Dollar store fun

I love green crystal, green glass, green gems and jade. It's inescapable - I love the stuff. I don't want to fill my tumbledown hovel with it though. For one, I'd have to clean it and for another, it'd be another thing that the black widows, cockroaches and brown recluses could hide in and behind - I have enough of an issue dealing with the influx now.

A few days ago, I broke down and bought a rather nice-looking solar bottle from Dollar General. It was my little $4 luxury since I so rarely buy anything fun for myself. Look at the picture below. Isn't it cute? I was so excited to get it home. I had visions of being able to take photos of it and with it in the picture.

By now, you've probably realized that it was ultimately a crushing disappointment. It didnt work. Well, it did - kinda. I sat it under a lamp at m'lady's house and then after a couple of hours, turned the light out. A light came on in the base of the unit, shining a cold greenish-blue light upwards into the neck of the bottle. It stayed lit for a few seconds then faded to nothing.

Undeterred, I took the bottle to my home and left it in full sun all day. In the evening, I tried it and it did exactly the same thing. Puzzled, I upturned it and looked underneath. There were 4 screws and an apparent battery door. Now it's not unusual for these solar things from China to come with bad batteries. Indeed I'd say it's pretty well standard for them to have non-functioning NiCad batteries that have to be thrown away.

Inside was a tiny battery. Reading that it said 2/3AA, I hunted online. The AA Duracell is shown for comparison. It seems some lunatics have developed not only a half AA sized battery but also a two-thirds AA sized battery. Incredible! Why anybody would want to reinvent the wheel is beyond me. Needless to say, the 2/3AA cell holds just 150mAh. A standard red LED will draw 20mA. A white LED being less efficient will draw 25mA. This means that in theoretical Heaven, the longest the LED would remain alight would be 6 hours. In the real world it should be 3 hours or slightly less. Thank Heavens it's just a fun curio rather than serious illumination!

Weighing the battery in my hand proved it was way too light to be well made. It was a cheap battery with a plastic shell - the kind of battery that has to be removed every night and placed in a glass tray in case of leaks. Clearly the battery wasn't up to much. Looking online, replacements are available but only in NiCad and for an exorbitant $10 for 4. Given the lamp needs only 1 and only cost $4, that's a bit rich!

Though I really like my bottle lamp and would love to have taken photos of and with it, it is destined to go back to Dollar General. I'll re-invest my $4 in something more practical. Shame on me for buying something fun!

The Straight Fail

Feel free to quote me on this: Prices that can't be bettered usually means service that can't be obtained. I keep running into this problem in America. This is particularly pertinent to the photography blog because one of the services that has just failed on me is the Straight Talk MiFi service.

Invariably it seems necessary to get on the phone to the helpline in order to get the service for which I have paid reinstated. This seems to happen every couple of weeks. It is therefore no surprise that a $40 data card which has 4GB of data lasts me 2 months and often expires before I get to use all the data. I won't go on about the barely passable sub-human that can barely grunt in English on the helpline - they use the cheap-ass offshore call centers like so many companies in the US do. It's not the fault of the workers - they leap at any chance they can to get out of a mud hut and into earning enough to have at least one meal a day that doesn't come from a dumpster in their own country.

There seems a definite connection between not using the hotspot and hotspot failure. Every weekend I visit my lady who has internet via Hughesnet. For 3 weekends a month I can use her data. The 3rd weekend, no matter which data package she has, the data mysteriously gets "used". It doesn't matter if anybody is using the internet or not - the data just goes from 30% used to 100% used. Suspicious of Hughesnet fraud have surfaced, given that nobody is online when large chunks of data are recorded as having been used.

Needless to say, when I return from my lady's home, I cannot use my hotspot and have to contact the helpline. This weekend, the hotspot failed again. I emailed the Straight Talk customer service people and without telling me what they did, they did something. When I started my MiFi pad today, I couldn't log in. No explanation as to what they had done. Fortunately my smartphone came up trumps. They had reset everything so the session ID had changed from what I'd set as had the password. Searching online, the password had changed to 12$817. Typing that in allowed me to reset the session ID and password to my original settings that all my equipment will recognize.

Yup - you've guessed it. Still no actual data connection. Now, I know I'm not out of data as I checked last night using my smartphone and still have 2.8GB and less than 30 days to use it. See what I mean about the service being so fragmentary that I physically cannot use all my data?

