How to fix a Nikon GPS cable

If you’ve got one of these you’ll soon find (at least my son and I did) that the cable design is woeful – it’s far too long and catches on stuff and bends. What’s worse is that the strain relief is far too rigid and it just snaps rather than bending. (I’m specifically talking about the CA10 that joins the GPS to a 10-pin camera like the 300, the principle holds good for others I suspect).

Camera end on its last legs

This is the GPS unit end under stress

A quick Google finds somebody offering the cable for GBP260, Grays have them for about GBP50. Mine lasted a fortnight in India. Yes you can get a replacement from the shop under warranty but they’re not going to do that every two weeks for the next few years.The solution is simple if you have access to someone with an electronics lab – you need to put some flexible rubber sleeving over the transitions to better take spread the stress. Here are a couple of ends – one almost gone, another brand new so treated. You can guess it’s better to fix the cable when it’s new or as soon as possible.

Repaired ends – top one was ready to fail, lower one protected before it got the chance.

So how do you get those rubber supports on? You need the fiendishly-cunning Hellerman three-pronged pliers:

You slip the sleeve over the prongs and expand it so:

then slip the smaller end of the cable through. Slacken off the pliers and withdraw them from the sleeve.It takes a certain amount of force and dexterity and be careful not to impale yourself on the prongs, but it does the job. If you haven’t got a chum who can lend you the tool and a few sleeves the tool costs only GBP35 so would be worth it if you plan to use the GP-1 a lot.

Finally, as you can see I’ve used a combination of medium and large sleeves to taper the strain relief.

My first and last article on DIY!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strobism – not as easy as it looks

It all seemed so easy. That nice David Hobby (Strobist)’s videos show him wandering round Howard County, Maryland lighting anything and everything with a handful – at most – of Nikon strobes (or flashguns as we say here in Britain). So when I had a minor op on my hands and was provided with a couple of splints to keep my palms flat during the night it reminded me of the appliances the Victorians used to stop boys, ahem, ‘touching themselves’. A photograph of my hands encased in these things and entitled ‘Tales from a Victorian orphanage’ seemed like an idea. Had I known what lay before me… Anyway here’s the photo.

Tales from a Victorian orphanage

and yes I know that the Victorians painted institutions green not orange and didn’t have Velcro. But it all started as a five minute project to provide some amusement on Facebook. Two people and three and a half hours later…

Let’s start with what went right. I used a Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod on which the centre column can be bent out sideways so the tripod is of to my left out of the way. A 10-24mm zoom on a Nikon D300s was pulled back to 10mm to allow me to be behind the camera and stick my hands up in front. My wife focussed using live view and pressed the shutter. It might have been better to have used a Triggertrap to fire the shutter and used the multipoint AF rather than the rather slow contrast detection AF in live view – lots of wasted shots.

Now the strobes. Five! The problem was trying to light the stairwell. The SB-900 upstairs couldn’t see the master downstairs. So the master on the camera is zoomed out and pointed at a flash just out of sight half way up the stairs and at zero power – it in turn relays the signals to the one on the landing. There’s a brolly behind me and another flash clipped to the cord of the pendant lamp by the kitchen door on the right. The time was spent iterating that setup. Oh and the splints came out too bright so I tried using a polariser to turn them down. Did it work? I don’t know, I was past caring. But it did mean two of the flashes were on full power just to get f/5.6 (and I only went to f/5.6 because the focus was so chronic. Perhaps a brighter way to tackle it would have been to have exposed the house using ambient and to have gelled the flash to match the compact fluorescents and then shot at 1/30. We live and learn.

But at least I’ve justified that fifth strobe to SWMBO. And when I go and try to shoot an interior I won’t make nearly such a fool of myself in front of the client trying to light it!

If you’re wondering about the medical side, Dupuytrens Contracture is when cords grow in your hands and pull it into a claw. Mind had progressed to the point where I could only just get my hand around a pint pot, so time to get it sorted. The operation consists of a local anaesthetic which has to be partial as you need to scream if they hit a nerve. Then the surgeon simply inserts a syringe needle and breaks the cord with a series of punctures. Sounds horrid – it wasn’t. Here in Derby (UK) it’s done as a one stop shop – you’re in and out in half an hour. Making the splints takes longer. And I was using my hands fully as soon as I got home. Three cheers for the NHS!

A year on

A year ago I went into the garden, fired up with the notion that a real photographer was someone who could make an interesting photo within a couple of metres of his back door and fairly quickly concluded that I wasn’t a real photographer. With the aid of several effects filters I managed to produce something that wasn’t too dull. I made a note in my diary to try again in a year’s time. These are the results, not perfect, but I’m rather pleased that they’re straight off the sensor.

