It’s been a bit over a year since I dropped my Nikon SB600, rendering it useless. When it happened I was able to disassemble the flash and identify the part which was damaged, but being a relative layman when it comes to circuit board components I didn’t know what to replace it with.

Apparently though, I wasn’t the only person to damage their SB600. Nor was I the only one who popped out the jewelers screwdriver and did a post mortem. David identified the part as a small inductor, and even provided the digikey part number that was the best fit to replace it.

Armed with the knowledge that someone else had repaired their strobe which suffered a similar fate, I felt empowered to take on the project myself. I ordered up half a dozen of the component from DigiKey and started psyching myself up for the project.

The repair

Now, I’m a pretty technically adept dude, and I’m not terrified to use a soldering iron. That said, I’m also not an electronics wizard so I did approach this project with some trepidation.

It took me a while to get the remnants of the old inductor off of the circuit board. The components on this board are all surface mounted, and I do not have a hot air rework station, just a simple soldering iron with a fairly sharp tip. The inductor did finally yield to my persistence and patience though.

Soldering the new one on proved a tad more difficult though. I had only one soldering iron, so I could only heat one of the two contact points at any given moment. As a result the new inductor is connected, but one of the contact pads is actually elevated quite a bit on top of a glob of solder. A little amateurish, but it gets the job done.

Modz

Since I was going to have the flash disassembled again, and since I had recently read this little teaser over on strobist, I decided to improve my strobe at the same time.

My first attempt to complete this mod was a complete failure as I managed to reverse the trigger and quench leads. I should have looked at this and maybe I could have avoided that. The failure was actually fairly hard to detect. See..

Both the trigger and quench signals are just a short to ground, and the both happen in such quick succession (trigger to start the flash, quench to stop it after a specified time) that it all happened well within the sync speeds I was testing at (1/60 if I recall). So it looked like the trigger was working, but the quench was not, when in actual fact the quench signal was triggering the flash and it was just popping at near full power! Oops!

After going back in and connecting the 1/8″ stereo jacks leads to the correct pins, I was still getting the same issue. This time though, it seems I have a problem with continuity between the quench pin and my stereo jack.

Results

At the end of the day, I chose not to try to fix the 1/8″ stereo jack mod since I didn’t want to pop the flash open again. I’m quite happy with the repair, and while my mod wasn’t quite as functional as I had hoped, it does give me the ability to trigger my SB600 using my radio triggers easily.

Okay I know what you’re thinking, and no I didn’t figure out how to turn a basic reciever into a studio receiver, but sadly, I’m simply not that cool. What I did do however was open the boxes for my two new RadioPopper JrX Studio receivers, put batteries in them, test them (oohh pretty), then instantly void their warranties. Why you ask? Because I can. Also because there were just a couple design choices which weren’t convenient for me so I wanted to tweak them to fit my workflow and needs a little better.

So, as part of my aforementioned shopping spree I decided it was time to upgrade my wireless triggering system. I was previously using the “Cactus v2s” triggers, which worked reasonably well but had limited range and reliability in spite of the fact that I performed hacks on those as well. My choice for a replacement is the JrX system from RadioPopper. In my case, one transmitter, and two Studio receivers. The studio receiver allows you to control the output of up to three groups of the White Lightning or AlienBees studio strobes and/or TTL Nikon or Canon speedlights (with yet to be released RPCubes). This works well for me because I have some old and new Nikon flashes with TTL, and when I step up to studio strobes, I’ll likely choose White Lightning and/or AlienBees.

So now to the nitty gritty stuff. Just like on my old Cactus triggers, I really wanted a nice way to mount or hang these triggers on a light stand. When I modded my Cactus triggers, I went a little crazy and bought 100 lanyards so I had plenty to spare. Sadly the receiver didn’t have any built in place to mount one, so I went searching for an appropriate place. I finally decided on putting it just below the data port which (if you’re looking at it from the front) is on the left side of the trigger. There is space there to drill two small 3/32 holes pretty close together to thread the lanyard through.

