I found a stray roll of unused Kodak Gold a few weeks ago. It was bouncing around loose junk in this crazy house. I know it wasn’t mine, so my best guess puts it circa 2004, but who knows. I went out and shot it, and despite some patches of grainy fog, I love the results. Some of these skies are ridiculous.

I am completely in love with the ultrawide 15mm. A warm revelation washes over me when I get so much room to move with it. (Thanks Scar!)

I went back and found my post right after I got my Sigma 12-24. What a dork!

I developed these myself in a Unicolor C-41 kit from Freestyle. That’s always an adventure, but I’m happy to save the cash.

I’m still struggling with how to get into long-form photo projects. I’m wrestling with confidence. By just dumping these photos here, I know I’m shortchanging myself, but I’m out of ideas right now. And since Photophlow died, I’m missing the interactions and stimulations of a rich community. So, I just keep shooting and experiencing. That’s good enough for the moment.

We were putting things in boxes for the Salvation Army before the holidays when my brother, Rick, commented how this book could make a nice gadget cover. I agreed, and we set it aside. This week I picked up a strip of balsa wood and some elastic from ye olde craft store and voila. I pulled out the pages and sealed the seam with some gaffer tape. Used wood glue to affix the balsa rails to the edges. I pasted a page from the book that I liked into the inside cover just for grins. I found a foam sheet laying around from some Christmas gift and used a glue stick to stick some protective strips on. I don’t love how the foam strips look with the book page. Next time I might just put a full sheet of the foam on the inside cover. I used glue to put in the elastic strip. I considered putting an elastic strip around the outside of the book, like how Moleskines do, but I didn’t want to mess with the color of the book’s cover. Maybe if I were doing this for real I could dye the elastic?

Anyway, thanks to Rick for the idea, and to Blanche Saunders for writing the book — I sacrificed a good read to make this

Hey kids! Did Santa bring you a speedlite for Christmas? Maybe it was a LumoPro or something similar that doesn’t come with its own pouch? Well, don’t let your new flash go unprotected out there. Just swipe some leftover bubblewrap and your trusty roll of two-inch gaffer tape and make your own ghetto-luxe padded pouch!

What you’ll need?

1. 2″ gaffer tape
2. Bubble wrap
3. Your speedlite

 

Cut strips of bubblewrap. You can be a stickler and measure, or just keep your flash handy and eyeball it. You’ll want the front panel to be longer on the bottom (for the bottom of the pouch) and back panel to be longer on the top (for the flap.) Keep the smooth side of the bubblewrap on top since that will be the inside of the pouch. The tricky part is that last bit when you’re taping inside the pouch.

 

I made sure to keep the flash inside the bubblewrap womb to make sure I was never making it too tight. You can test the ingress/egress (sexy!) of the flash as you go along. From there it’s just a matter of taping it up as neatly or as gritty as you want. The beauty of gaffer tape is its “scultpability.” To help around the corners, take a square of gaff and rip it halfway, then make a corner from that. Again, you can be as tidy and exact as you wanna be. I’m from tha streetz, so I like mine a little rough. (Or, I’m just lazy.)

One other tip: If you’re testing your pouch to make sure it’s not too tight, make sure to test inserting the flash both ways as you go along. (Oh, behave!) The flash probably has a chubbier end so it might fit one way, but not the way you want it to.

For the top flap, if you have some adhesive Velcro ™ laying around, great! If not, you can make a strap by folding a piece of gaff in half, tape it on, and just slide the tongue of the flap in that. (Rowr!) Gaffer tape has some friction to it, so this works fine for me. (See first picture on top)

There you have it:  A quick and dirty padded pouch for your speedlite.  It doesn’t feel half bad next to my factory pouches. If you try this, or have better ideas, let me know. And if you dug this, Like us on Facebook!

 

I ordered a kit to build a sound trigger with variable delay from HiViz.com. It comes as a bag filled with loose electronic capacitors, resistors, and wires. Fun! But, I fired up the detailed instructions and got after it.

The instructions are very clear. But, the kit assumes you have an extra PC sync cord to cut up in order to connect it to your flash. I didn’t feel like snipping a ten dollar connector. Luckily, the LumoPro flash I have has a 1/8-inch miniphone jack. So I cut up one of the two hundred pairs of cheapo earbuds I have, just to get the plug. I wired it up and it didn’t work. So, I did some reading and discovered that stereo plugs never work well.

I’d always wanted an excuse to go to Electronic City and browse the aisles of geek heaven. A mono miniplug was a buck sixty. I also picked up a black plastic project box.

An hour later I was covered in black plastic shavings as I used a Dremel to cut a perfect hole in the black case that holds the piezoelectric listening device. But, the whole thing fits pretty well.

And, as you can almost see from the video, it works.

I will need to continue to tweak it. It triggers the flash on every sharp noise, so if I use it on a dropped item, the flash will fire on the drop, and every bounce. That probably won’t work — but there are ways in the electronics to mitigate that. But, the basic device is operational.

Stay tuned for more.

If you’re like me you have five or six BP-511 style batteries for your SLR. And, going out on shoots, coming back from shoots and during shoots, it can be a challenge keeping track of which ones are charged. Some of the batteries came with weak plastic trays that never stay on when tossed in your bag. Other times these batteries (or their knockoffs) come with a cap that can help protect the battery, but I always seem to lose those.

So I use this method to protect my batteries and keep track if they’re charged or spent. And my solution uses the miracle of gaffer’s tape: An Informative Battery Case

One of the beauties of gaffer’s tape is that when you stick it to itself, it makes a flexible, strong, grippy material not entirely unlike leather. I guess you could also do this with duct tape or some packing tape. That is, if you’re a punk!

My roll of tape is 1 and 7/8 inches, or about 47mm. Tear off a strip about 28cm long. Wrap it around the battery sticky side out. Make it as tight as you can, the more snug the better.

When the battery is wrapped, double back around being careful to line up the tape. This gives you a basic tube. Then I tear off two shorter strips for the bottom.Stick a short strip to a slightly longer strip, and curl that around the bottom end of the battery. You can then layer another strip around the tube overlapping your bottom cup.

Now when I have a newly charged battery, I slide it in with the contacts down and protected. When I swap it out for a spent battery, I slide the empty in with the contacts up and visible.

Of course, I can have this same issue with rechargeable batteries for my speedlights. In this case, the clamshell cases for them are usually exceedingly solid. So on the edge of a small strip of paper, I write “GOOD” and “BAD” side by side. I snip out the strip, fold it in half, and tape it into inside of the batteries’ clamshell case with a ‘T’ of transparent tape. This makes a flap that can go either way and is visible when there are batteries in the case.

I originally tried determining a “top” and “bottom” to the clamshell case and deciding that if the positive pointed up, then the batteries were good. However, I could never remember what I had decided was “up”. So, that’s why I went with this no-thinking method.

With Compact Flash cards, determining a top is much easier because their makers are eager to use a flashy logo on one side of the card. So in the clamshell case that holds CF cards, I put in a piece of colored tape or the sticky part of a Post-It note. Then I have little trouble remembering that if I can see the logo, the card is empty and ready for use. If the logo is covered, then it’s full of wonderful photos just waiting to be processed.

This is what works for me. Do you have your own methods to solve these problems?