A little while ago Pocket Wizard announced the new v7.5 firmware for their new Multimax units that have the USB port for firmware updates. Included with the new firmware are a few useful features:
Long and short range mode
Noise sniffer
Signal strength meter
Radio relay (Repeater mode)
Since I just got the new Multimax’s at the tail end of my spring terrain park shoot season I was only able to test out a few of the new features. The signal strength meter is a really good tool for sure to have going, especially in a long range situation which is usually the situations that I’m shooting on the mountain. A lot of time’s I’m shooting with my 70-200mm lens and am pretty far away from my strobes so being able to see what the signal strength is from my Multimax is a good tool to try and pre-determine if I’m wandering out of the radio signal’s range.
The other upgrade I was able to test out was the long range mode. I was shooting photos of freeskiers Simon Dumont, Matt Walker and LJ Strenio sliding an urban rail with Poor Boyz Productions a few weeks ago and started wandering out a bit further from the scene and my lights . As I found my shot I realized I could have a few problems with radio interference with the shot I had setup. My first problem was being surrounded by some steel chainlink fence, my second was not having line of sight to my strobes, the third was laying up against the steel chainlink fence. Too add to this I was laying on the ground so I could get the grass in the foreground and to finish things off I was in an urban environment with power lines directly above me.
I was about 300 feet away, a bit on the middle end of the range of the Multimax’s but with all these factors and radio interference I couldn’t get consistent signal and my strobes were firing a little erratically. Since this was a perfect time to try out the new long distance mode I began sprinting back and fourth between my shooting location and making sure I had everything dialed with the Multimax’s on the three strobes I had setup on the scene. The long range mode worked and in a situation I may not have been able to take the shot I wanted previously, I was able to get the shot I wanted with lighting.
I spoke with some of the people at Pocket Wizard and the reason long range mode works is they slowed down the data rates and increased the error correction. This is supposed to have an impact on the maximum usable shutter speed, however I was able to sync this shot at 1/1000 of a second with my Nikon D40 body. With that being said, I’ll have to do a bit more testing to see at what shutter speed the reliability begins to degrade in long range mode.
It’s again that time of year for me, the season is ramping up and time to replace old broken and lost gear. In an effort to pack lighter for trips on the unfriendly skies I recently looked at my pile of light stands looking for a way to cut some weight and to get things in smaller bags. In the past I’ve been packing my rolling ski bag in order to get my older 9 foot Bogen light stand in the mix. The nine foot basic stand sits at 36″ long folded up and weighs in at three pounds. While it’s a pretty good sturdy stand, packing my rolling ski bag around the airport and small rental cars really sucks.
My new solution hopefully is a good one. After staring at specs for about an hour I ran across the Lowel 0133 Omni Light Stand. This compact light stand packs down at 29 inches folded up and weighs in at 2.9 pounds. It isn’t as sturdy as your standard, basic tubular legged light stand however I’m hoping it’s compact size will make up for that. The legs are 1/8 thick, 9/16″ wide solid strip aluminum as opposed to the typical tubular aluminum legs that most light stands these days have. This makes for a bit less stability however it’s made up for in it’s compact size, especially when folded up.
The 9′ Lowel 0133 Omni Stand seems to be built very well, using solid aluminum collar clamps as opposed to most of the lightweight stands out there that use plastic collar clamps.
Being a bit ambitious, I also ordered the Lowel KPH Half Pole 3′ Extension. Carrying around an extra pound in my luggage can get me an extra three feet on top of my nine foot stand. It isn’t the sturdiest combination, however with some weight holding down the base of the stand, it should work ok in light winds with a small head or speedlights on top of the stand/extension combo. I’ll let you know how that works out later though.
More about the extension though, it’s a 2-section extension pole with the same solid aluminum collar clamps as the 0133 Omni Stand and the same gray anodized finish. The base of the extension is a bit on the wide side compared to the 0133 Omni Stand but it gets the job done. I think it will.