Straight Talk isn't the cheapest for mobile telephones. That prize goes to Assurance Wireless for their free Obamaphone. The cheapest I have used is the $20 every 3 months Virgin prepaid service. So far, through bitter experience I have found:
1. Virgin mobile running on Sprint really sucks. There's hardly any reception in many areas and from November to January there's negligible reception right beside their radio masts. Christmas one might just as well put the phone in a drawer - service isn't happening. I dumped Virgin after 8 miserable years.
2. Family Mobile (running on T-Mobile). Not too bad. Plenty data, the service was good. Just no service at all near my lady's home. I dumped Family Mobile because of that.
3. Straight Talk (mine runs on AT&T) - this actually seems to work despite the billing being somewhat odd. It seems that if I buy my airtime online, I get charged tax according to the phone area code. If I buy my airtime in store, I get charged local tax. That's just plain bananas and a very good reason to register a Virginia area code! As far as voicemail and connection to Google Voice, it was such a pain that anybody that rings me now gets to speak to Google voicemail and I'll just call them back.

Effectively I am paying $47 a month for my phone and getting the Hell bugged out of me by Straight Talk and paying $20 a month and getting spotty service from Straight Talk MiFi data. Clearly this situation cannot continue. I'm probably going to be hunting for a brand new pre-pay service. Because my Nexus 4 works well and I love using it (and it's barely 2 years old), I'm stuck to 3G and that means AT&T or T-Mobile. Verizon and Sprint being CDMA services, they're unusable.

The lack of data is a massive annoyance. I really cannot use a cable data service such as Time Warner or Windstream because of my forthcoming move into my motorhome. I'm thus on a hunt for a better service. I seem to use 3GB of data on my phone plus 2GB of MiFi data every month when things are going well. If I can find a service that gives me 5GB on my phone and uses AT&T that also costs $67 or less a month then I'm there.

So, blog updates are becoming more sporadic due to Straight Talk being such a pain in the butt to use. A solution is being sought though.

The transvestite photographer

It is a little known fact that 10% of men are homosexuals and about 6% of women are lesbians. This was revealed many years ago by a survey into sex in Britain. What was not revealed at the time was a breakdown of sexual variance by profession.

When I speak of the transvestite photographer, it is important to recognise that "transvestite" is a serious misnomer that covers a wide variety of things. It can mean:-

• A man that wears women's clothes because he finds it relaxing to role-play.
• A man that wears women's clothes because he finds it erotic.
• A man that wears women's clothes because he wishes he'd been a woman.
• A man that wears women's clothes because he wants to have sex with men.
• A man that wears women's clothes because he believes he should have been a woman.
• A man that wears women's clothes because he believes he is a woman.
• A man that wears women's clothes as a trademark.
• A man that wears women's clothes for shock and attention value.
• A man that wears women's clothes with the intention of getting a sex change operation.
• A man that wears women's clothes to be hip and in with the crowd.

I've doubtless missed a few variants because as my father always says: "Human sexuality isn't black and white - it's an infinite series of shades of grey". Male and female does not stop at chromozones. How else would you explain hermaphrodites who have the genitalia of both male and female?

Many forms of transvestite are drawn toward photography - partly because it's easy but mostly because it's artistic. Many studies have shown the female brain is more artistic than the male. So, have you asked whether your photographer is a transvestite? 

Have tablets killed photography?

They're everywhere - lurking where they're least expected. Only the other day on a trip to a wholesaler to buy a shower base, there it was - a 7 inch tablet - lurking at the checkout. The checkout process was completed on a tablet that had a card swiper. They have literally taken over the world.

Just five years ago, before the late Steve Jobs announced the first iPad, magazines sold well, computers sold well, laptops sold well. God was in his Heaven and all was right with the world - albeit a clunkier world. People transferred images in two ways - they either connected their camera to their computer or transferred a memory card from their camera to a reader attached to their computer. Of course simultaneously developing alongside the tablet was the smartphone which has such good photo quality now that most people that would have had a compact camera now just use their smartphones with their instantly uploaded images.

Tablets seem to have replaced books and magazines as physical book and magazine consumption units. Indeed, they have replaced computers for the vast majority of people. They're more compact, capable of many of the same tasks and they're so much cheaper that laptops have plummeted in price to try to compete. For the past 6 months or so, this blog has been updated solely from a tablet with an external keyboard as an example.

