It's Summer/Photography Time: My Starting Team of "Role Players"

I'm actually supposed to be at the Tyler (Texas) Zoo this morning with the kids, cousins, In-Laws, you name it. But the little excursion fell through, so here I am "blogging"..... about photography ..... instead of doing it! 

Some photographers are like me (no, that's not my collection), as much, or more collectors. Although, I must admit that I do have a bit of a wee collection myself. I'm not here to talk about collecting which is actually a bit out of my areas of expertise, but creating a stable of cameras to shoot pictures in different situations by using different cameras that suits the purpose the best. Although it might actually seem like conspicuous consumption, my intent AND application is quite the opposite (as you'll see). 

It all started here some years ago when I went "whole hog" DSLR and sold everything for a Nikon D70 and 18-200mm lens. It could just as well have been the Canon 20D, but that buying decision was completely driven by the lens. This turned out to be the correct one, since I still have it and use it as my primary lens. Some 7+ years down the road (and one VR motor replacement later), it spends most of it's time on my D300 which does our family's photographic heavy lifting.

When I say "heavy lifting"; that's exactly what I mean! Configured like this (or some version there-of ), it's a little bulky and difficult to manage for long periods of time. However, I must say that it does a fantastic job (when I do mine), and has alleviated me from employing a professional for family and children portraits over the years. Although it's no longer "state of the art", it does what I need it to do. But, what about when I don't need to do as much?

As of last year, I have the option to take; not as much camera!  As you might have read in my "Compact Camera/System" series, a progression over several camera models has brought me to this option. AND over that same amount of time, I've also been accumulating lenses of a size/performance appropriate for it as well. Although a lowly 6mp by today's standards of 24 and 36mp, it's does a fine job for snap shots in package size that will fit in a winter coat pocket. It goes to places like amusement parks, and family gatherings where I neither want nor need the bigger/heavier/more capable D300.

And then there's this. Given the size of the D40, does it even have a role? Well yes, it does actually. I probably wouldn't have gone out and bought it on my own, but since it arrived unbidden (along with other stuff) from my brother when he was cleaning out: I took it in like that "stray kitty". Interestingly enough; unlike it's brother Coolpix 8800 with the 35-200mm eq. lens, this 8400 with the 24-85mm eq. lens gives it the ability to do quick indoor pics unlike anything else I have! Plus lacking the pentaprism hump of an SLR and having a completely retractable lens, gives it an advantage over over the D40. Is there more?

Oh, there's LOTS more! But as part of my day to day line-up of "starters"; this is it. The Nikon CoolPix 995 of 2001!!! What on earth do I do with it? First of all, it only tops out at 3.3 megapixels, so it's not too difficult to dial down it's file to sizes to be appropriate for web use without having to fiddle with them in software. You know; pics for ads and such. Plus it's unique split body design allows me to have it twist into contortions for different angles instead of my old aching body! A couple more things. Yes, I have adapter lenses for it as well. Right now, just a wide and a fisheye, but with a 28mm accessory mount size, it's easy to find adapters for any kind of instruments like telescopes and microscopes! Another area that the twisting body design comes into play. Besides, I got mine off of Craigslist locally for about $10, then a second one showed up courtesy of my brother with the fisheye attached!

So, there they are; the "starters" on "my team" (left to right- 995, 8400, D40, D300). In fact, I employed the second 995 to shoot this picture! None were bought new. None were bought anywhere close to their original selling price. Actually, I'm not even certain that every piece of photographic equipment I own put together cost me as much as the $1800 list price of the D300 by itself! Yes: old equipment have their limitations. However, they can all be very useful if used for the right tasks. They can all be easily found out there for a ridiculously small percentage of their original selling price. They're kind of like the San Antonio Spurs of cameras!

If Someone Will Shed A Little Light.....

You guys are probably thinking that all I've been doing lately is work on my shop and it's power tools. Actually, that's not quite the case. As I've previously discussed, my brother somewhat "out of the blue" sent me some cameras, and lens adapters. Then really out of the blue, sent me a couple of Wide-Angle/Fisheye adapters Nikon made for their fixed-lens cameras. One in particular, the FC-E9 which gives the cameras a 35mm equivalent of an 8mm Fisheye lens is really astounding! Here you see it mounted on the rather smallish CoolPix 8400, but it's really big mounted on the CP 8800! Anyway, as much fun as it's been playing with these things.... and let me tell ya, they are a HUGE hit with the 7 and 10 year old crowd, what I'm really doing is trying to get these cameras integrated into my digital photography life. So far, the 8400 with it's somewhat more compact body and 28mm (35 eq) lens is winning this little battle. 

 

As I become more and more reliant on it as my "around-the-house" camera, one thing is very apparent. I really don't like that flash! Not only is it weak, it's also poorly located.