What’s changed? I think I’ve learned that the light shining on the scene is key; there are some things you can’t ‘sort out in post’. Light is number one, depth of field is number two – the rejects from this lot were the ones with either too little, or more often, too much.

I’ve been quiet lately…

I’ve been quiet for a bit. In the library, reading about photography, its history and art criticism. It’s been quite interesting. And I haven’t actually taken a photograph with a DSLR since March. Although I snapped this on the iPhone.

Which makes me wonder.

The second semester of the FdA offered the opportunity to build up the techniques towards seeking to work with a professional in a or so dozen three-hour lessons, three of which were on B&W developing and printing. Interesting as this is – especially for students who haven’t done it before – I don’t see how it’s ever going to get me from say this (a grab shot, not a carefully composed setup note!) …

Burton Bridge Pie

… to something that might grace the pages of ‘Pies and Piemen’ or that the brewery might thank me for and put on its website. So I’m sitting down with a mind-mapper and am plotting how I can develop the skills I need using the library – open to all with ID – the Internet and cooperation with local businesses. TTFN!

 

Yet Mair Kulcher (Thijs Groot Wassink)

I went along to a talk at the Silkmill, Derby to see what Thijs had to say about his photography. First however there was a warm-up act. Katrina Schwarz gave a talk on ‘Neighbours as an art space’. ‘Neighbours’ turned out to refer to a soap opera popular in the UK. My interpretation of her thesis was that ‘Neighbours’ is a projection of the world according to the Daily Mail. She showed provided evidence of racism and middle-classness, but a sequence featuring a dog dreaming made it seem a little highbrow. What was my experience like? I found it rather surreal to be sitting in a darkened room surrounded by interesting photos, watching clips from the TV while out of the corner of my eye I could see happy people playing and running about on the Derby riverside in the blazing sun of an unseasonal March day. My mental image was of stepping in dog poo and trying to scrape it off my shoe. This is not meant to be derogatory, and I don’t know what brought it on. It is simply a reporting of my subjective experience as I drifted in and out of slumber on that very, very lovely warm day, sitting in the Silkmill, the site of the world’s first factory and the world’s first strike.

Thijs Groot Wassink woke me up. He and his photography partner Ruben Lundgren have worked together as WassinkLundgren since they graduated in 2005. According to the Telegraph they create ‘conceptual documentary works’ which seems an admirably terse summary. So some notes:

Two works, Duoperspectief and Tokyo Tokyo. The pair walked together throughout the city and took photos of the same person at the same time from different angles. This produced intriguing results and the ‘point’ was to portray two truths, a refutation of Cartier Bresson and the critical moment. An interesting idea indeed.

Another book, ‘WassinkLundgren is still searching’ was printed in China as an edition of 500 and edited by tearing out the pages that seemed less good whenever they were given to a recipient. Video. Each book is therefore more or less unique.

Wassink explained a little of the background to ‘Plastic bottles’. They were working in Shanghai with a viewfinder and placed a plastic bottle on the ground as a focussing aid, and before they could take the photo a scavenger picked up the bottle and made off with it. And so they made a book of photographs of people scavenging discarded bottles

There was a video of dogs left outside shops, the point of which eluded me.

Both of the artists are now doing Masters’ degrees, Wassink in London and Lundgren in Beijing. Lundgren has made a series of photographs celebrating his tallness, including wearing a measuring-tape suit.

Questions were invited. The greater part of the audience (four out of six) were Fine Art students from Derby University. They were most intrigued by the whole business of street photography and I had an interesting chat with them afterwards. But the really useful question was ‘Where does the money come from?’ Wassink’s answer was direct. ‘The usual. Prostitution.’ Books don’t make money but help promote; prints are a better source of income as are magazine commissions.

What of the photographs? Random seems to sum it up. The most interesting thing would have been to see their rejects too, which might provide an insight into what they thought was ‘good’ and ‘bad’. How naïve of me. An insight into what they chose to publish and what not to publish. A chat with Thijs might have helped, but he was still being monopolised by a rather vocal American half an hour later when I reluctantly left. But if you’re passing, drop in to see Thijs’s work and others from the Hijacked III exhibition. And take a sandwich for Thijs, he’s probably still stuck there.

At the end I was left with a question. What is art? Well here’s as far as I got. If the artist is not of independent means, it is that for which somebody will pay and which the purchaser is prepared to accept as art. Who buys art? WassinkLundgren’s website is pretty upfront about it. Commercial organisations can hang the art somewhere to demonstrate how wealthy or clever they are and art collectors can hide it away to demonstrate the same. And if you want to show how clever you are, do you buy art that anyone else appreciates or understands? Hardly – what matters is that you have it and they don’t, surely. Now, I pride myself on being a sceptic, but I try to avoid cynicism. On this occasion I’ve failed miserably. I trust I don’t write anything as cynical again for a few years.

