This morning, having seen the sun peeping through the breaks in the cloud, I decided to take my new lens for a little walk around Oxford…
Photo tour…

Having finally got my new bag home and installed all my camera equipment I think I can give a meaningful initial review of the Crumpler “Brian’s Hot Tab” photographic and laptop rucksack.

The “Brian’s Hot Tub” is the largest of the Crumpler rucksack style bags for photographic equipment. It’s about the same size as a large standard rucksack you would get from the likes of Karrimor etc. and the outer shell is made of a very similar material.

Unlike any other rucksack I’ve come across, the bag opens by unzipping around the inside edge of the back, the part which rest upon the user’s back, and the flap then folds down giving complete access to the internals. Attached to this flap, by an ingenious set of flaps and velcro, is the removable laptop pouch which is easily big enough to fit my rather large laptop though there’s no storage for the power supply.

Within the main body of the bag can be found the photographic storage unit. This is a separate sub-unit again velcro’ed into the shell and can easily be removed so that the bag can be used as a standard rucksack. It’s well padded and has a mesh front which zips around the outer edge of the unit. Internal to this are a large number of shaped partitions, all velcro’ed together and a small sub-unit faced with another zipped mesh front.

Externally there are two fair sized pockets on the front of the bag and one on the right side. On the left there is one fixed loop and one adjustable loop to allow the carrying of a tripod. I’ve tried my Manfrotto 055MF3 and that fits in there easily.

The overall build quality is very good, as you would hope with a bag with a list price of around £170 (though I picked mine up for £130). The shoulder straps are wide, well placed and shaped with a buckle to attach them across the chest. There is an optional waist band, costing around £12, but I don’t have that to test.

The only niggles I have with the bag are as follows:-

(1) Because of its highly modular construction the amount of space available for photographic equipment is rather more limited than you would expect from such a large bag.

(2) It would have been better is Crumpler had used an impervious sheet rather than mesh to cover the front of the photographic unit as this would have prevented dust generated by any other items stored in the bag from contaminating the photographic equipment. It would also have made the unit useful as storage of the equipment out of the bag for when you want to use the main shell as a normal rucksack. It would have been even better if the unit had a grab-handle on its top for this use as well, as the laptop unit has.

(3) There’s not obvious place to store any power units. This would be fine in the days of film but not today’s digital camera era, especially if you’re using this bag for travelling rather than as a day bag. This is also a problem with the laptop unit.

Not a great deal.

I’ve bought a Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 EX DG Macro lens for my camera. It cost £300 in the end. I’ve had a quick experiment with it this afternoon even though the light’s not wonderful outside. It does amazingly sharp macro photography.. when I can persuade the D70 to actually focus on the tiny thing I want (instead of somehting behind or nothing in particular) and stay still enough to keep at the correct focusing distance (which at F2.8 is a problem because there’s almost zero depth of field) when pressing the shutter button and when the wind stopped and the bush/tree with the lichen came to rest. 🙂

What did surprise me was how big and heavy the lens was. It’s about double the size and three times the weight of the Nikon 18-55mm DX lens which came with the D70. It’s Huuuuuuuge!

That’s about it, really. I’m off out to listen to the choir a friend sings in (Commotio) tonight at 8pm in Merton College Chapel. The last concert was quite nice and melodic, I’m not sure about this one. They do contemporary music you see and some of it can be quite “interesting” and non-melodic. Anyway, Katie was pleased with the large version of their CD cover I printed out so as to advertise their first CD in Blackwell’s.

[update]
You can see my experiments here. Ignore the tennis ball shots that was another experiment I did last Sunday with contrast in sunlight.

Having determined that in about 6 months time I will be getting an amount of money as an inheretance and also having been asked by Lindsey to do her wedding photos for her in a couple of months time I’ve decided to release £2000 of my current savings for the purchase of photographic equipment.

In the past week I’ve placed a pre-order for a Nikon D200 camera body. That’s going to take just over half the allocated funds on its own, about £1200. This leaves £800 for everything else I’ll need for this job.

Today I splashed out on the best tripod/head combination I could afford, i.e. a Manfrotto 055MF3 magnesium/carbon fibre 3 section tripod and a 222 joystick ball head. Seeing as the only ones of these T4 cameras in Witney had were on display they gave me a nice £20 discount on their retail price. Still, the combo still cost a hefty £250. So I now have left £550 for a big camera/computer backpack (Crumpler Brian’s Hottub, probably about £120-130) and a good, fast lens for inside work, something about F2.8 should do (there’s a Sigma EX series lens which should suit at around £250 as I can’t afford the equivalent Nikon at ~£1000).

From the Charles Curran via the Oxford BOFH mailing list [kirai.bitacoras.com]

This afternoon I popped into Morris Photographic, Oxford’s main independant camera shop, to look at tripods and to enquire about the Nikon D200 camera body and the Nikor 17-200mm VR lens.