Of course, I could always go with this solution.... maybe not. That's Nikon's SB-600 i-TLL flash mounted on the CP8800 there. Trust me, you really don't want to see the "head-on" view of this. It ain't pretty. And with the hotshoe of the CP8400 in the corner, it would be even more ungainly on that camera. Oh, yeah.... that's the smaller of my two i-TLL flashes. It would be a LOT worse with the significantly bigger SB-800! I could go with the smaller and almost balanced SB-50 on there, but that flash doesn't take advantage of the newer i-TLL flash system that's not only baked into my DSLRs, but the 8800/8400 as well. What to do?

The answer is this little guy. Variously known as the Sunpak RD2000 or Quantaray XLF-50, it's small, light, and it bounces. Why not the little Nikon SB-400? Well, there is that $35-50 difference (although the Nikon is more powerful), but I also have a little secret. As most photographers are aware, Quantaray is a "house brand" of the Ritz chain of camera stores. They sell all manner of stuff using that brand, but the actual product is made by someone else, such as Sigma for many lenses, and in this case Sunpak for this flash. However, that's not the important part. It's been well publicized that Ritz isn't doing very well, and that they've gone through several rounds of store closings. What it mean is that their distribution centers often have to dump stock and these things will appear on the "secondary markets" such as eBay at a steeply discounted price. In this case, the XLF-50 can be pretty regularly bought at $50 or so. That's somewhat less than half the price of a SB-400.

I'm very OK with using a generic at that price-point!

Oh, and did I forget to mention that this flash actually bounces, vs. merely rotating the reflector like the SB-400?

Did I also forget to mention that the hotshoe foot rotates completely inside the flash body to make it that much more compact and easy to carry.... say in a pocket? No, it's not very powerful with a guide number of 20, but that's at ISO 100, which means you can pick up 2 more stops buy simply shooting at 400. On the plus side, it only takes 2 AA batteries and is quite the lightweight at 100g w/o batteries. Come to think of it; this thing is so compact, it might also make an excellent companion no only to my stable of CoolPix cameras, but to the D50 and most intriguingly the Panasonic GF-1 as well!?!

 

Mana From Heaven..... or at Least San Jose

A couple of weeks ago, I came home to find this on my porch. My brother, who's going to be working for an extended period of time in Taiwan for awhile decided he needs to "clean out" before he leaves in October. I suspect, this isn't the first box I'll be getting from him. Now, as far as that weird camera goes.... if you are wondering; it's a Topcon Uni, a leaf-shuttered, interchangeable lens, SLR introduced in 1964. It came in the original leather "ever-ready" case, along with a 100mm/f4 lens as well as the standard, 53mm/f2, and other random stuff like a Topcon, waist level finder (most likely for a SuperD), and a Scheider-Kreuznach, Retina-Curtagon 35mm/f2.8 in one of those cool "bubble" containers that lenses used to be sold in...... whew! And that was just the beginning! Here's a link to a guy's blog that I read regularly, that discusses this model of camera:

http://mailch.blogspot.com/2012/02/users-review-wink-mirror-camera-topcon.html

Also in the box was this Sekonic Type L-VI selenium meter that I really like (even though it doesn't work anymore). I have a bit of an old light meter collection, so this one, which is small, fits in perfectly. You'd think that this would be enough, right?

No, not close...... next out was a Nikon 995 (my second), but this one had a FC-E8 Fisheye converter attached! That'd make the camera's built-in lens have an angle of view ranging from 8mm to 32mm as related to a 35mm camera. That's right; 8mm! I don't know where he got it, but, it's huge.... as you can see. There's a scratch on the front element, but hey, it was free. 

Then out of the bottomless box, came this: a Nikon CoolPix 8800. That's right; the same model of camera I bought when I went digital "whole hog", then subsequently sold to jump into the D70 DSLR. It's an 8 megapixel "Super-zoom", where the lens goes (35mm eq.) of 35mm to 350mm.... hence SUPER ZOOM. It had the battery grip attachment as well, so it was like my original rig just came home! I had forgotten how compact it was, and I think it's really going to be nice to have as an "in addition to", camera. Yes, they are slow compared to a DSLR, and the buffer takes forever to flush when shooting in RAW, but really, when will it ever need to shoot in RAW when it sits on a shelf next to a D300!?! It'll be really great to just hand the kids when they want to go some place and need a camera.

Last, but not least, was this: the Nikon CoolPix 8400, which as the companion model to the 8800. It's 35mm equivalent zoom range was an unusual (at that time) 24mm to 85mm range. Perfect for those inside affairs like birthday parties etc. where the D300 just isn't necessary and really, just too bulky. 

Both the 8800 and 8400 have the fold-out and twist screens which allow you to use it at virtually any angle. Again, perfect for informal affairs where there might be a crowd to shoot over, under, around or through! 