The other thing which bothered me about the receivers was the special battery that was required. Now, to the credit of RadioPopper, they chose a battery which is common enough that there is a market of rechargeable versions (the CR123A). And, even better David over at Strobist has done the hard work of finding a good package and strategy for keeping charged batteries in your gear. There’s a hitch though. The rechargeables will slowly discharge on the shelf or in my camera bag. I’m an amateur/hobbiest, and as such I only break out strobes and wireless triggers maybe once or twice a week. Chances are I’d have to replace the batteries just about every time I pulled my triggers out for use! Okay, so that’s an exaggeration, but stick with me for the punchline there are other reasons the battery RadioPopper chose doesn’t quite work for me.

Enter my second mod. Just like the one on the Cactus triggers, I replaced the proprietary 3v battery with a pair of good old fashioned AA cells so I can use some of my standard NiMH rechargeable batteries. Now, I know what you’re thinking, that I complained about the self discharge of the LiFeP04 battery and here I am replacing it with an even faster self discharging NiMH rechargeable? Well, yes, and for a few good reasons. First, I have a pretty good stock of rechargeable AA’s and chargers, and I have enough devices that run on them that I can be pretty confident I’ll have a charged up set ready for me when I’m shooting. There is also the excellent Eneloop NiMH battery which has a self discharge rate so low that you can consider it non existent for all practical uses. And lastly, in a pinch, I can find a crappy set of AA’s just about anywhere, and their superior mAh (usually 2000 or greater for an average rechargable AA, vs 750 mAh for the CR123A rechargeable) means they’ll last longer during use, and have more capacity to self discharge giving me a bigger time buffer for storage. In the end, it’s compelling enough for me to make the switch.

So there you have it, my two simple mods which make these great triggers just that much more user friendly for me. You can see a few more pictures of the mods in my Flickr photostream. All of those photos were taken with a Nikon SB24 which was triggered by a Radiopopper JrX receiver which was already modded, in case you were wondering if it worked. Now to wait impatiently for the RPCubes so I can control all my Nikon strobes!

So you likely know that I recently dropped and broke my Nikon SB600 flash. Disappointed as I was about this, I was already thinking of how I’d replace it. My searches for Nikon compatible flashes had always included these apparently super affordable Phoenix flashes. Now, of course, I was always very suspicious of these for a couple of reasons. First, in all the auctions and other sites selling these I never saw information indicating if this had ANY manual control, and there was never a picture of the rear panel of the unit! Second, there weren’t really any reviews of it online. I found a few, but usually it was on something like Amazon where it was fairly apparent that those reviewing were (at best) uninformed users who wouldn’t know the difference between a “good” flash and a bad one.

In spite of those facts though, I convinced myself that spending $80 to find out if the thing is any good couldn’t hurt, right? Wrong! The thing got shipped reasonably quickly to me from the eBay seller, and upon opening it up it seemed like it had some potential. Yes, it was kinda cheapy plastic and felt light, but that is what I expected for something so inexpensive. The real dissappoinment came when I put it on my camera, and snapped a few shots. You can see the results here. Needless to say this thing, even when doing full power pops, can’t provide enough light to expose a shot properly. This, in spite of the fact that it’s a big, imposing looking flash. They did a lot to try to make it look like an SB800, hinting that it might actually have some decent performance.

So now, to answer some questions I had about it. This is strictly intended for use with iTTL. The back panel just contains a couple switches, one to turn it on, and one to switch “modes, and a guide for ISO/zoom/distance that this flash supposedly covers. The switch to change between “BL” and “STD” has absolutely no influence on the poor performance. Using a Cactus v2s to pop it seems to do only a very low power pop and the flash does not seem to recharge afterward.

The zoom is manual which is to be expected, and goes from 28mm to 85mm. When I zoomed it in to 85mm, and fired it I noticed some artifacts from the lens/diffuser which were distracting see here.

My plan was to use it along with a Nikon SC-28 iTTL cable to simulate the way I was using my Nikon SB600 when shooting butterflies on the fateful day that I broke it. I figured that I would lose some convenience having to go with a cable, and zoom the flash manually. I didn’t anticipate that the thing wouldn’t have enough power to expose a frame properly! So if you’re wondering if this thing is any good, and maybe thinking you’re willing to give up a little performance and convenience for a STEAL of a flash, think again. You do, sadly, get what you pay for.

For what I did actually do to replace my Nikon SB600, stay tuned. I went on a bit of an ill advised shopping spree, and have some exciting stuff headed my way!

