Michael Chang

The Panasonic LX-3 (and the similar Leica D-LUX4) is a bit of a clunky “compact” camera in terms of its form factor.  The protruding lens barrel gives the camera an slightly odd, “non-box” shape, and finding a good carrying solution is a challenge.  Personally, I don’t want to carry the camera around in the $90 Panasonic DMW-CLX3 case.   The case is a classic, retro look, but the LX-3 is a lot more useful if you can carry it and maneuver it like any other standard compact camera.  Also, the suggested OEM case is not very discreet for street photography.

The best solution, I’ve found, is an $8 Lowepro case.  The Lowepro D-RES 8 is the perfect size for the LX-3.  There’s an inner pocket just enough room for an extra SD card and battery.  The D-RES 8 fits the LX-3 almost perfectly, and there’s plenty of padding for bump protection.  This case is discontinued, so look for new old-stock on e-Bay and your favorite camera stores.

The best strap for the LX-3 is a hand-carry strap if you want to carry the camera in-hand.  Carrying the LX-3 around the neck seems unnecessary for such a light and small item, and everyone has his/her shooting preferences.  The Olympus adjustable wrist strap (part# OLWASB, $4 at BH Photo) is a great solution for hand carrying.  It’s soft and strong, and it has a an adjustable eyelet that keeps the loop around your wrist when you are swinging the camera everywhere.  Everything feels lot more secure with an adjustable wrist strap!  Let this wrist loop hang out of your Lowepro D-RES 8 case, and you have a really compact carrying solution for $12!

Put the rest of the money you save on batteries for the LX-3 since this little camera does eat batteries.  You can purchase an extra lens cap for $8 directly from Panasonic.  Search for part VYF3198 at

http://www.pstc.panasonic.com/EpartR/PartsListChoice.asp

Finding a decent, pinch-style cap for the Sekonic 758 light meter was more of a challenge than I had anticipated!  Major online photos stores (like BH and Adorama) only carried slip-on caps, and finding the right slip-on size can be tricky (need to add 1 to 1.5mm for these small sizes).  Besdies, if you’ve ever had to deal with the slip-on cap for a B&W slim filter, you know that these slip-on caps tend to slip off all the time!  Pinch caps, on the other hand, stay in place nicely.

Much to my surprise, I found a nice pinch-style cap for the 30.5mm thread (on the Sekonic 758) at the local Best Buy.  Sunpak makes a $5 blister pack with two pinch-caps that fit 28mm, 30mm. and 30.5mm threads.  One is a 28mm cap, and the other fits both 30mm and 30.5mm.  The catalog number is LC-2830-BB, and the product line is called “PlatinumPlus.”

Pair this lens cap with a Sigma cap keeper (basically an adhesive cap holder on a string), and you have a great, tethered cap for the 758 light meter or other 30.5mm filter!  Hurray!

Tip: Use the cap included in the Sekonic 758 for the eyepiece/viewfinder side, instead.  Now, both the viewfinder and lens are protected.

Oh, happy day!  Mozilla Firefox 3 now supports color management!  This means color-aware browsing of photos and images in a decent browser.  Windows users didn’t have a mainstream color-aware browser available until Firefox 3.

To activate this breakthrough in WinXP:

1. Install and launch Firefox 3.
2. Type in “about:config” in the URL box.  (Ignore the warning about making custom configurations.)
3. Find “gfx.color_management.enabled” and double-click to set the value to TRUE.
4. Find “gfx.color_management.display_profile” just above the previous entry and point this to your ICC/ICM monitor profile.
5. Close and restart Firefox.

Tip:

• Find your monitor profile in
  C:\Windows\system32\spool\drivers\color

• From Windows Explorer, click & drag your monitor profile into the Firefox URL box, and Firefox will give you the path in “Firefox’ form.

• Example:
  file:///C:/WINDOWS/system32/spool/drivers/color/my_monitor_profile.icc
• Enter this “file:///…” string into the Firefox gfx.color_management.display_profile field.

Enjoy browsing with a color-managed browser!!!  Photos look so much better in true color!

For those of you not using Firefox, go to the International Color Consortium to check if your current brower supports color management.  (IE7 currently does not.)

This is what I typically carry around in most outdoor, walk-around shooting situations:

Lowepro 75 AW top-loading holster bag
(great for dusty and damp situations)

Really Right Stuff Arca-Swiss L-bracket
(for tripod shooting)

Singh-Ray LB Warming Polarizer (slim)
(for landscapes)

Hoya Pro-1 S-HMC UV filter
(B+W MRC filters work great, too)

Lens hood

Extra compact flash cards

Extra batteries

WhiBal gray-card reference
(for white balance; “studio” size works well)

Allen wrench for RRS bracket

Gallon- and quart-sized Ziplock bags
(for cold-weather and wet shoots)

My favorite walk-around lens at the moment is the 17-55 f/2.8 DX lens. The eventual prosumer full-frame Nikon DSLR with the new 24-70mm f/2.8 lens would be a dream combination, but the 17-55 DX is no slouch!