So, what am I saying? Am I going to back-track? I'm sure most of you have figured this out already that I'm just going to add them to my arsenal, and use whatever is the most convenient and sensible at the time. We'll start off with this: as you can see, there's quite a size (and you can imagine the mass) difference between the two. This image is of the CP 8800 compared to a D70, so you can imagine the difference with the D300 which is even bigger and heavier. That part is obvious. What is not obvious is that both of the CoolPix cameras use a compact sensor.... meaning about the same size as the one your wife carries around in her purse, which has many limitations, most of which are exacerbated, not alleviated by a high mega-pixel count. So the CPs are "noisy" cameras if you try to use them at or above 400 ISO, therefore, they aren't for low light use without flash. However, they both have Nikon's advanced iTTL technology so can take advantage of my SB-600 and SB-800 Speedlights. Also, there's the "advanced amateur" bugaboo, that almost all manufacturers are prone to in that there's just not enough memory buffer to allow continuous shooting when dealing with large files (eg. RAW), so they are certainly not for fast action shooting where you might want to blow up or manipulate the image later. JPEG is the order of the day! 

Are there any benefits other than weight and size? You bet! Here you see the aforementioned Speedlight compatibility at work. Yeah, it's a bit ungainly, but it works great. Then, there's the memory card compatibility. Yes Martha; that's a full-sized Compact Card in the CP 8800 there. I only have about a dozen of those things ranging in size from 128Mb to 32Gb. 

Overkill? Probably. But you know; not only would I never wear a shirt like this, but these camera will keep me from carrying around a bunch of camera like this poor guy!
 

"Bread and Butter" and Other Random Thoughts

.....or in this case, toast and butter, but anyway.... in my IT consulting business, there are certain jobs that are just simply that. They aren't glamorous, or really even much fun at all, but they do pay the bills (or in my case, the PayPal balance). 

Probably half to two-thirds of my business involves rebuilds on Windows machines. If you've been on a computer for any amount of time, you know that your machines slow down almost immediately upon arrival at your house. And by the end of the 3 to 5 years (or 2 if you've bought consumer HP or Acer), when you've finally decided that the sluggishness is so bad that something needs to done about it, then I get called. Now if it's gone the actual 3 to 5 years, it'll need to have RAM upgraded since all those updated have succeeded in majorly slowing it down. However if you've actually gone all the way out to 5 years, it probably needs to have the hard drive replaced too (it's mechanical). Anyway, having been in this business 6-7 years now, I've accumulated enough of a clientele that there are usually several of these in the average month. It's as boring as it gets, but like I said before, it pays the bills. By the way; these people come to me because I'm better at it AND charge something like half of what Best Buy/Geek Squad does!

Of course you guy should know that the bulk of my remaining business is flipping computers, since I written about it quite a bit. Specifically, I do "business class" machines that my clients have come to rely on due to their build quality/price-point balance. These machines like the Dell E6400 (my current favorite) can be delivered to them loaded, updated and ready to run for around $250, plus or minus. They are easy since I have the official Dell restore disk for the OS that they are licensed for and can be found in the thousands. On occasion, I'll do a ThinkPad for someone if they are willing to pay a little bit more for the attributes that they are famous for (keyboard, better build quality, etc.), or even Apple products like MacBooks..... crazy huh!?! I've done about 5 Apple products in the last year and a half. I don't mind do them; they're just expensive for what you get. 

Lately, I've gotten into laser printers. I don't mean, I've just recently started setting my clients up on them! No, I've been doing that for 4-5 years since they are so much more inexpensive than inkjets to operate. I've moved 3 of my 4 commercial clients to them. I have actually started repairing them. Recently, I accidentally came across some videos on YouTube showing how to do simple repairs on the mid-sized ones like the Laserjet 5/6p, 2100/2200/2300, plus I stumbled into a little shop in a neighboring town that had a bunch of them. They all seem to have some sort of small issues ranging from worn "pick-up" rollers to bad fuser grease. He doesn't have time to mess with that so he sells me several at a time for a relative "song". So I fix them and send them off to happy clients who probably won't have to change a toner cartridge for 3 or 4 years!

Now, I'm not exactly Super-Green guy running around in my woolen socks and Birkenstocks, but if I can help cut down on techno-waste, I will! 

And now for the "random" part: my brother is moving. .....So he's decided to thin-out his massive collection of stuff. So a couple of weeks ago he asked me if I wanted one of his old 35mm cameras. Obviously since it was an oddity (Topcon Uni), I said shoot yes (or some thing to that effect). Anyway, when the box arrived it contained the Uni, some various other old camera gear, but also a Nikon Coolpix 995, with a "fisheye" attachment (!) and these!!! The Coolpix 8800 and Coolpix 8400 twins as well. They are both 8Mp of the "superzoom" category which originally sold for around $1000.... apiece! I used to own a 8800 so I'm familiar with it, but they're be a post just on these guys when I can get around to it.