Welp, my Nikon SB600, which I’ve had for about a year and a half now has officially been declared dead. After dropping it yesterday it simply wouldn’t turn on anymore. I popped it open today hoping to discover what went wrong, after getting it pretty well apart, I noticed this.

Apparently the drop cracked the casing the F100 p3D (whatever that is) on the board. I did a bit of research and apparently permanent damage to the SB600 is fairly common after very minor drops, and in some cases they fail completely without any obvious trauma. I’m considering trying to identify and replace this part, but it’s a surface mount component, and I’ve never successfully soldered one of those. Anyone out there know what this thing is?

Even if I can repair it, I’m gonna go ahead and replace it. At the moment, I don’t want another SB600 after reading too many similar cases of failure, I don’t want to spend ~$300 for something that’s likely to get broken again quite easily. I’d like something that does TTL since that’s a big part of the reason I liked the SB600. I’m going to have to go with a TTL cord instead of using CLS for situations like yesterday where I was using it handheld, but it’s a small price to pay. The flash(es) I’m considering are around the $100 neighborhood and even if I were to break one of those, I can justify replacing one of those. More on that when I figure it out.

* UPDATE:

I’ve completed this repair, and the SB600 is now working fine, thanks much to David for identifying the inductor! You can read about my repair here.

We finally took Quincy to our local Museum of Natural History for the Butterflies Alive! exhibit. It’s been open for months now, and is ending September 21st. They’ve been doing this for years, and my wife and I have never visited. It was actually extraordinarily enjoyable, and I got some pretty nice photos, if I do say so myself. You can check them out on Flickr.

The whole thing was pretty cool. They had this very large screened in area with blowers and double doors at both the entrance and exit. This was of course to prevent any butterflies from escaping. Once inside, they had lots of plants and a great garden feel. Of course, Quincy was more interested in the many fountains than in the actual butterflies which we were there to see! Go figure!

Not long after we arrived a group of women and girls arrived together, and a bit of a commotion ensued. Apparently one of the butterflies had decided that the womans hair was an excellent place to disguise itself! I got a couple shots, but my instinct to kneel when shooting Q or the butterflies got the better of me, I should have gotten a more arial angle! Really, there is a butterfly on top of her head, just click the picture to see it bigger.

Once we left the butterfly exhibit Q was pretty much done, and he made that very apparent. We did manage to grab a few shots of him in some of the gratuituous cutouts though. Unfortunately, after we got those shots, I dropped the flash I’d been using handheld to illuminate my shots. It wasn’t a very long fall, I lost my grip of it from about hip height (maybe 3ft tops) and even slowed it’s decent by gently “catching” it with my foot, kinda like a hackie sac stall, before it hit the ground. No parts flew off, there were no cracks, overall it seemed rather uneventful. Imagine my surprise when the thing wouldn’t turn on anymore! Evidently, this is a resonably common problem with the Nikon SB-600, as a quick google search revealed several accounts of people having this problem even without having dropped it. I think I may be dismantling the thing and taking a look soon. Meanwhile I’ve only got a single light which I can only use in manual mode with my camera. If all else fails, I suppose I’ll be hitting up an authorized service center.

All said, it was a very enjoyable day. For this face, it’s worth it!

Okay, so this is almost two months overdue, but I wanted to share an observation and thought process I had courtesy of one of the professional photographers I follow on Twitter; AcmePhoto.

The tweet was something along the lines of “I’ve got plenty of fireworks photos, so I left the SLR behind”. This was in reference to the July 4th fireworks display this year.

My first reaction was; Sweet, he doesn’t have to lug around the SLR and a tripod. He’s probably got some great shots, and now he can just enjoy the time with his family. But then, I thought; Well shoot, that’s kinda a bummer. Why doesn’t an opportunity like that excite him? Has he become jaded?

See, I’m an amateur, and I’ve only had my DSLR for just over a year. Every photo opportunity excites me, and everything is new and undiscovered for me. I haven’t taken any fireworks shots on the last two July the 4th’s and I’m really looking forward to the chance to shoot some great fireworks shots. So for me, I think about EVERYTHING as a “cool shot” and I’m constantly thinking “boy I wish I could take a great picture of that”.

Now for the average professional, I presume this sort of almost hysteria about taking photos goes away, and you get a much more focused and methodical approach to capturing great images. But, is there a cost? At what point do you tip the scales toward the mundane from the constant conscious (or subconscious) excitement and inspiration for making great images? Or do you, but you’re just more contained and rational about it?

