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Much better! Not exactly an architectual masterpiece, of course, just a quick example to show how much better you can make your point and shoot photos with just a little bit of extra effort.
The off-camera flash is a $10 eBay find. It's an older Vivitar 2500 auto thyristor flash. Not super powerful (GN80 at ISO100), but WAY better than the Samsung D53's built-in flash. Not to mention the often more pleasing image that results from the use of an off-camera flash.
Now here comes the cool part. Like most small point and shoot digital cameras, the Samsung does not have a hotshoe for flash mounting, nor does it have a PC sync terminal. So triggering the off-camera flash requires a neat little gadget called an optical slave.
It's a wee thing attaches to your off-camera flash. The slave has a light sensor that "sees" the pulse of light from the camera's built-in flash, and triggers the off-camera flash. Optical slaves are cheap, sometimes less than $10.
One more wrinkle. Most point and shoot digital cameras fire a low power "pre-flash" before making the exposure to set the correct flash power for the actual exposure. This pre-flash will be seen by the optical slave, and it will obediently trigger the off-camera flash the slave is attached to. This means your carefully set up off-camera flash has now shot it's wad before the camera's shutter has even opened. To get around this problem, some optical slaves have an adjustable delay mode. When set correctly, the slave will see the pre-flash pulse from the camera, wait a very brief moment, then trigger the off-camera flash to sync properly with the camera's exposure. Yay! problem solved.
You can get even fancier, as I did with this setup. If you look closely at the large version of this photo, you'll see a little gizmo sitting on top of the white display cabinet. It's the second from the left object on top of the cabinet. It's my optical slave with delay, but it's not attached to the off-camera flash, which is to camera left.
Instead, it's attached to the transmitter of a radio flash trigger. The sequence works like this:
1) The camera's built-in flash fires a low power pulse to meter for proper flash power.
2) The optical slave sees the pulse from the camera, and waits for a moment.
3) The optical slave triggers the radio transmitter it's attached to.
4) The radio transmitter sends a coded radio pulse.
5) The radio receiver attached to the off-camera flash receives the coded radio pulse.
6) The radio receiver triggers the off-camera flash it's attached to, syncing perfectly with the camera, which is now making the exposure.
All this happens VERY rapidly and reliably.
This photo was made with my old Nikkor-S 50mm f/1.4 lens. It was made in 1972 or 1973. It is quite scratched, dusty and maybe even has a little fungus growing, along with damaged coatings.
Nonetheless, it is fun to play with. I performed a crude AI-modification to the aperture ring (I used a file). The lens now works perfectly with my Nikon D600 (full metering and focus confirmation).
All set for the high desert Summer Sun
Ugly pseudo HDR conversion with Photomatix.
Shot by my girlfriend Zoe.
Battle Arms Development employee Tyler Schlappi does a function test on a short-barreled rifle at Green Valley Range in Henderson, Nev., Nov. 14, 2016. (Photo by Jason Ogulnik)
Samyang / Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens.
The lens hood has been “shaved” to allow a nearly full circle image to be captured.
Washington DC, Saturday March 24, 2018. Hundreds of thousands gathered here today to protest the ever more frequent gun massacres that have sadly become one of the defining features of life in the USA over the past thirty years. The shootings have evolved into increasingly more deadly events because of the ease of obtaining semi-automatic rifles, high capacity ammo magazines and other weapons of war. Organizations like the National Rifle Associations have successfully bribed our national legislators to beat back most attempts to enact sane gun laws that would ban civilian sales of these military munitions. In the wake of the Parkland, Florida high school mass shooting a youth led movement* has become energized and is pushing back against the gun lobby status quo and, it has to be noted, against the entire immoral agenda of Trumpism and 21st Century Republicanism. President Trump spent today at his golf resort in Mar a Lago, Florida. Again.
Yes, there was a very small number of pro-gun rights activists on the streets in DC today.
*There has been an active black led movement against gun violence and other forms of vigilante and police violence in America for many decades but it has been ignored or unfairly reported on by corporate media and actively harassed by police wherever it appeared. The most recent example is the Black Lives Matter movement.
Take out a Lincoln penny, and have a look at the "LIBERTY" mark to the left of Lincoln's bust. What you see here are the first three letters of that word, photographed in macro. I used a 10X microscope lens mounted to my old Nikon D50 DSLR via a series of adapters.
This is the full frame as shot, not a cropped portion of the image.
As you'll notice, depth of field at 10X is VERY shallow. This is an unavoidable law of physics, so better equipment can't do much. I calculated the DOF with my setup to be around 16.8 micrometers. A micrometer is 1/1,000 of a millimeter, so that's only .0168 millimeters, or 0.00066 inches! (less than a thousandth of an inch).
There is a process called "focus stacking" that can combine images taken at several subject distances into one seamless image with much greater depth of field. That will have to come later for me, as stacking at 10X requires a VERY demanding studio setup and close attention to detail. For example, I would need a way to accurately and consistently move my subject less than a thousandth of an inch for each exposure, and do this perhaps dozens or even HUNDREDS of times for ONE final photograph.
