Michael Chang

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.