Now don’t get me wrong, AcmePhoto makes great stuff, and I don’t for a second categorize him as uninspired or uninteresting. I’m just trying to wrap my head around how the creative process changes as you become more comfortable with your tools, and hone your artistic eye. For me it’s all emotional, visceral and as a result my work isn’t always the quality I’m really after, and things don’t turn out the way I envision them. On the other hand, professionals seem to be able to execute with an almost cold indifference, but the result is never the less artistic and excellent. Is this just what we see on the exterior? Are they actually just as giddy inside, but have learned to control it, and not wear that on their sleeves?

So professional photogs, for you, when did you transition from a hyper child excited by the prospect of any image, to someone who can execute in a repeatable and genuinely artistic way? Perhaps that’s the real difference between an amateur and a professional?

Okay, first..  This post/rant was inspired by a few tweets from Chase Jarvis.  That said, I’m not throwing stones, or trying to start a fight.  The topic just got me thinking and I wanted to share my train of thought.  Chase, and any other professional who shots tethered, I’m actually jealous.  I wish I could shoot tethered.

Read more after the break…

So, the gist of the tweet(s) was about shooting tethered with the Nikon D3x and Aperture on a MacBook.  At first I thought "curse you Chase and your justifiable budget for fancy gear cause you’re a professional".  But then I thought, isn’t this just the professional expensive version of chimping?  If you’ve not heard of chimping, wikipedia has the best description I’ve seen here.

See, since I got my dSLR I’ve been reading a lot around photography communities, forums, and the like.  In that time, I’ve been able to gather that "chimping" is considered a weakness, and that "real professionals" don’t do it.  I don’t really subscribe to this mentality, afterall the manufacturers put the LCD on the back for a reason right?

I’ve recently shut off the automatic review of photos on my Nikon D80, for a number of reasons.  For one, it’s distracting to have the LCD glowing into your eye when you’re shooting a lot of shots in a dark situation, like in our living room at night capturing something our son is doing.  Also, the dials on the camera change function when the LCD is on to move back and forth between photographs, and the info that’s overlaid.  So if you shoot a shot, and keep the viewfinder to your eye, but try to change the exposure it’s ineffective and you just scroll through the pictures.

That said, when I’m doing anything other than "snap shots" I find myself pushing the play button to see the shot I just took.  Needless to say I’d gladly shoot tethered.  At the moment I have nothing but Windows and Linux based systems, and I haven’t commited to software for a RAW workflow or other tools that would allow me to shoot tethered, but I can assure you when/if I have all the tools necessary I’ll probably do it too.

So, I say to the critics of chimping…  Is tethered shooting really just an expensive version of chimping?  Is it "OK" for a professional to shoot tethered, and if so why is it any different than us mere mortals looking at the LCD on the back of our camera?  I submit that you are just jealous, like I am so you fabricate reasons that this practice is "bad" and makes you "weak".

Comments?

For the past few weeks there have been a rash of issues with our water supply lines here in our apartment complex. We’ve been without cold or hot water or both for hours at a time.

It’s culminated into our landlord deciding to basically gut our water lines and replace them. So since last Friday we’ve had folks coming in and tearing out large chunks of our drywall to reveal the plumbing, then the plumbers running new source lines along the outside wall and into each apartment. Then water was turned off Monday night around 9PM. The plumbers were coming in on Tuesday to finish hooking up the lines that had been run in parallel to the existing lines. Well, the water remained off through Tuesday, and we’d already forgone bathing for one day so we weren’t looking forward to another day without running water.

That brings us to the image above. We chose to check into the Ramada Inn that’s directly next to our apartment complex. They have this awesome koi pond/lagoon which the hotel surrounds, and as I was walking to the jacuzzi that night, it struck me how pretty the whole scene was a night.

So in an attempt to find a silver lining, I took some timed exposures of the lagoon at night. I didn’t quite get the effect I was looking for, but I think this is a cool shot none the less.

For those of you who may have missed it, this week one of my favorite new(ish) sitcoms Chuck presented this episode in 3D.

I had evidently missed the marketing campaign that mentioned that it would be in 3D, probably cause I’m not a big sports fan, and most of the hype was during the super bowl. Consequently, I was caught with my pants down (as it were) with no 3D glasses with which to watch the show.