Taken at the October 24th, 2012 campaign event of Governor Mitt Romney at Reno, Nevada.
It was very challenging to get decent shots of the event. A dark arena, long distance to subject requiring a long (shaky) slow lens and then a heavy crop, plus crazy mixed white balance lighting conspired to keep me on my toes.
It was amusing to watch the iPhone/Android crowd attempt to grab pics and video of their guy. Most of their shots were VERY blurry and had disturbing colors, like an impressionist painting of a bad LSD trip (oh, wait, I just remembered where we were...)
I decided to try my hand at "free range" bird photography. I used my Samyang 500mm F/8 "preset" lens, on my Nikon D50 DSLR.
I've done very little bird photography, with the exception of one afternoon in Little Valley, California last year. That day was a comparitive dawdle, because although I was using a lens with "only" 300mm of focal length, it did have autofocus, auto exposure, auto diaphragm and a maximum aperture a full stop faster than the Samyang.
Couple the inferior Samyang lens with a shaky photographer requiring high ISO (noisy), and my results were mediocre, at best. Despite the Samyang's 750mm equiv. focal length, I had to heavily crop all of the following bird photos. That, and lots of other processing to make them presentable.
I'll do better next time. Though I may not resort to the "cheat" of shooting near a bird feeder.
I have a new found admiration for expert birders who have the skill, patience and equipment to do justice to this very challenging endeavor. Some of their gear, though, is rather pricy.
Washington DC, Saturday March 24, 2018. Hundreds of thousands gathered here today to protest the ever more frequent gun massacres that have sadly become one of the defining features of life in the USA over the past thirty years. The shootings have evolved into increasingly more deadly events because of the ease of obtaining semi-automatic rifles, high capacity ammo magazines and other weapons of war. Organizations like the National Rifle Associations have successfully bribed our national legislators to beat back most attempts to enact sane gun laws that would ban civilian sales of these military munitions. In the wake of the Parkland, Florida high school mass shooting a youth led movement* has become energized and is pushing back against the gun lobby status quo and, it has to be noted, against the entire immoral agenda of Trumpism and 21st Century Republicanism. President Trump spent today at his golf resort in Mar a Lago, Florida. Again.
*There has been an active black led movement against gun violence and other forms of vigilante and police violence in America for many decades but it has been ignored or unfairly reported on by corporate media and actively harassed by police wherever it appeared. The most recent example is the Black Lives Matter movement.
This is the side of the PCB with the flash memory chip, which is part number FBNL63A59K3PG
The datasheets for this part indicate an actual capacity of 4GB, just as the H2testw program reported.
I've had no luck yet reprogramming this drive back to 4GB, as I can't find software that has this flash memory chip listed in it's database.
There are two more photos in this set.
Please click on the following link to go to an alert page on SOSFakeFlash.com about fraudulent eBay seller garysin2008:
sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/garysin2008-urgent-...
UPDATE (02/03/10):
I actually managed to fix it a few days ago, using UD Tools 1.2.0.8.
It's now a functional 4GB drive, albeit with a few bad blocks mapped out during the low-level formatting. The bad blocks are no doubt due to the low-grade flash chip used.
Samyang / Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens.
The lens hood has been “shaved” to allow a nearly full circle image to be captured.
This image was made from seven exposures, ranging from 1/1000 sec to 4 seconds long. The exposures were combined using Photomatix's Exposure Fusion function.
2014 Burning Man participants on the way to Black Rock City, Nevada
Shot on Gould Street in Reno.
This is what remains of a 1976 Cadillac Sedan deVille. 1976 was the Bicentennial year of the USA, and surely one of the low points in American automotive production. The fact that the 500 cubic inch (8.2 Liter) V-8 engine still runs at all is nothing short of miraculous...
This was my first time shooting fire dancers/spinners at night. Some post processing was required to get the results seen here.
I used my Nikon D600 with a Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6 "APO" macro lens with internal focus motor ($100 used on eBay).
I have a bunch of other shots of the firedancers in this set- check 'em out if'n ya like this sort of thang.
Samyang / Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens.
The lens hood has been “shaved” to allow a nearly full circle image to be captured.
I opened up this pack to inspect it before use, as the flash it came from is quite old. Some charge / discharge cycles on my Accucel-6 charger showed that it retains about 1,300mAh discharge capacity.
10 Sub-C NiCd cells in series (12 Volts).
Thermal probe for over-temperature protection while charging.
Norman part number B4126 or 811926
This is a wonderful example of what one can expect when out and about in Lewis County, New York.
Photo taken in the Hamlet of Brantingham.
Gun show extravaganza at The Greater Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks, PA. Three huge rooms with over 2000 tables of guns, ammo and shooting accessories! My kind of place to spend a cloudy, rainy afternoon. :-)
This was my first time shooting fire dancers/spinners at night. Some post processing was required to get the results seen here.
I used my Nikon D600 with a Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6 "APO" macro lens with internal focus motor ($100 used on eBay).
I have a bunch of other shots of the firedancers in this set- check 'em out if'n ya like this sort of thang.