I ran across this iPhone/iPod charge/sync dock / CF/SD card reader when I was at the Apple store yesterday getting my stupid iPhone fixed for the 5th time. The Griffin Simplifi is 3 important computer accessories in one for photographers. This thing is pretty epic and if you are anything like me, you probably have too many cords and accessories plugged into your computer as is. Why not put two of the most often used ones accessories you have one place? Anyways, I just ordered one and am pretty stoked to get it. The one thing that sucks is it runs on USB 2.0 instead of Firewire 800 but for the convenience it’s not that big of a deal.
After dealing with the old Seagate 1.5 tb hard drives and their problems I decided to go with some of the very reliable and very fast Western Digital Cavair 1tb “black” hard drives. The WD1001FALS drive is one of the fastest and has become one of the most reliable 7200 RPM hard drives out in the market, almost as bomber as their server class drives but at consumer level pricing. Right now they are available for $99 making these a no brainer. I’m stoked I’m finally replacing my slow old Seagate 1.5 tb drives with these new WesternDigital HD’s. A fast and reliable hard drive has become more important to me since my entire liveliehood is on these drives.
I already have a RAID 1 system to automatically write data to two hard drives at the same time for an automatic backup which has already saved me a few times with some previous drive failures. Since then I’d never work without the RAID as it’s saved me from the time in downloading from my web backup or my other backup site. I’m able to keep working as I just put in a new matching drive and the RAID1 system automatically copies over all the data from the working drive to the new drive.
Now I just have to wait for all the data from the old drives to the new drives so I can get going on retiring my other old 500 gb RAID 1array and get back to work.
A few months ago these new 1.5 tb hard drives from Seagate (Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA) and I’m thinking this is going to be awesome! Lots of space, two of these 1.5 tb hard drives in my RAID array (mirrored backup) can take the place of six total 500 gb drives in my RAID array! After using these things for the past 3 months, I’m pretty excited to retire them. There is a pretty big flaw in these drives that make them not play nice in a RAID array, they go to sleep and power down all the time. The problem with this in a RAID array is a lot of RAID controllers (like mine, the onboard Intel IHC9) think that the drive has failed when it powers down, the powers back up out of sleep mode, causing the RAID controller to start a refresh of the drive it thinks failed. So basicallly, the RAID controller is rewriting information to one of the drives making it run a lot slower. Not a nice thing to have going in the middle of an edit when you need all the speed you can get out of your machine! Supposedly this problem was fixed in a revision of the firmware however I wouldn’t want to mess with it as you really don’t know which version you are going to end up with this drive.
Also, a lot of reviews out there are talking about DOA (dead on arrival) drives out there which is just the last straw to make you want to stay away. I had one of the drives fail on me, and had to warranty it. Forutnately for me, I have a RAID 1 setup and it was all backed up automatically. I wouldn’t reccomend this drive for anything really. The reason I put up a drive review here on my blog is hard drives are now a part of the endless gear photographers need now. Getting the right drives that are fast and most importantly, reliable is an important thing these days!
Stay away from these drives. Seagate has been really good in the past, however this is one you want to avoid at all costs, especially if you run your computer on a RAID array. Over at www.newegg.com (very reputable place to buy computer gear from btw) the customer reviews are currently giving 26% a 1 star review, which is the worst you can rate this drive at. Yah, not a good sign. Check out the bad reviews here
This is one of those things, it’s really cool and amazing as to how far things have come with the development of the iphone software and with digital camera equipment. A new app for the iphone is out called the onOne DSLR Camera Remote. There are two versions, the full version that allows control of shooting in full teathered mode with mode, shutter speed, aperature, ISO speed adjustment, and image preview, right on the phone for $19.95. The lite version of this app is $1.99. Yes, $1.99! The Nikon version is currently in development. So here is the catch, and for some it might not really be much of a catch. You need to have the camera teathered to a wifi enabled computer via USB cord like you’d normally have your teathered setup. So what’s different? You can walk around and have all the control like you would at the laptop, on your iphone or ipod touch. Seriously, what’s next for an iphone app?
