Tuesday 16 July 2019

I Had A Busy Day Planned,


as I wanted to start again with my infrared photography,


now that Diana is out at work, I have some spare time, the camera we normally use was a half of the pair I use for our infrared photography, so we needed a replacement for our everyday photography, also we had decided that the Mamiya 645 film camera that we had that I have not used in years, could be traded in for a new camera, so off I went,

 to the Embankment tube station, a walk past Charing Cross,

 where a little drama seemed to be taking place,

 and I passed one of the twelve memorial crosses in England, and made my way to the London Camera Exchange,

where I had a good chat with one of the guys there, Diana and myself had already decided on a Sony A7II a great deal if you are in the market for a new camera, so price agreed on the trade in, and in a really nice gesture from the London Camera Exchange, I was given an extra battery, which was nice of them, and I was then on my way home, but first another stop,


as we are planning on a few picnics we decided to buy a small bluetooth speaker, and here it is a Bush Retro Speaker, we listened to it last night and it was so nice to listen to, the sound excellent, surprisingly so as it was under £20.00, I also picked up a 2TB external hard drive, both of these at Sainsbury's in Beckenham where they operate a 'click and collect' deal with Argos, the hard drive purchase was so that I can have all of my infrared images in the same place, rather than have them all over the place on our other 4 external drives with photographs on them, 

 so home I went,

 if you are not interested in photography skip this bit, our daily Lumix G8 now joins its converted infrared brother, which I had converted at Protech Photographic a few years ago, and good they were too,

 so normal pictures in one and infrared in the other, note the sensors where the flash would normally be, although it does not look it, both cameras and lenses are exactly the same,

 switched on and ready to go, the camera on the left is the infrared converted one, on the right the normal camera, the reason for all of this is if you want to take a long exposure and have two cameras taking pictures of the same scene in a different way, in my case one normal and one infrared, it is difficult not to have the cameras suffer from camera shake when touching and pressing both shutter buttons, so as well as the mounting rail, I use both cameras timers to give a 2 second delay in operating,

 and with a flick of wrist into portrait mode,

 I bought two of these, Oppilas wireless shutter controls, I used the camera end of both of them but I only need to use one of the hand held releases as one controls both cameras,

and here is a brief summary of what the unit can do, for myself all I need them to do is to switch both cameras on as the duration (shutter speed), I will have already set on both cameras, now this is important, if you are going to buy any aftermarket equipment like these, make sure they are made for your camera, as each of the major brands has a different remote cable socket on the camera, if you want see my efforts so far from a few years ago, have a look here at our infrared blog, not to everyone's taste but for myself great fun, for the rest of the afternoon and evening both camera and speaker were on charge,

Diana called after finishing work, so down to the station where I picked her up for the walk home, after an hour or so playing with our new toys and one from Game of Thrones we were then off to bed.


2 comments:

Jil Wrinkle said...

Just a thought: Instead of an external drive, you might want to think about DropBox. It is ridiculously easy set up and makes it impossible to lose your files. Plus you can access your files from any computer at any time and easily share files or folders with anybody. I get 2 TB for US$10 per month. I keep everything on it... all my important documents, photo collection, music collection. I also keep whatever video series I am currently watching in DropBox so that I can watch programs on my phone if I'm out and have some spare time, because I also have DropBox on my phone.

PattayaStan said...

Dear Jil, I tried DropBox, a long time ago but when I got to 10TB it all started looking a bit expensive, so I went with the 5 now 6 external drives, I have two 4TB drives the others are all 2TB, the trouble is I keep so many pictures, for every one on the blog there are so many more that I have but just can not bring myself to throw away! best regards, Stan and Diana.