Fortunately, I always record Chuck on our cable company provided DVR (no fancy Tivo for us), so as soon as I realized it was being presented in 3D, I paused it, and began scrambling for a solution.

As it turns out, I have some gels used to modify the light coming from my photography flashes. I also just happened to have two each of the red and blue gels (so my wife could enjoy the 3D-ness too). A quick Google search later to determine which eye is which color, and the contraption you see before you was born.

Sadly though, it was still the same cheesy 3D effect that we’re all used to. And to make it worse, since it’s a broadcast television show, they toned down the effect so those without glasses could still watch without their eyes hurting. The overall result was less than awesome. Never the less, the episode was good, and I can’t complain. Plus, I’ve got a fun story to tell about how I made my own 3D glasses.

When I performed my search for the perfect photo sharing solution, I fell in love with the Picasa desktop application. I even discovered that there is a linux version. However, as you’d likely expect, it didn’t really play nice as far as uploading photos to any photo sharing site other than Google’s Picasa Web Albums.

On windows, there is a great solution called picasa2flickr which passes the desired photo’s to the windows Flickr Uploader. Again, for obvious reasons, this doesn’t work well on linux.

So, having determined that it wasn’t worth my time to pursue trying to get Flickr uploads working from Picasa on Linux, I started evaluating many of the other native options on linux, such as digikam and fspot. While these more easily uploaded to Flickr, and had open API’s, none of them worked quite the way I wanted, so I abandoned my search for a good solution.

Then, on a whim I did a Google search just a couple hours after Andy O’Neill made a blog post about a button he wrote to import photos to Flickr from the Linux version of Picasa, named picflick.

I eagerly (re)installed Picasa3 on my Gentoo box using a beta ebuild found here. Then installed his button.

After playing with it for a bit, I realized a few things didn’t quite jive for me.

1) The script automatically resizes the image before uploading it to Flickr. I prefer to upload all of my images at their original resolution, so this was a bit of a road block for me.

2) The script used a Perl module to upload to Flickr. For the life of me, I couldn’t seem to figure out how to get it authorized with my Flickr account to actually permit uploads. I’m sure if I spent a bit more time and read a few more manuals I could have gotten it right, but it didn’t quite work “out-of-the-box” for me.

3) I’d prefer to see the progress being made, rather than the beeps and tray notifications that Andy’s script provided.

So, I stole the key part of his script, the part which translates Windows paths to *nix ones, and broke down the rest to simply pass the photos on to my preferred linux Flickr uploader, KFlickr

Here’s the contents of my script, including the win2native function written by Andy.

#!/bin/bash
DEBUG=1     # debug to $LOG
LOG=/tmp/picflick.log
PICASA_WINE_DIR="$HOME/.google\/picasa\/3.0\/drive_c"  # Relative to $HOME
PICASA_WINE_DIR_NATIVE=`echo $PICASA_WINE_DIR |sed 's|\\\\||g'`
function debug() {
        if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then
                echo "$*" >> $LOG
        fi
}
# wine2native(): convert wine filename to native linux filenames
# Arguments: _name_ of variable which holds path
# Example: wine2native file  # not wine2native $file
function wine2native() {
        VAR=$1
        eval "VAL=\$$1"
        debug "Wine path: $VAL"
        # use '|' to delimit the paths
        VAL=`echo "$VAL" | \
                sed "s|C:|$PICASA_WINE_DIR|" | \
                sed 's|\\\\|/|g'`
        debug "Source file: $VAL"
        eval "$VAR=\$VAL"
}
# check we have the required dependencies
which kflickr > /dev/null || die "You need to install kflickr"
file=$1
wine2native file
DIR=`dirname "$file"`
EXT=${file##*.}
debug "START_UPLOAD"
for file in "$@"; do
        wine2native file
        KFLICKR="$KFLICKR $file"
done
debug "Launching kflickr with the following args $KFLICKR"
kflickr $KFLICKR
debug "Done"

Now when I click the “Flickr” button in Picasa, it brings up the KFlickr app with all the pictures I selected ready to upload. Thanks for the inspiration, and code bits to make this work Andy, I was too lazy to actually figure out what was necessary to pull the image paths from Picasa and use them.