Canon 20D; The obituary.

After dunking my faithful 20D in the ocean a few weeks back, I decided to send it to Canon and see if it was fixable. At first they quoted me $300 for the repair, based on (I guess) my description of the problem.

So I sent the camera in, hopeful. After receiving it and actually looking at the guts, they determined there was "Severe liquid damage to the internal parts. Cost
of repair is equal to replacement value. Unit is beyond economical
repair. We are, therefore, returning your equipment to you un-repaired". I received the dead unit back today.

Bummer. Good thing there I had "Idiot Insurance".

So, on to "Plan B", I suppose. Dissection of the 20D as described here (note: it's a PDF):

www.customslr.com/technical/EOS_20D_Parts%20Catalog.pdf

It probably won't accomplish much besides satisfying my curiosity of what lies inside the little magic black box. But there's not much else to do with it at this point. An who knows, maybe with some rinsing in tap water, something will revive. I know, doubtful. It's far more likely I'll end up with a dozen little zip-lock bags of parts. (I plan on putting one PDF-page-worth of dissected parts per zip-lock bag, so reassembly is at least theoretically possible. Theoretically.

Ready?...GO!

This post is like one of those episodes of "Lost" where they summarize the whole season in a single hour...

Aiight, many weeks (months?) since my last post. Busy beyond reason. Here's my "season summary":

--Finished the planning of, and participated in, the perfect wedding to the perfect girl (awww). Complete with slideshow.

--Went on a 10 day honeymoon to Maui. Vacation...fantastic. 12 hours in the airplane each way...not so much. But it was a good enough reason for me to buy a fancy new iPod. Welcome to 2001. I love the bleeding edge.

--Biked down a volcano on a too-small 60lb beachcomber while wearing a bigass motorcycle helmet.

--Snorkled with sea turtles



--Watched the sunset (and sunrise...different days) from the top of a 10,000' volcano.



--Saw a sugarcane harvest, where they flash-burn acres of sugarcane fields creating mushroom clouds (and tons of smoke and soot all over the island).



--Saw the grave of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh on the absolute ass-end of Maui (but oh, what a scenic ass-end it is!).



--Snorkeled at Molokini...extra cool, half-eroded volcanic crater just off of Maui.

--3 or 4 days into the trip, I dunked my 20D in the Pacific right about here, killing it. Worst part about it is that I had to spend the remaining week of our trip with an extra-crappy semi-underwater point-and-shoot. The resulting shots were not pretty. Anyway, here's the final shot (at least it was a nice one). My girl, in the rain, in front of a rainbow while stopped along the Hana Highway in NE Maui. Shot number 16,932. Only two years old. Last frame of the 20D. Farewell, friend.



--Filed an insurance claim for my soggy camera.

--Bought a new 30D. Hello, new friend!

--Did tons of other fantastic, touristy things on Maui, but I can't remember any more. Besides, my eyes are going crossed from looking at this computer screen all day.

--Came back to an office moving in two weeks (that was two weeks ago).

--Moved the office this past weekend. Including new phone system, new phone service, new network hardware, and countless glitches. Today was the first day back for the users. Oh man. I need a vacation.

Weak!

'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin dead.

I guess if you gotta check out, doing what you love while snorkling the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is an OK way to go.

I was never a huge fan, but if I was bored lying on the couch on a rainy Saturday afternoon and I happened across "The Crocodile Hunter", I'd watch for a bit. He definitely did a lot for the conservation movement, and his help in that field will be greatly missed, I fear.

The Crocodile Hunter was the second (as far as I know) of the "Hey, there's something creepy and slimy in that dark hole in the rock-face, I'm gonna jam my arm in there and pull whatever it is out!" naturalists, and I like that (as, obviously, did a great many fans around the world). It was much more interesting to me than the "We're sitting in our Land Rover with our cameras and 800mm zoom lenses shooting video of a lion a mile away taking down a zebra" style.

The first and foremost "creepy thing in the hole...let's grab it" naturalists was (is?) the great Aussie Harry Butler. Harry hosted a show in the 70s called "In the Wild with Harry Butler". I caught it two decades later in re-runs, but it hadn't lost any of it's charm. Harry looked like an outback hermit,



and he would do the creepiest shit (for example, swim in a water hole with a bigass croc and a decomposing kangaroo corpse...cuz it was the only water for 100 miles, and he was hot). Since the first day I had internet access, I've searched for tidbits of info on Harry and "In the Wild" with no luck (literally, zero results). It's probably been a year or two since I last looked, and in looking again, it's nice to see there is a bit more info on him now (thanks to Wikipedia and everything2). There was an entry on Harry on Wikipedia, but nothing for "In The Wild" specifically, so I created a brief blurb. Hopefully I, or someone else, will be able to flesh [thanks Ben] out the article in the future.

