonderful security feature - if software is to be installed I have to enter my root (administrator) password. I do that ONLY when I want to install software. It thus cracks me up when I go to a website and it attempts to download .exe files to my Mac. Macs don't take .exe files. They take .dmg files. Similarly, when a website starts "scanning" my C drive, I start laughing because Macs don't have a C drive. The drive is named after the user. 

So what are these God-awful websites that seem to be following me all the time? Apparently they are just there to generate spam followers. If I enter the website with none of the daft codes, it takes me to a different website other than that listed. My suspicion is that these sites have been set up by the people that peddle website hits. They spam every blog in existence with fake hits in the hope of attracting the blog owner and getting them to investigate what the hits are. Thus they get hits for the people that have paid for hits. Clicking on these sites therefore is aiding and abetting fraud so don't do it!

These websites are awarded the thumbs down!

Starting a photography business!

Whoa there, Nelly. What do you mean you're starting a photography business?

Where are you getting your clients?
No - didn't think you could answer that one! Most people make the mistake of thinking that because somebody tells them they're good at photography or that there's money to be made from photography, they can go out there and be a professional photographer. Even if a close family member is pushing you to get out there and do professional photography and telling you you're going to make a mint, pause and step back. Who the Hell is going to hire Joe Blow to do photography? What do you mean, "do photography" anyway?

Do you mean portraits? When was the last time you had a portrait done? I know my last portrait was taken in a Walgreens by a minimum wage employee with a cheap compact camera for my passport. As far as posed portraits are concerned, most of the portrait studio chains went bust because nobody wanted photos - they are happy doing them themselves with iPhones etc.

Do you mean wedding/engagement photography? Wedding photographers have been the hardest hit by the digital revolution. Time was when people would hire a wedding photographer. Now pretty much everybody has a good digital compact or a digital SLR or perhaps they have a relative who has a digital SLR, wedding photography has become more of a casual affair as indeed it should be. The biggest hurdle to photography before digital was each photograph had a cost and people could only carry so many rolls of film. Normally that was the roll that was in the camera only. Photography was much more selective. Now because the cost per photograph is nil, people can take hundreds of photos and enough should be good enough that a professional is not needed. Even the dwindling number of professionals take hundreds or thousands of photos in the hope of getting a good photo. Sad to say but wedding photography is a dead end. People are getting out of wedding photography because there's no money in it any more.

Do you mean product photography? This is taking photos of small things for websites and catalogs. Isn't this exactly what people do for ebay? Just about everybody takes photos of baubles for ebay then tidies up the image with photoshop or picasa (because it's free). Sad to say but you're barking up the wrong tree there!

Do you mean photos for newspapers as a newspaper photographer? Didn't the Chicago Sun Tribune just sack all its photographers and teach its reporters to use iPhone cameras? Seems to me like a fast road to nowhere.

Do you mean sports photography? That's not exactly thriving either. Who will buy sports photos? Magazines, newspapers perhaps? Well, yes but only if you can get a press pass to the games and have long enough lenses, liability insurance and luck as well as a market. That's not somebody that says "yeah, ok. Show me the pics when you're done" but somebody who has a signed contract to buy at least X of your photos when you're done taking them. If you don't have that, you're just taking snaps for your personal photo album.

How much are you going to spend on equipment? Ah - you have all the equipment you think you'll need? Where did you learn what equipment you would need? Did you find out on some scurvy little forum? What makes you think anything written on some scurvy little forum is worth reading let alone contains any worthwhile information? One of my friends described forums as "maximum noise, minimum factual information while wasting maximum time". He was dead right.

Don't have the equipment? Don't bother buying it. I can personally guarantee that if the professionals are all going out of business that you will follow very shortly after, having wasted maximum money getting minimum clients.

How are you going to reach out to your market? Advertising? Advertising will soak up maximum money and provide no return on investment. That, I can guarantee. Marketing - handing out knick-knacks with your name and logo? That's nothing but a scam. Anybody handing out those has been scammed by the people flogging them. I smile politely and take the freebie then scrape the name and logo off when I get home and use it if it's a useful thing. Otherwise it goes into the garbage.  Somebody gave me a mug with advertising stencilled onto it. A good soak in hot water and a scrub with a brush got that crap off it and now I have a reasonable coffee mug.