The major downside to tablets is the total lack of local storage (hard drive, blu ray, dvd etc), the total lack of connectivity to scanners and printers and the total lack of connectivity to cameras. If I want to process photos or upload photos, I have to get my laptop (and pray that it feels like working - I still need to head to the Mac guru in Charlotte to resolve the issue of the screen switching off at inappropriate times) then connect my card reader, transfer images via the card to the computer and process them then connect my computer to my tablet to transfer images. Certainly I could use bluetooth transfer but its so much slower than a cable.

Some, more modern cameras come with bluetooth, wifi and NFC but there's a vast pool of people out there such as myself that have older cameras -mine date from 2005- that don't have the money nor time to waste on obtaining a more modern camera. We've all been left in the cold by a total lack of backward connectivity. It very much has echoes of when Microsoft went from 16 bit to 32 bit machines where you had to kiss your 16 bit data goodbye as it was unreadable by the 32 bit machines.

For myself, I do 99.9% of things on my tablet. If a website won't work on my tablet then I don't care what the website does or would do for me. I just don't use it. It's not worth the effort of bending down to plug my laptop into the power supply. These days, things are all about ease of use. The old clunky ways won't do any more. Asking somebody to plug a camera into a laptop to transfer images to the laptop to edit them before transferring them to a tablet is like asking somebody to saddle up a horse in order to ride to the nearest town for a newspaper. Most people will just say "F**k that". Hence, of course, most of my photographs these days are taken on my smartphone.

If some enterprising fellow were to come out with a way of reading camera images via a cable attached between my card reader or my camera and my tablet then I'd be exceedingly interested. Bonus points if there was software on tablets that would read CR2 files.

In the past I have tried Eye-Fi cards but found them so horrid and so limited in use that I sold mine. Nice concept but horrible execution. Having to put an adaptor to convert from SD to CF didn't earn any brownie points either.

So, have tablets killed photography? Pretty much for most things, they have because everything is such a kludge to get images from cameras onto tablets that many people just gave up and went for a smartphone instead.

Interesting developments

A couple of days ago, a fellow I know vaguely who just about gets by as a professional photographer sold all of his extensive Canon collection and bought an Olympus micro four thirds camera system. When asked about his experience, he was very forthcoming and his real world experience was completely contrary to the widely disseminated wisdom that comes from photo forums.

If one were fool enough to believe everything one reads on a photo forum then one would have to be a super being in order to carry the colossal amount of heavy gear they advocate. A simple 16 megapixel sensor would not be enough either. It would have to be the latest, greatest sensor for what photo forums are all about is the worship of camera gear - not the worship of photographic talent nor skill. Indeed, check any photo forum and the number of posters posting actual photographs is minimal. Those that are verifiably posting their own images are very rare indeed.

It was thus a breath of fresh air to hear a real world experience. In a nutshell, his experience was pretty much what I had thought it would have been albeit with some surprises:
1. The smaller sensor produced images not quite as stunning as those from a larger sensor but pretty darned close. No surprise there.
2. The smaller sensor had much cleaner high ISOs. That was a surprise and a very welcome surprise.
3. The smaller, lighter equipment were a wonderful asset. No surprise there.
4. The menus on the camera were horrendous to use. No surprise there.

So, basically the micro four thirds is close enough in image quality to standard sensors to be well worth considering. One of the camera retailers didn't think much of micro four thirds as sensor resolution seemed to top out at 16 megapixels but that seemed a blinkered approach to me. If Nokia can get huge numbers of pixels from a tiny sensor then four-thirds topping out at 16 megapixels is hogwash. In any case, 16 megapixels would be enough for a photo 4608x3456 pixels or at 300dpi, 15x11 inches. My preferred measure is 150dpi which would render to 30x22 inches. Even at 300dpi, image resolution is sufficient for just about everybody.

It is pleasing to see people doing what I have been thinking of doing. Those with long memories will recall that I sold 90% of my camera gear a few weeks ago. I retained two bodies and two lenses because I felt I had not used them to their ultimate. Seeing this fellow's experiences makes me seriously consider selling the remains of my Canon kit and following the micro four thirds route. The only thing I'm not keen on is the obtuse sounding menu system.

Stupid High ISOs

The new cameras are coming out with ever more stupid ISO figures. 1600 became not good enough then 3200 became not good enough then 6400. The latest seen today is 256000 ISO. This is getting so retarded that its not even funny.

