Michael Chang

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.)