Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Shutterbug stirrings

Well that's Easter over for another year. Now we can get back to some good old fashioned serious consumer spending.

One of the things I want to buy is a new tripod for my camera. I have one which I bought when I was with the Australian Army in Vietnam in 1966. It still has a dyno tape label with my name and unit on one of the legs. I used it to support my 35mm Pentax Spotmatic in those days. The camera wore out long ago - some of the rubbery bits inside deteriorated from old age, like with me.

The aluminium tripod sort of still looks okay, but various screws have been replaced over time, and setting it up properly is a frustrating business.

I've been doing some web research on tripods. There are zillions of them, and most seem pricey. One of the brands which took my eye was Manfrotto. A salesman at Valentine's camera shop in Fremantle said they were the Ferraris of the tripod world. Fast and expensive. They are doing a Camerahouse catalogue deal this month on one - $299 - gasp! I'd figured on only spending about a hundred bucks, or less. I'm going to have to shop around for a while.

When I was at Valentines I bought a couple of Hoya UV filters to protect my two Nikon D80 AF (auto focus) lenses. This was prompted by the discovery of a greasy finger print (not mine) on one of them a couple of weeks ago. If you take a look at the picture of the hay bales I took at Yornaning, the incriminating evidence can be seen with a blur in the lower right corner. I promise to do better in future.

Something else I need is a better camera bag. The one I have is too small to carry a couple of other useful Nikon AF lenses left over from my film camera days. They're ten years old but still work fine with the modern digital camera. One of them is a wide angle lens which I bought second hand after it had spent it's first life with the local Post Newspaper Group. They changed over from Nikon to Canon.

With the bag, I'm thinking along the lines of a small backpack with padded sections for the different bits of gear. I'll do some careful research there too, but probably not on the web. I'll need to touch and feel. Could be more than a hundred bucks involved, knowing my tastes.

I bought a new 2 gig SD card for the camera last week. OfficeWorks advertised them for $19.95. It was only about three years ago when I paid over $100 for a 250 meg card.

When my son left on his overseas trip a couple of weeks ago he took a 4 gigabyte card which cost him about $60. I urged him to take greater care with composing his photos this time. When he came back from a trip to southern Africa two years ago most of his efforts looked like they had been taken by a drunken chimp.

A better flash unit is something else I'd like. The pop-up one on the D80 is puny, and only useful for stuff like closeups of Milly the pup. But decent Nikon Speedlights are expensive too - like several hundreds of dollars. I'm not ready to go there yet. I have a Speedlight from my film camera. It cost hundreds of dollars too, but unlike the old auto focus lenses, it won't work on the modern digital cameras. Now it's useless.

On Easter Sunday I took a few photos with an old lens of some of the chocolate merchandise which arrived in this house. I've put the images in a file called 'Easter eggs' on my Picasa site. Maybe you saw similar chocolate lines in your house too?

Easter Monday was pretty boring so I did a bit of net surfing and discovered via Google News a 'scientific' claim that sex had been invented in South Australia. Wow! Amazing science! In an idle moment I bunged off a response to the Adelaide Advertiser. You can read my note and the original article by clicking here.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.

Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

About the writer

Click here to see our backyard.

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!