In ultra-light situations, I just take the 18-200 VR on a D40/D40x/D60 with a few SD cards and an extra battery. All of this fits compactly in the Lowepro Rezo TLZ 20 toploading holster bag. These consumer DSLRs have such great battery life that I could ditch the bag and just put an 8GB or 16GB SD card and go!

In the no-DSLR, ultra-ultra-light situation, I carry the Fujifilm F31FD point-and-shoot gem. One battery and a 2GB XD (yes, XD, blah) card last for a whole day’s worth of shooting. Stop down a little to avoid the dreaded purple fringing.

The list of items explodes for wedding and event shooting. Flash photography equipment sure takes up a lot of bag space! More on that later…

P.S.  Some online stores say that the D60 + 18-55 VR kit lens will fit in a Lowepro TLZ 10.  Unfortunately, this combo won’t fit.  The D40 + non-VR kit lens will probably fit, but the newer kit lens is just a little to long!  Use the TLZ 20 instead.

Shooting spring flowers is a great exercise in composition.  How do you manage the foreground, background, “middleground”, focal point, colors, perspective, depth of focus, highlights/shadows, etc?  Shooting dense flower beds really helps you to explore your compositional style.

I like shooting dense flower beds, in particular, because you need to strictly control the elements that appear in your frame.  Are you going to keep that leaf, the other flower, or the base of the background flower in the photo?  How can you manage the viewers’ perspective relative to the ground and the sky?  How can you make the picture “edgier?”  In particular, how do foreground and background colors change the feel of the composition?

Anyways, I highly recommend visiting your local park in the spring.  You can learn a lot about your own compositional style, likes and dislikes without having to do much trekking!

Yes, the Nikon 18-200 VR lens is a real, compact gem, and yes, it suffers from zoom creep after some use. (In other words, if you point the lens straight up or down while at ~135mm, the lens will zoom in or out because of gravity. The best solution that I’ve found (and there are many out there) is a simple silicone wristband (black). These are the same wristbands that have been popularized by Lance Armstrong’s “Live Strong” campaigns.

Don’t stick tape on the lens barrel as tape can come loose or leave nasty adhesive inside your lens barrel. Thin rubber bands don’t seem to stay put very well. The silicone wristbands are prefect except that they end up covering all the focal-length markings. Using a “clear” wristband solves this issue, but the band looks more like a white band, which isn’t as elegant as black. I use a black wristband and mark off key focal lengths with a permanent market somewhere else on the lens barrel.

A silicone wristband costs about $1. It’s a cheap and elegant solution to a problem that probably should have been corrected in Nikon’s original design.

Stores sell these specialized metal bars that magically wash away garlic oils/scents on your hands. These bars often cost around $10. What’s the secret? They’re stainless steel!

So, you can save yourself counter space and a few dollars by using your run-of-the-mill stainless steel spoon, instead. Why stainless steel pulls away garlic oils so effectively is still a mystery to me. There’s some good chemistry behind this phenonemom, but I haven’t seen a definitive explaination— only speculation…

DataRescue’s PhotoRescue software suite is an essential piece of software for the photo toolbox. It’s the most effective tool that I’ve tested for data recovery on flash drives. The Wizard version will work for most snags with accidental formatting and data loss, but there are even more powerful Expert and Advanced versions, too.

Sandisk’s RescuePro also works quite well, but I found that the current version at the time of this writing (4.0) has trouble with the Nikon D300 RAW+JPEG files. Since RAW files also contain embedded JPEG thumbnails, RescuePro does not always parse the binary image data correctly. It truncates some RAW files while augmenting some JPEGs. These recovered RescuePro data files can be manually spliced and joined to recover the RAW and JPEG data (very tedious!), but PhotoRescue Wizard was able to parse everything correctly with no hassle.

So, why did I end up needing recovery software in the first place? Well, we all have our CF card downloading habits/sequences. Shooting over 1,000 images on one CF card results in another directory being created. I formatted the 16GB CF card before downloading the second directory. Thankfully, all the data is easily and quickly recovered with PhotoRescue. PhotoRescue also allows you to make a binary image of the CF card so that you can use other tools in the future should you find that there are any problems with your data recovery.

What’s the lesson?

1. Always double-check that you download all the CF card data before formatting? This seems so obvious, but habits throw a wrench into things.

2. $29 is worth the money for PhotoRescue! There are a lot of more expensive programs out there, but this one’s worth the money. Search around the web, and you’ll find a lot of more detailed, praising reviews.

A Haiku…

La Jolla Nights

Beautiful coastlines
Expensive homes on the hill
No eats after 9

A sign of the times:

One of the top 100 searches in Google on Dec. 24 was “Is Santa real?”  Ten years ago, young kids wouldn’t have thought to get such answers from an internet search engine.  Instead, they would have to leave cookies and milk, try to stay up to see the big man, or rig up a Polaroid photo mechanism in the chimney.  Google takes the fun out of the hunt.

In a few years, I can just imagine 6 and 7 year-old boys and girls hitting the forums to ask such things… maybe on their neon or Dora-the-Explorer Blackberries…