Slow progress

Those that have been reading my blog for a while will recognize my need to squeeze every drop of blood from every penny. Thus, progress is painfully slow. No more so than in the acquisition of stuff, particularly when I have a low paying job with hours that precude any other employment. In addition to that, photography is not my first priority. First priority for disposable cash goes to the construction of my motor home. That, I need, in order to better my chances of being able to take a job in an instant.

After ordering my iPad mini 2 and getting my secondhand Olympus E-M1 plus a secondhand lens, I needed other things. In no particular order, a lens cap, camera strap, polarizing filter, lens hood and USB cable. As those had to be ordered from China to save money, there has been a time delay.

The polarizer is an unknown brand "Andoer" but to be honest, I bought some off brand skylight filters when I did high speed photography and they were excellent. It's not a coated filter so I could get reflections. I remember buying a Hoya multi coated filter and getting reflections. It turned out Hoya had three kinds of filters.

Multi coated - these just stop some surface reflections.

Super Multi Coated - these stop all surface reflections.

Digital Multi Coated - these are the same as Super Multi Coated save for the fact they're coated on the back as well as the front.

Needless to say, I did encounter a rare occasion when I did get reflections on the back of the filter. As far as I can recall, it was photographing Christmas lights one year. I believe it was caused by a reflection off the sensor rather than the multicoated front element. I'm really not sure how good this $3 polarizer will be.

The lens cap turned up and is exactly right. The lens hood turned up and is frankly a disappointment. I had expected a bayonet mount to fit the lens. Instead, it's a screw in hood. That was a disappointment though I'm sure I'll be able to use it.

The USB cable needed to update the firmware in my camera and lens has not yet arrived nor has the neck strap. They'll be here some day.

I had desired a camera with Bluetooth or wifi in order to facilitate downloads to my tablet. I have, however, obtained for $10 a USB plugin that acts as a mini wifi server which in turn allows wifi access to any USB device. Of course now I have that, I can't find my memory card reader. Without buying another, I have to wait for the USB cable. It goes without saying that the camera uses a size I don't have!

There is a viewfinder attachment available that looks pretty tempting. That would turn the camera into something like a DSLR. That might be worth getting if the tests come out well.

Forthcoming is a competition at my camera club. The theme is 7 black and white images. I might take the opportunity to shoot a series of images with both my Canon DSLR and my Olympus ILC. If you recall, a few years back I compared images from a cellphone, DSLR and a zoom compact. They were all pretty much the same. I remember being called all kinds of names by the magpies on camera groups for my findings.

Now, if the new camera is as good as or better than my Canons then there's a good case to sell the bulky Canon stuff. I'd want to match the range of lenses. For most of the range that's simple and cheap. The 45 -150 is about $100 secondhand. My current kit gets me to 480mm while the 150 goes as far as 300mm. I'll have to see if 300 is too short - if I buy a longer lenses. I see no need to have two bodies either. I am not a professional photographer and resent anybody trying to push me into being one. I am not, never have been and never will be a snake oil salesman.

So, the futures looking rosier. Work ends tomorrow and stays off until September. That should give ample time to test and compare cameras as well as to completing my bus project. Not to mention actually having time to enter a competition!

iPad on day 2

Looking at the software available for iPad, there's a glaring gap... There just is no suitable app for blogging. Certainly I have tried a blogging app. As can be seen by yesterday's efforts, the big problem is that the app ignored all my nice paragraphing. There was no solution other than to uninstall the app.

How am I blogging now? Simple. I am using the email approach to blogging. Blogger allows me to email updates of up to 10 MB in size. And of course one of the nice things about the iPad is that I can just dictate my blog entries which is a lot faster. Unlike Android it actually makes sense of what I'm saying. Android never could quite understand English as it is spoken.

On the whole I am very impressed by my Apple iPad. In times of mistakes, it doesn't make a lot when I'm dictating. I probably have to correct about one sentence in every three. Android couldn't understand anything half the time. This is not an Android bashing session; this is merely comparison between my experience of the android on the iOS devices.

Yesterday , I ordered a gizmo to read my camera memory using Wi-Fi. That should make a huge difference. Now, one of the questions I had was whether I should continue blogging using Google blogger or whether I should change to Wordpress. For the moment, it makes sense to continue with the Google blog. This of course is a downside to not using my own domain name for the blog. Had I used my own domain name then I would be able to switch blog hosts at the drop of a hat. As my blogs still do not make very much money even though they carry Adsense, there seems little purpose in spending money on a domain name. My typical AdSense income seems to be less than a dollar a month. A domain name, even a cheap one would cost about $10 a year. That is not going to finance itself. As I have said many times before in this blog I am totally done with financing the Internet. I don't pay for web hosting. I don't pay for domain names. I don't pay for anything that does not return more money than I am spending on it. This is particularly so regarding the Internet.

If you haven't considered an iPad, maybe you too need to come out of your shell! The entry price can be as low as $250 for a full sized iPad Air. That's about what you'll blow on cheap Android tablets every year.

The only thing I don't like about email blogging is that I can't add search descriptions and tags. I can include photos however and get them correctly formatted. Even the dictation seems to work.

