Two differing jobs in the diary this weekend, Cricket in the sunshine, followed by sitting next to a pond whilst photographing the Elstead Paper Boat Race.
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A Little Protection Required
Having managed to crack the screen of my iPad and the repair cost is something of the order of £300, I decided that prevention is better than cure and invested in an OtterBox Defender.
I am quite impressed at the construction, however it does increase the size & weight of the iPad substantially. However it is still lighter & more convenient than a laptop with a better battery life, so it is a compromise that I am happy to accept.
No Football for me
No football for me today as the Fulham v Aston Villa will be more than adequately covered by the Agencies, so a trip out to the Cricket.
Maybe, just maybe
I think that I may have found my ideal “day” bag, For days when a sack load of kit isn’t required. A think Tank Photo Retrospective 40 in black. It is currently loaded with One DSLR, a 14mm F2.8, 24mm F1.4, 50mm F1.2 & a 70-200 F2.8, along with an iPad.
Still plenty of room left for flashguns and assorted other crap bits.
Whoops
I have always wanted another 85mm F1.2L, I had a FD 85mm F1.2L back in the old days when I was shooting with Canon F1n bodies. Had to buy it, it was too good a deal not to. Will get around to calibrating it, and getting used to it. It is a huge block of glass, AF seems pretty reasonable if not particularly fast. Looking forward to having a play with it.
One of the things that is really impressive is the size of the rear element, there is no wiggle room at the lens mount, in fact the electronic contacts are actually hanging out over the glass.
Learning Curve!!
Purchased a piece of software recently that was used by the chap that calibrated my cameras & lenses, FoCal, I am not going to pretend that I understood half of what the graphs & charts mean, but the important thing is that in the end it gives you a value for the AutoFocus calibration, which means that what ever you point your camera at, should be in focus.
Essentially you set a target, set your camera on a tripod pointing at the target from a specified distance (depending upon focal length) plug in the computer to the USB port on the camera & the software does most of the rest. Some cameras have more automation than others, with Canons the software will tell you to enter various adjustments usually starting with -20 then -10 etc up to +20 it then calculates the value required & homes in on it.
For prime lenses it takes about 10 minutes per lens, with zooms a little longer (on Canons) as you have adjustments at the Wide end & the Tele End of the zoom.
So I have calibrated three lenses on three bodies, just a few more to do. Mind I think I may have to retire to the garden to do the 400mm.
First Weekend
First weekend off in quite a while, happily it co-incided with a Bank Holiday & the warmest one at that for a number of years. So a couple of days at the coast were in order. I wasn’t planning on taking any kit with me, but in the end I chucked a body & 24-70mm in the car. I had recently purchased a 3rd body for use behind the goals at football, so it seemed prudent to take it & give it a work out. In hindsight I should probably have given the sensor a clean first.
The camera was a used EOS1 Dx with about half a million frames on it, it doesn’t look like it has been heavily used, but it has. I have seen colleagues with kit in far worse nick. If at the end of the day the shutter fails, it’s a cheap enough job to replace it & the mirror box.
So a trip to see the Poppies:Wave at the Royal Armouries, Fort Nelson in Portsmouth was planned with a couple of friends, it is very impressive, I just wish that it hadn’t been quite so busy as I would have liked to shoot it from a few different angles.