How about joining the Chamber of Commerce? Nice idea if you want to sit and listen to the sound of people patting each other on the back. Not terribly effective for selling photography.

How about joining a camera club? Great if you want to brag about your prowess as a photographer then to get your ideas and photos picked to pieces. Not so great for selling photography because they're all trying to do the same thing.

So, start a photography business? If anybody tells you that you need to start a photography business then you have my permission to smack them around the head until they come back to their senses. There may have been business in photography a hundred years ago but there certainly isn't any now. Even videographers are having a hard time now that most cellphones will do very good quality videos.

You don't want to see this sign on your door!

The fleecing of the innocent.

Digital cameras are essentially very simple devices. With Single Lens Reflex cameras, the development and body design has been done and everything has been known for decades. The sole new thing is the digital innards and its controls. Pentaprisms have been around for decades, mirrors have been around for decades.

The basic electronics inside cameras are fairly similar. Marketing gurus make an awful lot of noise about insignificant improvements. Saying "our new whizzo M5 image processing engine" is the same as saying "we upgraded our 286 CPU to a 386". The only things that change on a camera are the whizzo CPU (which is not really that exciting), the digital sensor (again not that exciting) and they rearrange the controls and displays just to make it look as though they have done more than they actually have.

Recently the camera mafia brought out a series of new cameras that do away with the requirement for a mirror and a pentaprism. That eliminates a costly mechanical assembly prone to mechanical issues and the pentaprism - a large chunk of carefully ground and mirrored glass. Both of those are prone to manufacturing defects and flaws as well as assembly damage. By eliminating these and using the "live view" that many digital SLRs now possess as well as the digital compact market, manufacturers can slash costs tremendously.

The same smaller cameras also take smaller lenses that contain less raw materials. Because the image is processed by the camera before the user sees it, the image can have all kinds of lens defects cleaned up using onboard software, unbeknownst to the user. This means that less care need be taken with the lenses as the camera can clean up the mess on its own.

So, we have a camera that costs less to produce and which (as most Interchangeable Lens Compacts do) has a smaller sensor. The lenses cost less to produce because they needn't be made as well as their bigger brothers which in themselves were bad copies of 35mm manual focus lenses. The big gripe about autofocus lenses was the cheap and nasty materials used. These have become the norm now and they are as appalling as they were when they first came out. The lack of a depth of field scale is just one criticism. A worse criticism is that they don't stop at infinity - they focus beyond infinity.

Each successive change and development has brought forth ever worse equipment at ever higher prices. Those that suddenly try a manual focus lens are amazed at the clarity of the image. Modern lenses are little better than coke bottle bottoms. The images produced are usually sharpened to death in camera or in post processing. This latest "development" of mirror-less cameras seems to be in the same vein. Junk at high prices.

As an example, a Canon mirror-less camera is $600 (the EOS M) and a Canon camera (with a pentaprism and a mirror) is $399 (the T3). Both have the same size sensor. My question there is, where is the benefit for the consumer? The standard lens (an 18-55) is $139 for the mirror-less camera and $199 for the mirror camera.

I remain completely unconvinced by the change to mirror-less cameras. There is great debate over the size of sensor used in many mirror-less cameras with both Pentax (yes, unbelievably they haven't yet gone bankrupt) and Nikon producing cameras with quite small sensors. The Pentax sensor is the smallest and is on a par with most cellphone sensors. The Nikon is a bit bigger but is still very small. Even the micro four thirds sensor is bigger than the Nikon sensor. It is noticeable that independent lens manufacturers make lenses for the micro four thirds cameras but not for Nikon or Pentax. Perhaps there's something to read into that.

I just don't see the point in spending as much money or more money on a camera that costs less to produce and which isn't as good as the larger camera it replaces. I suppose enough fools will rush in to buy this mirror-less stuff from whichever manufacturer to make it a success when it truly deserves to fail. The innocent will continue to be fleeced by the camera mafia. Time must surely be running out for the camera mafia.

Camera batteries - the scam continues

What a minefield camera batteries are!

In the good old days, all digital cameras ran off the standard AA battery. You knew where you were with AA batteries and if yours died when you were out you could nip into the nearest shop and pick up a fresh set of batteries. Then camera manufacturers found their cameras consumed so much power that they had to create their own batteries. Of course, these manufacturer special batteries came at a premium price. Instead of $5 for a set of AA alkalines or $10 for a set of AA rechargeables, the new batteries were $40+. A very nice little earner for the camera companies and of course the camera buyer is then locked into buying batteries from that company. 2 is the minimum recommended for a camera and they supply just one.