Ahoy! Meet Sidney, my roomate Max Kuszaj’s evil, crazy (should be on Xanax or something), poop filled pet parrot. I like to also refer to her as Satan’s little helper. She hates people, especially me. She like lurking, squawking, biting the shit out of everyone (especially me), pooping everywhere, doing one clawed chinups, sliding flat down cage rails, pooping more, failed flight attempts with clipped wings and squawking a lot more. These were a few more photos in a series of test shots with the Tamron 28-75 f2.8 LD XR Di SP lens with my backup Nikon D300 body. I love the close focusing and the ability to still get a blown out depth of field at f8.
Salt Lake City, Utah is the new Seattle. At least for the last few weeks. I’ve been wanting to move back home to Seattle for the Summer months in order to escape the blazing heat of the usual Utah Spring and Summers. This year however, it’s been like Seattle, which has been great. It’s been pretty nice even though there has been a lack of golf for me due to the non-stop rain! This cool, rainy pattern has been also been a good thing for me, forcing me to finish my work in front of my computer with the weather keeping me in my cave, working more. Here’s a few random photos of the dreary Pacific Northwest type day.
Today I got a chance to play around with an old lens I used to have, the Tamron 28-75 f2.8 LD XR Di SP. I used to own this lens lastyear when I was using Canon gear, however since the switch to Nikon, I hadn’t gotten around to getting one again. In fact I hadTaken with the Tamron 28-75 f2.8 LD planned to not get it, thinking the Nikon equivelent would do. I had missed this lens a lot. It’s not fast, in fact the AF is ungodly slow but the macro capabilities is what I missed.
The close focusing and being able to really blow out the depth of field is awesome, especially with the wedding season apon me. For the money you can’t get any better at about $350 new. It’s really sharp, my copy is as sharp as my Nikon 28-80 f2.8 AF-S lens, smaller, lighter, and did I mention it is $350 new? Austin Holt bought this lens a while back after my recomendation to him, but decided to get rid of it, opting for the faster AF of the Nikon AF-S version. Fortunately for me, it works out as I got to test the lens to make sure I had a sharp copy before buying it. The photos above are a few test shots around the house with the Tamron. Thanks Austin!
So for any photograhper that uses Pocket Wizards to trigger a remote camera, no doubt you’ve had the problem where you run out of range and are dissapointed as you can’t shoot the angle you want with your remote cameras due to lack of range. Well Robert Benson has solved that problem for you! The thought of this is sick. Hopefully the development of these will spawn some new, and much more robust wireless transceivers for photographers soon! A little bit from his blog post about his new switch for 2-way radios is below.
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Robert Benson successfully created a long range radio camera trigger using walkie-talkies available from Walmart. He started working on the project after shooting a Redbull Air race in San Fransisco where his pocketwizard remote trigger set up failed because the distance was too great. After that race he worked on some alternatives and ultimately came up with this super long range radio based trigger for remote cameras. He currently has a patent pending on it, to find out more visit his blog: http://www.robertbenson.com/blog/archives/860
OK, so I know this is a bit of a plug for F-Stop but I think I’ve given this particular case a good test. A week and a half ago, I went out to Echo, Utah to shoot a BASE jump with my roomate, Max Kuszaj. I shot the jump with 2 cameras, one locked of on a tripod tight on the exit point and the other a bit wider, handheld. So I finished up with the shoot and decided to take a few photos of the Double Barrel lens case that my 100-400 was in cause I thought it might look cool, just for grins. I finished, put my camera away in my pack and walked back to my car and drove off. It wasn’t until 2 days ago when I realized I didn’t have the lens. I drove back yesterday to see if it was there and fortunately since I left it in a meadow away from the trail it was still there, standing up right where I left it. At least 2 thunderstorms rolled through, possibly more in the week and a half it was sitting out there in the meadow and the lens was fine. Pretty happy about finding the lens, and finding it in good condition. Anyways, here’s to good gear!
A little while ago Pocket Wizard announced the new v7.5 firmware for their new Multimax units that have the USB port for firmware updates. Included with the new firmware are a few useful features:
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