TRAVEL 67 : Chris Willson Photography

I was out snorkeling a week ago and found this camera in amongst the coral. It’s a nice camera. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I’m a big fan of these waterproof shockproof point and shoots that can take a licking and keep on clicking. The problem is that this camera had been underwater for days if not weeks or even months. Water head leaked inside the body so that the camera no longer worked and the 8GB micro SD card inside was unreadable.

As is probably clear from the photo (or the title of the blog) the culprit here is the ever so convenient quick release strap connector. The owner lost their camera and quite possibly all their photos from their holiday / honeymoon / deployment in Okinawa.  (If this is your camera please get in touch. I’ll hold onto the micro SD card so that if the owner does get in touch and wants to send the card to a data recovery specialist they can give it ago.)

Which leads me to the fact that many aftermarket camera straps have quick release systems at both ends of the strap. These clips are said to be very secure, but it would only take one of them to come loose for the camera to drop unceremoniously from your neck to the ground.

I understand the desire to be able to remove your camera strap quickly and easily from the camera body, but I needed a better balance of risk versus convenience. For my 645D, I now use the original strap plus two small locking carabineers to attach it to the camera.

So today’s question is… What camera strap are you using?

Press the DISP button on the 645D camera and an Electronic Level Display appears on the rear monitor. It measures the degree of tilt both horizontally and vertically. Green means you’re level on a particular axis, then yellow bars show the level of tilt until you hit red.

In the shot above you can see that the camera is angled approximately 3.5 degrees down on the vertical axis (7 yellow bars), and off the scale on the horizontal axis (red).

Why is this a great thing to have? If you’d wanted the camera perfectly level when you took the photograph but found you had it angled, you will have to rotate and crop the image. Depending on the degree of tilt, this cropping will result in you having a smaller image to work with, or even losing part of the image.

I use a ball head (rather than a pan head) with my tripod which means I will be using this feature a lot when shooting landscapes or cityscapes. I’m not saying all photographs should be taken perfectly level, but if you’re trying to keep things from going askew, the E.L.D. makes it a little easier.

Pentax has announced that a new super wide lens will arrive in April for the Pentax 645D system. It looks like it will be an amazing piece of equipment. At 25mm it will be the equivalent of a 19.5mm lens on a FF 35mm camera. If mounted on a film 645 camera (or a future full frame 645D) it will be the equivalent of 15.5mm.  Similar to the new 55mm it has excellent optics enclosed in a weatherproof body. An interesting thing to note is the built in filter holder behind the large curved front lens. The dial on the left allows you to rotate a circular polarizer while the filter is sealed away inside the lens. This is a great feature, and is something I really like about my huge 67 400mm lens.  A few things that may rise a few eyebrows…

 

At 1070 grams this is going to add a fair bit of weight to your camera bag.

At around 4000 dollars (￥361,782 at Amazon.co.jp) this is a serious amount of money.

It is very pleasing to see that Pentax is continuing to develop new lenses for the 645D system. One of the initial worries about the 645D camera was the lack of wide angle lenses, making the system quite limited when used alone. Now with the arrival of the 25mm, there is a least the possibility of going wide, I just need to sell a kidney to do so 🙂

Took the bullet train from Okayama to Osaka. I’m not a trainspotter, but it’s hard not to be impressed by these trains.

The N700 is the latest version of the 700 series train. Max speed is 300 km/h (186 mph) and, due to its ability to tilt, it can take curves in the track at 270 km/h.