Hasta La Gadget!

Nyko, usually seen pushing badly conceived Wii accessories, has come up with a small, stylish and unobtrusive zoom lens for Nintendo’s DSi handheld. Scratch that. We can’t fool you. The Zoom Case is a huge cylinder which hangs off the side of the included plastic case and makes the DSi look much like and elephant.

For just $25 you can “grace” your sleek little console with black and silver plastic, and at the same time add an 8x zoom to the camera. This – as Nyko repeatedly mentions on the product page – requires no batteries, as the elements inside are just bending light. We’re not sure that this is any better than just walking a little closer to your subject, especially considering the fitness levels of most of the kids we see playing Nintendo.

Product page [Nyko]

See Also:

• Nyko Wiimote Wireless Adapter
• Nyko FrontMan Wireless Guitar Controller for Nintendo Wii
• Nintendo Sues Nyko Over Wireless Nunchuk

If you’re thinking of buying Lomo’s latest plastic-fantastic accessory, the Diana Lens Adapter, which lets you put the company’s range of medium format lenses onto your DSLR, we have one word of advice. Don’t.

The adapter was launched just over a month ago, and at the time I wrote “I’m sold. As soon as the local Lomo store re-opens after today’s holiday, I’m going to pick one up.”

It took a little longer, but I bought one this week for €12, although in the US it costs just $12 (€8) along with a Diana Fisheye lens (around €30). You get a small plastic disk which slots into your Nikon of Canon’s bayonet mount, and onto this clips the lens of your choice. The little widget works fine in this regard, although as it looks just like a body cap with a hole in it, you may wonder where your cash is going.

The real problem comes when you team it up with a lens. Remember crop-factors for lenses? The same works for different film-formats. The Diana is a medium-format camera which shoots on 120 film, which is 6cm wide. Putting the 20mm Diana fisheye onto a 35mm (full frame) DSLR therefore makes the lens “longer”. In practice this means that you don’t get the extreme vignetting and spherical images you’d expect of a fisheye. Of course, if you opt for the longer Diana lenses, like the 110mm, you actually get a much longer focal length. I’m not going to do the math here, as I always get it wrong, but the effect is more than noticeable (feel free to post the numbers in the comments).

What you do get, though, is Lomo’s famous poor-build quality and blurred, distorted images. The shot above is straight out of the camera with no processing, shot on a Nikon D700. Pretty nasty, right? But that’s the point, and the low-contrast fuzziness is easily tweaked in software to make it even worse (or better). The worst part is in fact that the plastic adapter alone can be pressed into service as a very wide-angle pinhole for a DSLR. The problem? It’s stuck fast on the back of the lens. I don’t think there’s any way I can get it off without pocket knife.

And one more thing. The fisheye comes with a clip-on (or hot-shoe mounted) viewfinder. Useless unless you actually put it on a real Diana, but lots of fun for sticking in front of a small compact camera’s lens and shooting through it.

Product page [Lomo]

See Also:

• Digi-Diana: Lomo Lens Adapter for Canon, Nikon DSLRs

Photo credit: Charlie Sorrel

The LightScoop is a $35 plastic gizmo which sits over the built-in flash of a DSLR and reflects the light up at the ceiling. This, in one neat and simple stroke, turns an almost unusable, on-axis light source into a big, soft, flattering sheet of light.

As our strobist readers will know, the bigger a light, the softer it is. This counts for apparent size, too, so a small light pushed close-up to the subject may well be a lot softer than a huge light far away. For instance, the mid-day sun is both huge and hard.

Reflecting the crappy lamp on the top of your camera makes it both bigger and moves it off the lens axis, giving more interesting (and flattering) results. The LightScoop does this by putting a shiny mirror-like reflector in front of the flash. It slides into the hotshoe mount, keeping it in place, and you can buy it in both neutral or a slightly warm color.

As ever, these simple accessories are easy to make yourself, but you need to weigh up the convenience of just buying something you know will work. I’m hoping to test one out, but until then you can check out the LightScoop Flickr Group to see what it can do.

Product page [LightScoop. Thanks, Betsy!]

Depending on your needs, and your tolerance for dorky belt-mounted accessories, the Spider Holster is either the handiest camera-carrier we’ve yet seen, or a sure-fire way to scare the girls away.

As I have found out from riding a bike with a lock holster around my waist, hip-mounting heavy gear is a comfortable and fatigue-beating way to carry it. It also keeps things close at hand. The Spider Holster consists a belt, a hook for that belt and a plate for the base of the camera. The baseplate (which screws into the tripod mount) has a small ball-like nodule sticking out, and the belt-mounted section has a slot into which the ball can slide. Think of a hip-mounted trailer-hitch and you’ll get the idea.

With this setup, your camera hangs at your side, ready to use, and when you need it you just grab it. No straps to get in the way, and no dead, crushed shoulders at the end of the shoot. On set, it looks fantastic.

Out in the street, however, it may not be such a good idea. The ease of access extends to the pickpockets around you, and wearing a camera like this is, as we have mentioned, a lady-magnet. If, of course, those magnets are placed in their repellent pole to pole positions.

The security aspect is mitigated by the second and lower of two camera positions which engages a catch, but this is more to stop things falling as you clamber around the set than to discourage light fingers.

The stainless steel and aluminum Spider Holster is set to debut on November 1st, with the price yet to be revealed.

Product page [Spider Holster via Photography Bay]

It’s only slightly bigger than the smallest of compact cameras — and fits nicely in a jeans pocket — but Canon’s S90 is packed with features that will make serious photographers sit up and take notice. First of all, there’s that lens: 28-105mm equivalent (about 3.7x zoom), but with an impressively wide maximum aperture of f2.0. Oh yes: We like that.

We also like the retro-ish control ring around the barrel of the lens. You can assign whatever function you want to this ring, be that exposure compensation, ISO equivalent, aperture, focus, zoom… and with a second configurable control on the back, you’ll soon be dialing up whatever kinds of shots you want, just like you can on a decent SLR.

Read Wired’s review of the Canon S90 by Mark McClusky, and let us know what you think of this camera.