The person behind the counter told me initially that if I did order the camera I’d be 3rd in line and that only a few days before they’d had a delivery of two cameras. Anyway, he decided to call up Nikon UK for an update…

The upshot of the conversation with Nikon UK was this:-

(a) Nikon UK have an order book for the D200 running into a few thousand but Nikon Japan are allocating only 500 cameras a month to the UK. It’ll be at least 6 weeks until Morris Photographic will get any more deliveries. (The person behind the counter later told me that there was no point in even taking my details as being interested in this case.)

(b) The delivery lead time for the 70-200mm F2.? lens which is not a cheap lens is currently 12 months.

(c) Nikon UK don’t even have a delivery timescale for the Nikor 17-200mm VR lens I want.

So, basically, don’t even bother trying to buy any Nikon gear unless it’s at least a year old and/or obsolete because you’ll not be able to get one. It looks like Nikon Japan aren’t interested in selling stuff in the UK.

Well, I’m not sure when my last posting was, really. Anyway, I’ll bring things up to date a little here.
Long posting a’hoy!

Well, I’ve just had a phone call from my Dad.

Apparently the cause of my Nan’s death was pneumonia according to the autopsy.

The funeral’s scheduled for Friday week.

I’ve also been informed that the estate is worth around £100K!

Well, that’s a very useful sum. It will pay off my morgage and car loan for a start. The rest will get invested. I’ll also invest the money I’d use to pay for the loan and morgage into the same pool every month. That should help it grow as well.

I *MAY* use some of the money for camera equipment (a good tripod/head, bag and maybe some good telephoto glass) but I’m not sure about that yet. I may just still save up from my normal funds. The £30K left over after paying the bills isn’t a huge amount so needs to be kept as pristine as possible.

Well, it’s been a mixed week and a bit.

The beginning of last week was my birthday. I did absolutely nothing to celebrate it on the day as no-one was available to go out. Similarly, the rest of the week, really. Just a quiet, boring routine of going to work and going to bed, really.

Friday was different, seeing as one of the postgrads in the department was going away for a month in Germany working a combined celebration event was hatched. Five of us went off to “The Gardener’s Arms” in Jericho and had some food. The pub is a completely vegetarian food place. I was surprised that the burger actually tasted of beef! Anyway, I wasn’t too keen on the chips as they were definitely McDonald’s fare rather than nice, thick juicy ones.. and they were too salty as well.

Saturday I woke up and wondered what to do with the day. Initially I thought of going into town and browsing in book shops but then I wondered if Rachel and Graham would mind if I popped in for an hour for a cup of tea and a chat. So, at 10am I phoned them up… As it turned out it was a nice day with soup and bread for lunch, much tea drinking, watching of rugby on the telly (only ever any interest to me if it’s a group effort) followed by a lovely roast chicken dinner followed by more natter. A bit more than I expected, really.

Sunday was quiet. The weather was wet and I just didn’t get around to doing much of anything.

So, now it was Monday morning, a normal Monday morning I thought. This changed as I was eating breakfast when the phone rang. It was my Dad. He had some sad news, my Nan had passed away at the nursing home where she had been living since my uncle died nearly two years ago. She was 99 and had been very frail for the last couple of years and had lost all connection to the present. All her recent (as in the last 50 years) memories had gone, she was also virtually blind and deaf. In a way it was a release.

My Nan said to me repeatedly over the years, talking about her house etc. “When I go, this will all be yours.” I used to always brush it off saying that she still had years ahead of her. Now, of course, she’s gone, the house being sold a couple of years ago after my uncle’s death and the money used to pay for the nursing home. I’m wondering just how little is left of that legacy now. The house sold for about £160,000 I think, but with nursing charges of (I think) about £1000 a week or maybe more, it’s probably pretty well all gone now.

So, here we are, it’s Tuesday morning and after a night of not sleeping well due to mind sinusitis I’m trying to work or, more importantly, think. It’s hard this morning.

There’s a reasonably interesting rant over on The Register about how poor the BBC’s on-line BytesSize revision aid is. Disregarding the English grammar flaw examples, the subject doesn’t seem to be well taught. Having also seen a number of the BytesSize television programmes for sciences I know a reasonable amount about I see the same types flaws in the knowledge being given to the students.

In some cases it’s a case of over simplification to the point where the facts being given are totally wrong and would give the student totally the wrong concept about the subject. In others, important and valuable information which would actually make the subject understandable is just left out.

Now, I have to wonder if this is all the BBC’s fault. Seeing as these revision guides are to help students pass their GCSE exams, surely they’re tailored to what those exams are requiring. i.e. The GCSE course syllabii are hopelessly broken, dangerously inaccurate and are teaching our students erroneous information which they will have to re-learn later if they go on to higher education (or even on to ‘A’ levels).