In the past I have tried knock-off batteries from manufacturers other than the camera manufacturer. To but it bluntly - they don't work. I had a knock-off for my 30D and used it once or twice and then it just died and refused to take a fresh charge. So, I'd paid $30 for a cheap-ass knock-off battery and then had to pay $40 for a genuine battery. Enough said about cheap-ass batteries!

Aside from modern cameras being power hogs due to the constantly on LCD screen, using AA batteries and switching them out ever 200 shots would rapidly become tiresome - especially when they take up more physical space than the newer LiOn batteries.

I am not a great fan of lithium batteries. Each lithium battery is a potential bomb. They are controlled by electronic circuitry to make sure they don't go critical. Every now and then somebody screws up with their design or the circuitry fails (as circuitry is prone to doing) and there are news reports of devices going up in flames or people being injured by overheating devices. Airlines refuse to transport batteries containing over 2g of lithium because the batteries are so dangerous.

Lithium combined with water produces hydrogen so what we have is a battery that once it catches fire, cannot be extinguished with water. Adding water increases the fire and aeroplanes have very limited fire-fighting facilities hence the ban.

I am a fan of AA batteries. I would like to see the new interchangeable lens compacts taking them rather than the lithium things as they give many more options. Nikon once had a bright idea. They produced a range of cameras powered by the EN-EL1 battery which was lithium but which also took a 2CR5 battery. Those were mighty handy as a backup. They were expensive but there was a viable backup to the lithium battery. Not an ideal solution but a possibility.

In favor of AA batteries is universal availability and many options - lithium, alkaline, rechargeable NiMH etc. Against is the power-hog nature of cameras and the bulkiness of AA batteries. My Canon XT needs 6 AA batteries in the battery grip with a special AA holder. The small Canon lithium holds 7.4v 720mah. 6 AA batteries have 7.2v at 2000mah. In terms of bulk, the small Canon lithium is a lot smaller and lighter. Having said that, taking it from AA to AAA, the bulk is not dissimilar and the capacity of mine is 850mah.

Pentax has had several digital SLRs that run exclusively off AA batteries. Fuji had a few digital SLRs that ran exclusively off AA batteries. It is thus not an impossible feat. If a lithium battery pack was disassembled, inside would be a pair of 3.7v cells. I saw online that somebody had disassembled a Canon NB2LH battery (which powers my XT). There's some circuitry inside but the two individual cells of the $40 battery cost $2.86 each. Mass-produced, the cost of circuitry is negligible as is the plastic case. If we give Canon the benefit of the doubt and said that the component cost was $10 (being very generous) then said that they made $15 markup and the retailer made $15 markup, it's still 150% markup per party as opposed to standard markup of 30% - 40%. Even at 40% markup, the $10 battery would only reach $20 by the time it reached the consumer. Batteries are, as I always suspected, somewhat of a racket.

Cell phone makers are notorious for their batteries. They change them regularly so that when the battery goes in their phone, it can't be replaced because the batteries are no longer made and thus people have to buy a new phone. I had one phone that had a battery pack I found easy to disassemble and inside were 3 AAA batteries. That was an easy fix - I just popped 3 new AAA batteries in and it all worked just fine.

My conclusion is that not only are we being scammed by camera manufacturers regarding sensor sizes but we are also being scammed by camera manufacturers with the funky batteries. The public is being scammed and systematically milked by the camera mafia.

Twitter Twubble

Twitter is a disaster area or rather, the Android app that Twitter has, seems to be a disaster area. The following image is a screenshot taken on my phone. I sent a Tweet just after midnight when I had left work for the day. By 7:30AM it still had not posted despite repeated attempts.

This is not the only time this has happened. It seems to happen about 50% of the time when I try to post an image with my tweet. I've had them failing to post for a week and more before I get fed up and delete them. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. 

I am amazed that Twitter floated itself on the stock market. One would have thought that a fully functioning product was essential to stock market floatation when a company only has one product. Apparently not. I'm glad I never invested any money in something that could well be a disaster area.