In favor of the high ISOs is increasing light sensitivity. This means photographs can now be taken without flash that would before have needed a tremendously powerful flash. As an example, if I shot candle flame and it needed 1/30th exposure under 100ISO then under 256000ISO the exposure would be 1/8000th of a second. Consequently for a candle flame there is no advantage other than the entire room could be photographed by the light of a single candle and a handheld camera - no tripod needed.

Doing away with tripods is a very good idea. They're bulky, heavy and cumbersome. Only the right royal pain in the ass type of photographer will carry a tripod on holiday. I have a tripod. I use it solely for high-speed photography though it was intended also for landscape photography. I honestly never use it and did consider selling it when I sold all my redundant camera gear to a dealer. The fact I would have barely got $20 for it made me stop and wonder if it was worth even taking to the dealer. There is an off chance that I might do more high-speed photography - even though I sold all my flashes. There's even a chance I might do some Schlieren photography too. There were enough chances equally countered by alternatives to give me cause to stop and think. As can be seen though, my use of a tripod is extremely specialized and way beyond what most amateurs (and professionals) would consider doing. For them, high ISO does everything.

The problem with high ISO is not that they make flashes and tripods utterly redundant for most purposes. The problem comes when trying to read a camera display. Does it say 256000, 64000, 12800 or 512000? Its like looking at a list of telephone numbers! The German system of DIN numbers would seem far superior in this respect. 100ISO is 21DIN but 256000IS is 45DIN. How much easier is it to read 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 than 100, 125, 160, 200, 250, 320, 400, 500, 640, 800, 1000, 1250, 1600, 2000, 3200, 4000, 5000, 6400, 8000, 10000, 12500, 16000, 20000, 32000, 40000, 50000, 64000, 80000 etc? My vision is not perfect but even with glasses, that just looks like a sea of zeroes. How many zeroes - whoops let me count. That's not an option in my opinion.

It is high time camera manufacturers offered the option of using DIN as opposed to ISO in order that we can see film speeds more easily. Is it 21DIN or 45DIN? It is also my opinion that photographers and the camera industry in general needs to pull their socks up over this issue. These retarded sets of zeroes need to be replaced pronto. In fact, it's reminiscent of the hyperspeed scale in the movie, Spaceballs where the speed indicator reads "ludicrous speed". Continuing to use ISO in preference to DIN is in my opinion ludicrous and people that prefer to see their cameras cluttered with references to 51200ISO as opposed to 48DIN need to be gently wrapped into a straightjacket and put into a padded cell for their own safety as they're clearly crazy.

More of very little

There really hasn't been much happening photographically in my tiny corner of the world. The best that can be said is that I've been working on other projects such as the bus project. The bus project takes up pretty much every non working minute of my life at the moment.

Otherwise, the news from the camera press is nothing if not entertaining. The big camera companies are now releasing digital SLR cameras with ludicrous amounts of megapixels at ever more ludicrous prices. Not only that but they're also releasing them with NFC (Near Field Communication), buetooth and wifi. All very interesting but it doesn't really address the major stumbling block of cameras. They're just too fiddly for a lot of people to use.

I love photography. I have a DSLR. It's about ten years old and 8 megapixels. I'm not likely to upgrade anytime soon. More megapixels don't excite me. Added video doesn't excite me either. Higher ISOs don't excite me as I mostly shoot at 100ISO. I'm happy transferring images from my memory card with a card reader too. WiFi is interesting but not exciting and only interesting if it can upload straight to my personal online cloud.

The problem is that the cameras are way in excess of their value in terms of cost. NFC is another stumbling block - NFC doesn't work reliably. As an example, I can put my Nexus 4 phone on my Nexus 7 tablet and try to NFC a file from one to the other. Occasionally, it works. Most of the time, it doesn't. It's a bit like stock market predictions - occasionally one is right which the advocates seize on as being the way to do things without caring about the times it doesn't work. For me, NFC is so utterly unreliable, I reckon I'd stand a better chance of knitting a jersey out of a rice pudding than of reliably using NFC. In fact, NFC is something I jus ignore, preferring to go the long way around of using bluetooth for file transfer.

So, what have the companies done to make cameras more user centric? Umm.... I'm still scratching my head on that one myself. Since they went digital, carrying the manual has become obligatory such has been the increase in complexity.