Andrew Macpherson

After all the trouble last year I’ve been treating the MacBook Air with kid gloves, so it was with considerable horror that I felt the hinge graunch again.  This time the insurance company fixed it without prevarication, but qualified its return with “will not cover this fault again” which I think would be a prima facie case for return to vendor under European extended warranty legislation.

I don’t want to try it out.  The MacBook Air is now on Ebay and I’ve switched to a slightly heavier MacBook Pro with a nice big 500Gb disc.  The Air is beautiful, easy to use, light and just plain cool.  It is however too fragile for me.

Pros: can be taken where tripods are banned, magnetic attachment very slick, good hiking staff, easy to deploy as a stand
Cons: mount locking clip fragile and easy to lose, attachment screw for legs section falls apart

This review was first published on the Warehouse Express website

“I had a problem — I’m a dedicated tripod user, and the holiday firm advised that tripods are either a source of hassle or local revenue in Marrakech. Additionally I’m a bit stiff with tendonitis so a walking staff seemed a good idea. I spent a week on the internet looking at alternatives and the excellent videos on the Trek-tech website convinced me. (continue reading…)

NeoCube

My friend David very kindly gave me a cute toy for the Solstice — a set of Neodymium spherical magnets marketed as the NeoCube — they’re fairly small but extremely powerful. Once one gets over being able to have a handful of ball-bearings that don’t go flying off in all directions,the obvious use is for still life exercises.  One can make rather amazing structures as the photo demonstrates, and the videos on the company’s website are an entree to endless hours of frustration.

So anyway it’s a nice difficult subject to light and photograph.  highly polished spherical items.  I had fun with soft-boxes, and black and white foam boards till I got a set of reflections that I liked,  Then the fun begins, to try to photograph it.  The image will only be in focus for very slightly more than a hemisphere at F11 with a full set of macro tubes.  I’ll be making a later post with some good links about circles of confusion, hyperfocal distance and the digital vs film non-issue triggered by thinking about this. (continue reading…)

 

The problem a refurbished flat, with plenty of space that just isn’t getting potential renters through the door to look.  The idea is to break out of the mould of sterile pictures, and try to add some aspirational zing to the advertising.

Jessica very kindly offered to do the shoot on a TFP/CD basis to build up her portfolio, with a view to getting pro modelling and film extra work.  I think that the results were worthwhile — have a look at the studio shots in my portrait folder as well — the sepia head shot makes a wonderful canvas.  Jessica was a joy to work with, and made my job much easier.  Life as a photographer is so much better when the subject also wants to look good.

Equipment: Canon 5D, 70-200 f4 L, Elinchrom D-Lite 2 Go, Chinese wireless flash trigger, shooting tethered to the MacBook Air.  Shooting tethered allowed Jessica to get a feel for how the shots were coming out, and, seeing that helped her to work with me to improve the results.

Yipee! the MacBook Air is back, apparently fully fixed.

“2^nd top case fitted and tested, connector onto main logic board is strengthened”

It was the rest of the response that surprised me: (continue reading…)

Well the MacBook Air got to BackStage and of course was working perfectly.  I had however described the symptoms, and pointed them to this blog for the earlier description of the fault, so they concluded it was something to do with the motion sensors on the top case (which protect the hard disk by withdrawing the heads, amongst other functions), and decided to replace the keyboard and trackpad again.  They checked after doing the work, and everything seemed fine — and I’m completely sure it did, in no way do I wish to imply otherwise, there’s nothing so frustrating as a customer fault that isn’t there when you try to replicate it for diagnosis.  The repair finished too late on Friday for the delivery pickup, so it shipped out on Monday.

Picking up the Macbook Air

Tuesday morning: the chap from TNT is getting to be a regular visitor.  He arrived with the Macbook Air at 10:55 and by 11:10 I was on the phone to Backstage again.  I had

1. Unpacked the MacBook again.
2. Plugged in the power supply, and clicked the mag-power into place to re-charge
3. Logged in to check that it was apparently working
4. Reconnected with my wireless LAN — for some reason it had lost the preferred  list
5. Checked the date and time
6. Started the Spyder 3 utility to check the screen colour  calibration
7. And that was it ….

I picked up the MacBook Air, exactly as in the picture, and it froze, requiring an external USB mouse to shut it down. (continue reading…)

Ever feel “They saw me coming?”   I usually do after a photography related transaction.

The other day I was looking for an extended shutter release, say 5m or so.  Canon’s own brand for my EOS 5D was about £40 for the nice handy one one uses in conjunction with the tripod, — about 0.8m in length.  to extend it Canon offer a 10m cable with appropriate plug and socket at either end for a mere £80.   This certainly feels like the Mickey is being taken somewhat.

Slightly better, EOS magazine are offering a wireless (radio not IR)  remote for £50, with a good long range,  but it really is a case of E-Bay to the rescue, as it cuts out most of the middle men between Chinese manufacturer and consumer.  Even when you add in £11 handling charge by the royal mail for paying the duty, one can still win massively.

In this case I got a wireless remote, with pre-release focus and bulb mode, for £12, no shipping, and it was under the duty threshold (£18)  At the same time I indulged myself in a macro focusing rail — you know — one of those bits of precision metalwork that the tripod makers want about £200 for?  From the same supplier in China it was a mere £32 and offered side-to-side as well as in-and-out adjustment.

And the delivery only took 5 days.

Shopping around the globe is now trivially easy.  Where there is no good reason to go with the original manufacturer’s accessories, it really pays

Well I have to say that once the MacBook got to Backstage, the repairers, they achieved a swift turn-around, and had it back to me, with the connectors changed, and apparently working in short order.

And so it continued for nearly 3 weeks.

I use this MacBook Air as a laptop, not as a portable desktop to move from table to table, but genuinely as something to sit in my lap, or on the arm of my chair, the tray table in a plane or wherever I’m going.  I want to be able to review pictures quickly in consultation with the sitter / client… (continue reading…)

I love my MacBook Air, it’s beautifully light and small.  Mostily it’s light, and so can go in my camera bag when I travel without my having to turf out half my lenses (except when flying Ryanair), so it was a great blow when the hinge fell apart.

It turns out that this is a well documented failure mode, for some units.  Just a well, as replacing two bits of shoddy plastic hinge might otherwise cost £350, to replace the whole screen.  The repair was rejected by 2 authorized repairers before I got on to Apple directly citing the notes in their own fora.  Apple of course came up trumps, and said that their repairers had been notified to watch out for this fault.

However since it came back the keyboard and track pad (did I say how nice the track pad on these is BTW?) have gone out to lunch, been replaced, and on arriving back here again were both still away for coffee — not even working at bios level.  :-( .   This time I plugged in an external keyboard and mouse, to un-register Photoshop before sending it away again — two weeks with Photoshop in three months is difficult, even when you have 16G CF cards in your camera. (continue reading…)

Speaking of mount board as I did in the last note. I’ve just upgraded from the Logan Compact mount cutter to the Model 450 Intermediate Mat Cutter.

The Model 301 did the job, but it had 2 prolems as far as I was concerned

1. The guide rail is sprung, rather than hinged. This turns out to be a major pest.
2. The bed is too short to cut A1 mountboard along it’s length

Of these having my fingers eaten by the sprung guide rail was top of my reasons to change.  Didn’t lose more than the VAT when I sold the old compact on E-Bay they seem to keep their value well, and I’m very pleased with the upgrade.

Both versions come with the same very useful how-to DVD to get one going