On a more cheerful note, I then went and took a non-conceptual documentary photograph in Jack Rabbits, the excellent local deli. Nom nom nom.

Cake at Jack Rabbits, opposite Derby Cathedral

Depth of field and DX cameras

If you use a small sensor (DX) DSLR and wonder why you can’t get paper thin depth of field this may help. Mind you it will only tell you why you are doomed, not help you to fix it short of buying a full-frame camera; sorry.

I took some test portrait shots with a 50mm f/1.8. I found that even fully open there was significant depth of field, enough to make skin that could have done with a gentler touch sharp. This contrasts with the salesman’s trick with the Nikon 85mm f/1.4 on full frame of getting the pupil focussed and the eyelashes blurred. So what’s going wrong?

To start with, to what extent is depth of field a function of actual focal length (say 50mm) rather than relative focal length – i.e. the focal length adjusted for your sensor crop factor (roughly 80mm)? Well the textbook answer is that it is a function of focal length alone for a given aperture and subject distance. Summarising Ansel Adams in The Camera, depth of field:

- increases four-fold if you halve the focal length

- doubles if f number doubled (e.g. 8 to 16)

- increases four-fold if subject distance doubled

So taking a portrait with a 50mm lens on a small-sensor camera will give you a similar angle of view to an 85 on full frame – so conventional perspective/distance for portraits. However  the depth of field will be that of a 50mm lens, about 2½ times more than an 85. So you can’t do the eyelash trick.

What about if you happen to have the magic 85mm f/1.4? Now there’s no change due to focal length, but you are further away and the effect is the same – a 2½ fold increase depth of field. Looking at other popular lens options, the 105mm f/2.8 macro leaves you five times worse off (greater working distance and smaller aperture) and a zoom lens wide open at say f/4.5 at 50mm gives a depth of field eight times deeper.

Deeper than what, incidentally? My depth of field calculator (Simple dof in the iPhone) suggests 15mm in front of and behind the subject for the benchmark 85 on full frame. So they must be pretty long eyelashes! But the point is that if you are attempting to get a noticeable difference in sharpness of parts of a face using a DX sensor you are going  struggle even with an f/1.4 lens.

Working the calculations backwards a 50mm f/1.4 will have a similar depth of field wide open to the 85 on full frame at f/3.5. The 105mm f/2.8 is equivalent to the 85 at f/6.7 and the zoom equates to f/11.

However, there’s more to portraits than focus on the eyes and open wide up as I discovered by looking at the Sandra Lousada photographs and with the following test shots:

f/6.7 - what's the subject

Depth of field about right - f/3.3. The focus is on the rider.

So, if you can’t get much gradation in focus within a face, what else follows? Well you probably want some degree of separation from the background, but now you have the choice of changing the separation of the subject from the background. Well in principle. If somebody is in a studio that’s fine, although in a home or work environment it may compromise the composition. Sensitive use of a blur tool in post may help here although a professional wouldn’t need to waste much time doing that before they ran out and bought a full frame camera.

One final point from my musings an experiments – why does the 300mm f/2.8 have such shallow depth of field?

300mm f/2.8 at f/4

I don’t think it does – his hair is in focus to behind his ears. What the 300mm does is makes things that are 100m away and more a significant part of the picture and hence well out of focus.

Anyway, I might have done the sums, but the good workman never blames his tools. And plenty of people are taking stunning portraits with small sensor cameras. So I need to get off my backside and get shooting.

The funless funfair

A trip to the fair seemed like a plan for photographs concerned with light – show wide shots of the coloured lights and some high ISO shots in the bustling crowds. I got neither. I wan’t able to compose anything wide and interesting and of interesting crowds there were none. It was virtually deserted which made the whole experience rather surreal as the music blared and throbbed as though were thousands present. But some atmospheric photos nonetheless.

Deserted. Utterly deserted. Friday night in Derby!

Customers? No. Giant Idiot Box Square lies between the town and the bus station.

At last – two customers!

Wheee!

The last shot was taken using ISO3200 at 1/350 at f/2.4 – I stopped the lens down from f/1.4 to give the focussing system a chance, but might have got away with a larger aperture and a higher speed would have been useful when the machine got really cranked up. The focus was set to 3-D tracking as the subject was moving unpredictably in three dimensions. And 10/10 to Nikon for that.

All shots on a D300s with a variety of lenses: 10-24, 18-200VR and 50mm f/1.4.

What did I learn?

I did some bracketing and should have had the courage of my convictions – some underexposed shots lost. Manual’s fine, after all the light levels aren’t changing.