Focus Shift: 50mm f/1.8G

The 50mm f/1.8G was Nikon's update to their cost effective 'D' and initial reviews where favourable. However, after using this lens for a number of years now I was still having issues with misfocus at wider apertures on my Nikon bodies. This behaviour was consistent across 2 other 50mm f/1.8Gs too but recently someone pointed out an optical phenomenon called focus shift that may be a potential cause...

iOS upgrades and further hate for iTunes

There aren't too many things I hate about the iPhone but there are many around iTunes: the lock-ins, the inability to get data back out of the phone, the single point of failure (sync PC crashes, then what).



But I still kept my iPhone. However, the iOS 7 and iTunes 11.1.0 mess really does make me consider the alternatives.

IDE power to Dell E520

Adding harddisks to an old Dell E520 should be easy - it's built with easy slide compartments. And it would be easy if you are adding newer SATA disks - if you're adding old school PATA (aka IDE) disks from your other (even older) PCs then it's a little more painful.

Speedlight Beauty Dish for the Masses?

The beauty dish is probably up there as an amateur's holy grail of lighting modifiers after they've exhausted the various umbrellas, softboxes, grids and bedsheets.

However the hotshoe speedlight beauty dishes tend to be a very limited for the speedlight/hotshoe market except for David Tejada's infamous plant pot dish or Todd Owyoung's 'chinatown special'. The professional/non DIY beauty dish market is ruled mostly by Kacey and Mola as speedlight enabled options, discounting the no name ebay pans/S mount mods.

But now LumoPro provide their 22" beauty dish offering - how does it fare?

Rear End Cleaning: 85mm f/1.4D

Oh dear.. Whilst I don't care too much about dust on internal lens elements, I do care about the dreaded 'f' word.

Firefox Java hanging workaround

Recent updates of Firefox and Java don't tend to play nice. I've had existing JRE 6 installations that were fine but then Mozilla adds these JRE versions to their vunerablity blocklists.

The net result is that the previously working Firefox/JRE plugin combination now hangs and crashes Firefox (Windows 7 x64). The same plugin works in Chrome. I hate poorly implemented upgrades.

D* Eyecups

One thing that is apparent when looking through a recent FX viewfinder for the first time is the larger size when compared to the DX viewfinder. But with a larger viewfinder I found that it had a tendancy to have more light leaking past my eye that would give me difficulty in seeing TTL.

Live Once!

It used to be pain to create bootable media (CD and USB) that would contain a standalone OS. Whilst this is somewhat (very) old news here's a quick primer for creating a Fedora bootable USB stick.

Wacom Volito2 CFT-420 and Win7

I rediscovered an old Wacom Volito 2 (aka CFT-420) recently and managed to get it working with Win7/x64.