Sent from my iPad

Ouchie ouchie, wallet hurtie

Ouch! I've gone and done it now! Yes, dissatisfied with the lousy run of tablets, I have bought another but not just any other tablet. This time I bought an iPad. Call me nuts but I believe a product I buy should last long enough to be able to use it. My history of tablets has not been exactly rosy In 2013 I bought a Nook Color tablet cheaply just as it was about to be discontinued. That thing cost me $90 and never performed as desired. In the slightest humidity the screen would go bananas imagining phantom touches. A photo album would mysteriously flip through all the images or the screen would be utterly response less. Inside a place with powerful air conditioning, it would behave. In my car, outside or in my home it would not behave. Worse than that, I was displaying photos at a function and it let me down embarrassingly. By the time I decided to get rid of it, they were selling on eBay for $75. I copied the text of an advert that sold for $75 and added the same generic photo. I should have got more than $26 for it but that's my experience of eBay. Anyway, it was a case of probably being lucky to get $26 so I sold the damned thing. Roll on a year and i bought a $5 Android tablet that cost me $75 in Walmart. It worked but was very slow. It had such limited memory that only one or two apps could be installed. I struggled on with that tablet for about 6 months before upgrading. Eventually, rather than repeat the miserable experience of eBay, I simply gave the thing away. My next tablet was a refurbished Nexus 7. That was pretty good. The screen was pretty good. In fact, I'd say the screen on the old Nook and the Nexus were both pretty good for displaying photos. The Nexus worked pretty well. In fact, very well. As time went on though, it became ever more sluggish. Eventually, after about a year the USB port worked loose and then the tablet began to behave erratically as though something had gone amiss. That situation became so bad that a factory reset was the only solution. Sadly, the factory reset turned the tablet into a non functional device that merely looked like a tablet. I gather Android tablets have a tendency to do this. Hunting around, it transpired that it was possible to reflash the tablet. Nobody was prepared to do this however and despite my having a pretty intensive computer background, the instructions provided online were opaque enough for reflashing to be well nigh impossible. In the end I found people who said they could do it but they were the usual geek type places. You've all probably encountered them - grubby, pimply, not entirely honest and who will claim to be able to do anything but when faced with reality find they can't back up their claims and quietly shuffle away or put up the shutters when they see you returning. Anyway, one was so keen on doing business they never got back to me and never answered their phone. The other wanted $50 to reflash a $100 tablet. There was a 3rd but honestly, by then I had tired of visiting shady Mike Hammer type places that looked fly-by-night. Thus my next purchase was a $50 tablet from Walmart. That actually was pretty good. It even had a clamshell case with a little keyboard. The keyboard-screen angle was a little strange and the low quality LCD screen was viewable only from certain angles. That meant using it was a matter of physical contortions but it worked pretty well. That was an RCA tablet but more capable than the one I gave away. Three months after purchase, the usb socket broke rendering the tablet useless as it could not be charged. I knew the answer before I started... Nobody would want to fix it. Even though it was under warranty RCA wasn't particularly interested. Postage ($10) would have to be paid by myself despite the fact it was their lousy workmanship that failed. That rankled me.  Then there was the thing that they would not replace my nice purple tablet with a nice new purple tablet but rather with a reconditioned black tablet - not even close to a satisfactory resolution! Thus, being in the market for a tablet, I considered my options. I could have bought another cheap tablet and regarded tablets as being a $150-$300 a year habit. Just like a narcotics addict, I'd be hunting for my new tablet fix every few months after the last temporary fix wore out. Equally I could have just kicked my tablet habit. That would require me to resurrect my old MacBook which definitely needs a new battery. While resurrection is a plan for the future, I have my doubts about its value. I could spend $160 on a new battery and I'm sure after 9 years it would be best to replace the hard drive - probably best to do that with a flash hard drive at $300. That then puts me at $460 or $300 shy of a new champagne colored brand new MacBook. Somehow the new MacBook seems better value especially considering I cannot upgrade the operating system on mine past Snow Leopard. The only other option was to leap into iPads.  Years ago, I had a similar situation with phones. I bought cheap phone after cheap phone and never had my money's worth out of them. Then I went for a Blackberry and that was pretty good but died after just a year. Next, I moved to android phones and had a series of underwhelming phones that were ultimately unsatisfactory until I spent way more than I wanted to on my Nexus 4. That was actually a good phone until the USB socket died. Fortunately it had a cordless charging option which I've been using for the last year or so. I almost went for an iPhone at the time. My next phone probably will be an iPhone. So, having decided that after blowing a nett total of $289 on android tablets that ended up in landfill, I'd try an iPad. I'd already paid the equivalent price of an iPad in failed Android devices. Looking around, prices were outrageous but there were cheaper options. The iPad Air was $249 at Walmart. That was a full sized tablet. The iPad mini 2 was $269 again at Walmart. As it makes no sense at all to have a big tablet when I can simply use a laptop, I went for the smaller tablet. It's just the right size to be portable and the right size to use at night. Needless to say, I got it cheaper than Walmart wanted - that's no great challenge! Using the iPad I notice several things. Firstly, the blogger app is not available. Secondly, there are less apps to weed through. Thirdly, the Apple environment is different from Google's. As I'm a blogger user, this is a challenge. In use, the tablet runs very nicely. Battery life is excellent. Thus far I'm on 86% battery having had several breaks from writing and having done other things as well as writing over the past 3 hours. The screen is excellent. There's a security code I have to enter rather too frequently that was missing on android. On the whole though, it's more pluses than minuses. Next, I have to get my iPad to talk to my camera, mass storage, my MacBook and to camera memory cards. That could be challenging but I'm always up for a challenge. I was right in dumping Windows and going Mac. I'm probably right in dumping android and going iOS.