I can't really see where Twitter is going. It was a service developed to connect to mobile phones with purely text messages. Now it has developed a little further with smart phones but it's still a very rudimentary messaging service that's absolutely plagued by spam and autonomous websites. It's not a serious business tool. It's mostly used by kids that want to post obscene messages. I use it solely as a quick way of posting short updates to my website or interesting curiosity factoids. Frequently it's utterly banal photos of what I had for lunch.

To tell the truth, I'm not really sure what I'm doing with Twitter. I'm trying to promote my website a bit and trying to use it as a contact page. It did work as a contact page recently so that's not too bad. The general purpose of Twitter is a bit lost on me. It seems to be somewhat vague about what it's actually for - what solution it provides to which problem.

The crap-talkers

In life I suppose every hobby or profession has its fair share of people willing to talk anybody's work down. I find a lot of these people in photography. It can be quite disconcerting to hear all their bilious bellowing all the time. Whatever it is that I personally do, I seem to attract such a negative group of people that it almost makes me want to give up and do something else.

As I have said before. I am NOT and never was a professional photographer. I do photography for interest, for fun and for artistic self-expression. I free myself from the boundaries of the world around me. In my home studio, I do not need flashes and studio lamps. The following photo was taken with a single 40W incandescent bulb fitted into an ordinary desk lamp. A piece of black card was in the background and Yorrich (my plastic head) was placed on my swivel chair (which has black fabric). The result is very pleasing though I did take several photos to get just the right exposure.

The end result is exactly what I wanted - a half-lit face with the rest dissolving into darkness. In a way, I suppose this is a depiction of human nature - the good bit shining out from the blackness of the abyss.

I really quite like using my 40W desk lamp as an illumination source. The following two photos were illuminated by the same method:

Scoff as much as you want at my 40W desk lamp. I really couldn't care less. If you want to go out and blow $300 on a professional light bulb and professional light stand then you have my permission to make a fool of yourself. My desklamp cost me $7.95 from Walmart. It's bright pink and is supposed to have a 13W fluorescent bulb but as I'm not a great fan of fluorescent, I use a 40W incandescent bulb and use it for very brief periods so that it does not get too hot and have a meltdown. Expensive lighting sources don't change the photo quality - they just cost more. Use an electronic flash if you want to add complications to the excessive cost factor.

As I have said before, I'm selling my flashes. I find the Canon 580EX2 is just a pain in the butt to use. It has a great many functions - most of which I don't use and have no intention ever of using. I don't need a strobe. I have no idea why anybody would want a flash that pulsed light every few milliseconds or seconds. I don't like the nasty computerised control panel on the back. It's extremely fiddly to use and very infuriating. I have used the flashes in three ways only. One is with through the lens metering. Another is with remote triggering and the last is with the power set on absolute minimum. I don't need any of the other features. I have an old 420EX that Canon decided to improve when they brought out the 430EX. They replaced the battery door - which badly needed fixing. The 420EX battery door feels like it's going to snap off at any minute. Then they added a clunky, cumbersome, time-wasting press a button and squint at a silly menu on an LCD screen (with a flashlight if you're in poor light) monstrosity. The 580EX2 is an equally hideous monstrosity. The 420EX had simple sliders that did everything. The only thing lacking was output control. 

My only use for flash is for high-speed photography. For that I do not need any of the Canon flashes. I can get a cheap secondhand Vivitar 283 which will do everything my Canon flash was used for. For the rest, I can use a simple 40W bulb in a desklamp or very occasionally the built-in flash on my camera. The following is a photo thats supposed to look sleazy (but misses the mark a bit). This was taken with the built-in flash.

This was taken with my standard 40w bulb in my desklamp. I don't get why people want to decry my control of light and subject control. I seem to do pretty well. I guess possibly because they don't like or are uncomfortable with my subject matter. I'm happy doing what pleases me. It hurts me when people make fun of me or my work or criticise unduly. Does it make me want to give up? No - it does not. I love doing the kind of photos that I do. They represent my world and what I see around me. I don't do pretty photos of smiling faces, pretty photos of flowers and pretty photos of pretty scenes. Each and every one of my images has an atmosphere - a feeling. It's not chocolate box art. I hate HDR and all the Photoshop garbage. The only editing I do to my images is control of contrast, exposure, shadows etc - it's all global changes aside occasionally from cloning something out.

