Pleasantly surprised by Sony

A few weeks back I went on a white-water rafting trip, taking with my Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-TX10.  It worked pretty well the whole trip, but at the end of the day I discovered that there was a crack in the case, with a small chunk missing.  Well shit.  I’d babied it the whole day, being… Read more

Amazon’s lying product listings

I bought some extension tubes from Cameta Camera, via Amazon, about two weeks ago.  The product page was titled: Vivitar Professional Metal Macro Automatic Extension Tube Set of 3 for Nikon (13mm, 21mm &  31mm) I suppose I should have caught on that something was wrong by the fact that the description for the same… Read more

Shooting tethered with a D3200

Ugh… random tip:  the Nikon D3200 will refuse to take a shot, while tethered, unless there is an SD card in the camera.  Even if you turn off shutter lock (which does work when not tethering). Also, Live View isn’t available at all while tethering.  That’s annoying.  The point of tethering is to get precise studio/macro… Read more

RAW failure

I like Aperture so far, mostly.  I’ve even managed to memorise a significant fraction of its obscure keyboard shortcuts and combos.  Enough to get around it and make it appear I have some idea what I’m doing. Unfortunately, Aperture relies on Mac OS X’s built-in RAW support (as does every other imaging app, which is… Read more

Stars are moving really fast

While we were camping I wanted to try some star photography.  I had borrowed Chris’s tripod specially for the occasion, so I was all excited and set to go.  I hadn’t initially thought of doing any astronomical work with the camera, but I chanced upon a discussion of it, with some example images from old… Read more

D3200

For a few months now I’ve been eyeing off DSLRs.  I’m not sure, now, what triggered it… I think just a couple of events, like Jen & Vante’s wedding, where I wanted for a better camera than my little Sony DSC-TX10.  While it’s a great little camera, and was totally worth having for Hawaii alone,… Read more