Anyway. I've gotten off-topic. The point of this post was mainly to say "Farewell, Steve". Your acting was a bit over-the-top, but your contributions to the conservation movement will be missed.

The saga ends

For the last week or two, I've been fighting with my truck, trying to get it to pass an emissions test so I could re-register it (due today, naturally). (I won't even get into how much of a scam the emissions testing process is for modern vehicles. Let's just say that they no longer sniff your exhaust and get an actual check of the output of your truck, they just read your computer and get a theoretical check of what the output of your truck *may be*. So when my truck was throwing error codes that probably had nothing to do with it's actual output, they failed me. But anyway...I said I wasn't going to get into it). Last night, with DT's help, I finally got the last bits fixed and got the error codes cleared. Today, I took it back and had it re-tested. It passed. *Whew*.

So I went to the DMV website to re-register and decided to treat myself to some license plate fun. I registered a fancy plate with a personalized message...



Basically it says "Dead F*ckin' Last singlespeed" baby! Which is where I typically finish every ride. No sense setting your sights too high. You might let yourself down.

f/8 and BE THERE!

The f/8 part is easy. It's the BE THERE that stumps me most often.

Last night, 'round midnight, they blew up a section of the old Woodrow Wilson Bridge here in DC. I thought it might have had the potential to be a cool photo op. I debated heading down to shoot it, knowing there might not be a good vantage point for us non-credentialed-journalists to shoot from. So I bailed on the idea. I should have at least tried. I'm so lame.

So, instead of seeing photos of what I may have gotten, here's a shot that a credentialed photographer from the Washington Times got:


(Click the photo to go to the Wash Times story on the demolition.)

On the Wash Post's site there is a cool, short Shockwave movie of the demolition as it happens. The page with the link to the movie is here

From the looks of both the video and still photo, there must have been a press room set up in one of the apartments right next to the highway. I gotta get me some o' them credential things.

Be there. Be there. Be there. Be there. It sounds so easy.

Baby steps are better than no steps

A couple of weeks back, I mentioned that my buddy Michael from Speedgoat Cycles in PA wanted to use one of my photos of him from Lodi in an ad for their shop. Well, the ad is out in the latest issue of Dirt Rag (Issue 123).

As thanks for the photo, Michael was kind enough to send me a copy of the mag, a Speedgoat shirt, and a couple of pair of bike socks. Actual payment (of sorts) for a photo. That almost makes me a professional, doesn't it? Time to update that resume!

In other, similar "Holy crap that's my photo in print" news, local racer, rider and writer Joel Gwadz had his story published in the free Mid-Atlantic cycling mag "Spokes". The story was about the recent Wednesdays at Wakefield race series and was accompanied by a couple of my shots of the racers (like this one of the author). Visit a local bike shop and grab your stack...er...copy today!

Photography stuff I learned yesterday

Yesterday Ben and I got on the subject of flash photography. (In my humble opinion, photography has about as much in common with flash-photography as snow skiing does with rodeo-clowning. Anyawy...). We started discussing high-speed synch flash work. I explained how I *thought* it worked, but had to admit...I had no proof to back up my idea. So I did some Googling[tm] and came up with the following web site. It seems to explain the reasons I wasn't happy with many of my Wednesdays @ Wakefield mountain bike race photos. For many of them, I was seeing blur in the riders, so I'd up the shutter speed (beyond the 1/250 synch speed). Instead of freezing the action more, it actually blurred it. I never really *got* why until now.

http://webs.lanset.com/rcochran/flash/hss.html

This site offered some nice insights that I thougth I'd pass along. The most important points of the site (for me, anyway) are:

"...there is a somewhat widespread misunderstanding that high speed sync would be useful for stopping motion in action photography. Since it's called "high speed sync", it seems reasonable on the surface to presume that it would be good for photographing objects moving at high speed. But this is not the case. "

...

"With ordinary flash, the first curtain of the shutter opens fully, and then the flash electronically turns on and off, faster than any mechanical shutter could possibly open and close. Finally, the second shutter covers up the film."

...

"The problem with "high speed sync" for action photos is that it works by making the flash slow down. Since the camera's shutter can't open fully in less time than its max normal sync speed, the film can't be exposed all at once at high shutter speeds. Exposure must be controlled by the shutter's slit traveling across the film, exposing different parts of the film successively. Instead of giving one almost-instantaneous burst of light, the flash gives a sequence of many pulses of light, approximating a continuous light source during the time the shutter is open."

So there you go. A 2 minute primer on high-speed synch flash photography. Hope you enjoyed it.