Two Legs Bad - Three Legs Good

Comrades.

The cause of Photographic Steadiness and Proletarian Imagery will be advanced this week with the Camera Electronic sale of tripods. These are little devices that are easy to operate at a reasonable price - you do not need to pay $ 5.5 million dollars for them and they do not need an army of red-coated French technicians to make them work...

Call in with $ 50 and leave it here and you can walk out with an Inca, Velbon, or Haldex tripod that can support your mirror-less camera, handy cam, or small DSLR perfectly.

It will be light enough to take hiking without the use of language.

There will be a quick-release plate on the top.

There will be a rising center column.

You will be happy.

Scrub That Sucker Clean, Baby!

Those of you old enough to remember the 1970's may remember where - that - line comes from.

The real reason we are featuring lens cleaning products is that we have so many of them and you all need them. This town is full of dirty glass, as any day at our or repair counter will attest. The wise people have dirty filters on clean lenses and the foolish people have dirty lenses, but that is another tale - today it is the question of cleaning glass.

Firstly - do not get it dirty. Use a lens caps and keep your fingers out of the lens hood -and if you are subject to environments that are dusty, brush or blow it off the glass with a blower or a soft brush. If the environment includes oil, fingerprints, dog nose prints, or fragments of egg-salad sandwich with mayonnaise, you will have to go on to the active cleaning.

Look at the head and tail images. These products are all designed to get after those heavier contaminants. You'll see three packets of dry lens tissue - soft one-use paper that can be safely wiped over glass. I would recommend that you either use a commercial eyeglass spray cleaner to wet one of these, followed by a dry wipe with a second tissue, or resort to the good old el-cheapo alternative of one drop of washing-up liquid in a glass of distilled water. Do not use drinking alcohol to wipe over the glass surface, particularly do not use Midori or Advocaat.

A packet of these dry tissues are a good partner to a couple of the Hama Feuchtreinigungstuchen. Say that late at night and see what materialises in the dark....

If you are caught out in the field, away from the washing-up liquid, he best cleaners are the Hoodman Lens Cleanse packets. They are a wet then dry combo and can remove anything organic. Highly recommended by Ernest, the fussy technician.

Last on the list are the microfibre cloths - these are available from several manufacturers, including one with our shop logo emblazoned on it. Use them to keep the small bits of oily smear at bay - they can also be washed out when they become fouled.

Power To The People - A Battery Of Chargers

Here in Australia there are only three common items to be found in every hotel and motel room - a bed, a Gideon's Bible, and the camera or i-phone charger from the last occupant.

We get calls daily from people desperate to replace lost charger. The variety of different batteries and charger blocks produced by the various manufacturers precludes having one of everything available at short notice. Indeed, some cameras have long outlived the production of their chargers.

The answer has been the Inca and the Hahnel universal chargers, They can be configured to stuff electricity into nearly all batteries - with some exceptions in the Sony range and in some of the newer Canon professional batteries. You generally just drop the AA or AAA cells into the tray or manoeuver the Li-on block onto the blades and let it go for an hour or so. We use 'em all the time here in the shop.

If you just need to do AAA's scoop a couple of the INCA chargers out of the $ 1.99 bargain bin near the door. There are 4 batteries in there as well as the charging block, and the charger doubles as an LED torch or power block for USB devices. $ 1.99 - you couldn't get a punch in the eye in a waterside pub for that price.

If you need to power something up out in the bush and you have your motor car nearby, you can put a can inverter into the drinks holder on the center console and plug in the Powertech  can-size inverter. It can put out 150W steady or 450W at a surge. it also has a USB port to power up tablets. Mind you, if you need to take a lot of tablets in the bush, it is time to slow down, watch the flowers, and smell the bees...

Have Youse Guys Got...Hahnel and Inca and Hoodman

"Have youse guys got a charger for my camera? And a plug-in thing to go to the computer? I need one by Friday 'cause I'm goin' on holiday."

Sometime in the future when archeologists are digging down through the strata to find evidence of civilisation here in Australia they are going to run into a thick layer of digital camera chargers and computer cords - lain down by people who put them in a very safe place - a very safe place indeed - or who leave them on the nightstands of hotels all over the country.

This is evident from the number of enquiries we get each day for their replacement. With the exception of the Flapoflex company, who have foreseen the problem, all other manufacturers are well behind the times. They supply one each of these articles in the new camera boxes. Flapoflex has realised what their customers are capable of and have decided to supply a sausage of chargers with each Flapoflex digital camera - rather like a machine-gun belt. You lose one charger and just rotate the next one into line.

For all the rest who are using Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Olympus, etc. we have decided to keep in two universal charger systems. They are made by Inca and Hahnel and feature adjustable charging blocks that can be plugged into either the 240 volt mains or a 12 volt car lighter system. They can trickle electricity into AA, AAA, and many other cells, They cope with most Li ion batteries from digital cameras and they have little sensor circuits built in to make sure you can put the batteries in the right way. They cost about $ 69 and are brightly coloured - so that you can see them before you check out of the next hotel room...

As for losing the computer cord, well good. Buy a Hoodman or San Disk card reader and be done with it. Your files will transfer safely into your computer at a much faster pace than ever they would with the computer cord and there will be no risk of confusion into the card from the camera fighting with the computer. And best news of all - we have lots of them so you can leave them in the hotel room for the next user...

Failing to Fail

I failed to fail yesterday, but it was a near thing. Had I not been forgetful, and cached some spare equipment in my kit bag, I could have been up a greased pole without a paddle. Or a mixed metaphor, for that matter.

It was batteries, you see. A couple of weeks ago I purchased several sets of lithium AA cells from a supermarket so that I would have spares for a wedding shoot. I already had Duracells in the flash units but better safe than sorry. The supermarket did not have Duracells so I took another brand. As luck would have it the Duracells had plenty of power for the 700+ shots at the wedding. Well and good.

Yesterday I set out to do a dance shoot and thought to change the flash batteries for the new sets just to make sure. Up on the platform, shooting away, everything as per normal, and then the new batteries - supposedly 8 x normal capacity - packed it in. I got less than 70 shots before the flash gave a warning sign on the LCD screen and refused to go.

Luckily, I had another regiment in the woods - a fresh set of Duracells buried at the bottom of the bag. Quick change and they then soldiered on for 650 more shots, with no faltering.

I reflected that I would stick to Duracell and Inca AA lithium batteries in the future, even if it meant searching them out. Indeed, I have asked for our shop to keep more of the Inca brand in.