 I really don't care what people think or say. These are my photos, my style, my vision, my way. I have far more fun with basic equipment and creativity than I ever could from using the fancy expensive stuff. Heck, look at the flashes. I don't use them so I'm selling them. I don't like the controls on them as they're too fiddly. I certainly don't feel they're worth the money I paid for them. I don't feel I had my money's worth out of them and selling them is the only sensible thing to do as they'll just depreciate further.

I have been using my 40W bulb quite happily for a couple of years. I see no reason to "upgrade". I'm very happy with it. It doesn't even send my electricity bills up. As an example, the following is a simple copy and paste of my last 24 months of electricity bills..

So, the moral of the story - don't listen to the crap-talkers. I'm not aiming this specifically at any one group because I've seen so much of that nonsense going in in real life, online and in clubs. I defy all the crap-talkers of the world!

Camera gear is not an investment

Years ago, I could buy a film camera and assuming I did not kick it around like a football, I could be reasonably certain of getting back pretty much what I paid for it. The same went with lenses too. They were in fact a fairly decent investment option. Cameras and lenses did not change much year on year. The Nikon F3 for example had a production run of around 20 years. Values remained consistent because there was no oversupply in the market.

Compare the situation of those years with the situation of today where a camera has a production run of 12 months, is on sale for 18 months and gradually reduces in price until the newer model comes out. The economics of today underscore the importance of never having very much camera gear. In years gone by, a huge bag of camera gear would be worth a lot of money. These days it's only worth a lot of money when it's new. As an example, I had a photography business. There's nobody out there wanting to buy photography as I rapidly discovered. Urged on to equip for every eventuality I did and blew a ton of money that I'm really not going to get much back on. The moral there has to be don't spend money on camera gear - it doesn't matter if it's lenses or cameras - because the value unlike in years gone by goes only down.

I paid $1100 for a Canon 30D and I see the same camera knocking about secondhand on B&H for around 10% of what I paid. Similarly I paid a ton for lenses and they're all similarly knocking about on sale secondhand for less than 50% of what I paid. In the end I am not trying to get what I paid for the damn stuff but rather the most I can get for it. That's not going to be very much by the look of it.

I allowed myself to be convinced that there was money in photography despite my personal doubts and parental advice. All I really wanted at the beginning was simply a camera and a couple of lenses. I did not want anything more exotic. Now it's time to redress the balance. I'm continuing to sell off all the unwanted junk - for it is just junk - in order to concentrate on the kinds of things I personally want to do. As I always was, I am more interested in landscapes than in photos of people. My ideal photo looks similar to this.

I like to make ruins look interesting. I like my photos to tell a story. I just don't find photographs of people all that interesting. That's not to say I don't take photos of people - I do. I just don't seek people out to photograph them as a normal thing.

My interest is primarily landscapes and ruins. Anything desolate. I think that must come from living on a crowded island like Britain where it's just impossible to get away from people. I remember standing in the very middle of a forest and trying to listen to the sounds of nature but hearing also the sound of traffic on the motorway/interstate quite distinctly. It's so hard to get away from people and so I prefer to concentrate on ruins and paint people out of my landscapes.

My aim at the moment is to cut back on the camera junk that I don't use, don't see any chance of using and have no personal interest in using. The studio stuff I sold quite a while back. I'm selling the flashes now. After that I have to take stock and decide whether to sell everything and go for a different system entirely or whether to keep the now vastly depreciated cameras and sell the lenses to fund lenses more appropriate to what I want to do. I must admit that I am extremely tempted to sell the whole lot and go for a much smaller setup. I'm still very drawn by the Nikon 1 system. Mostly I like the size of the Nikon 1 cameras and lenses. I have doubts about some parts of the system though. I've seen some blue halos around areas of high contrast which leads me to suspect a lens issue such as insufficient depth of field.

I'm not aiming to buy new if I get into a new system or get different lenses. There's just too much to lose. When I was using film, I bought everything secondhand and it worked well. Going digital I got everything new and that was my downfall. I broke the number one rule of never buy anything new if it can possibly be avoided.

The digital camera scam

In this article http://www.canon.com/news/2010/aug24e.html (on Monday December 2nd, 2013), Canon themselves state:

TOKYO, August 24, 2010—Canon Inc. announced today that it has successfully developed an APS-H-size^*1 CMOS image sensor that delivers an image resolution of approximately 120 megapixels (13,280 x 9,184 pixels), the world's highest level^*2 of resolution for its size.

 Canon has been sitting on a 120 megapixel sensor of APS-H size for three years. To give you a flavor of how big APS-H (29.2 x 20.2 mm), you could fit 1.46 APS-H sensors into a 35mm sensor. That means that expanded to a 35mm size, the sensor would be 175.2 megapixels. What is going on? Canon is sitting on gigantic sensors and rolling out minuscule improvements year on year. Nikon is doing exactly the same thing.

Digital sensors on cellphones are up to 41 megapixels now. The Nokia Lumia has a 1/1.2 inch sized sensor with 41 megapixels. That's 8.8mm x 6.6mm. You could fit 14.8 sensors that size into a 35mm frame and have 610 megapixels. Yes, you read that correctly - six hundred and ten megapixels. 610 megapixels printed at the 300 dpi that purists demand would produce a 2:3 ratio image of 30000 x 20000 pixels or 66 inches by 100 inches.

So, it looks as though the technology is definitely there and definitely being held back by manufacturers who will continue to milk the public by producing underpowered garbage, year on year. This sounds like a Yakuza extortion operation to me. If they produce a new camera every year with a few extra pixels dribbled onto it then they can charge $2,000+ for the new camera. If they produced a camera with the full 120 or 600 megapixels they would have to top that the next year and that's hard work. This way they can lie on their laurels and milk the market.

It seems to me high time that governments around the world investigated what appears to be collusion between camera manufacturers to drip-feed small increments in sensor sizes. It is noticeable also that the images produced from the same sensors for different target markets seem to be of very different quality. The low end of the market has pretty rough-looking images while the high end has nice sharp images. I suspect that the images are deliberately not as good as they could be in order to persuade the owner of a low-end camera to trade up to a higher end camera.

I smell something very fishy with the camera companies. They seem to be adding unwanted extra features and selling the heck out of the features instead of producing adequate sensors. We need an investigation into this scam.  The public is being sold lemons and subjected to price gouging.

E-readers are utter garbage

As you may have deduced, I have written a couple of books on high-speed photography. Without delving into depth on sales figures, volumes and distribution etc, I'd like to say that I just looked at my sales figures. Both print versions of the book sell really well. The digital version of the first edition, not so well. In fact, I haven't had a sale of the digital version in literally months. The print versions sell quite regularly and seem to be selling in increasing quantities.

I have two major problems with e-books. The first is the minuscule size allowed by the e-readers. I had to fight to get my first edition into the file space permitted. My second edition at 385 megabytes doesn't stand a snowflake's chance of getting into an e-reader as the average user, even if that file size was permitted, wouldn't want to wait for it to download. On a 3G download that would take at 600kbps (most 3G works at this speed) 5,256 seconds or about 87 minutes. That's not feasible. Similarly on a shared wifi network where the user is likely to be getting just 1.4mbps, it would still take 34 minutes. The second is the fact that e-readers are not widespread enough to be worthwhile.

What do most people use their tablet computers for? They use them for casual web browsing, playing with Facebook and other online games. There is no reading done not any serious work. Lacking a keyboard, nobody wants to use a tablet computer seriously. Speaking from personal experience, I had a color tablet. It was OK until I breathed on it and then the screen went bananas. That was a total waste of time. I never read a single book on it - not because I didn't have a book but because I didn't like reading off a glowing screen. It was not relaxing. I spent 90% of my time messing about with websites etc - most of which wouldn't work well without a desktop anyway. So, I sold the blasted thing. Tablets are not serious devices, they're for people with money to throw around to play with. They're adult toys though most adults would not have the guts to admit that. It's a bit like smartphones. They're just toys too. I have one and I admit I spend most of my time playing with it when I'm not working.

What about black & white e readers? They're much easier to read though the text is far from black and the background is far from white or even page color. It's like reading darker grey on lighter grey. Then there's that horrible and distracting flicker every time the page has to turn. It's all very unsatisfactory and very unnatural. 

I see the array of ebooks online and ereaders just seem to have allowed people to churn out ebooks of minuscule lengths and minimal quality for maximum prices. I have had the opportunity through work to see some of them and have not been favorably impressed. It is unsurprising that amidst this sea of trash that my ebook can't even be found. At least with Amazon, the print editions can be found and purchased. I do not see the situation as improving. There is zero editorial control of ebooks for quality, content or length.