Hasta La Gadget!

Something for the weekend, sir? I have just the thing, and it’s a curious cross between a homemade hack and a precision engineered, purchasable piece of kit.

The Kacey Pole Adapter (or MetalHead, as it has been dubbed by Stobist’s David Hobby) is a small aluminum spigot milled to have a female thread that will marry the thread of a standard broomstick or, better still, a telescopic painters’ pole. The other end of the spigot features a 5/8″ male stud (please, no snickering), which is the standard mount for photo lighting stands.

Why would you want it? Because it means you can pick up pretty much any cheap pole from a hardware store and turn it into a lighting stand. The painters pole version seen in the picture will let you elevate your lighting to a whole new level (excuse the pun — it’s Friday), taking your strobe far enough away to emulate a hard light source like the midday sun, or with the right softening, a rather flattering, wraparound, top-down light.

The MetalHead costs just $19, which is on a par with this kind of equipment. You can grab it from MPEX or pay a little more to get it from the manufacturer.

MetalHead Makes Your Home Depot Boom More Functional, Less Embarrassing [Strobist]

The LongArm and MetalHead – Taking Your Speedlite To New Heights [PixSylAted]

If you thought that the people who live in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro didn’t know the difference between a compact 35mm camera, a film DSLR or a digicam, then stay at home. It turns out that not only can some of the less law-abiding types recognize the difference, they can do it fast enough to choose targets for theft.

Jimmie Rodgers found this out the hard way while doing voluntary work in Rio, and his shiny new digicam was nabbed within a week. “I spoke with some people about it. They said that all digital cameras are worth money, but none of the film cameras are unless it’s an SLR.”

Jimmie took a look at the Canon Powershot A95 and decided that it was almost ugly enough to be an old-style film cam (he’s right. I had a similar one and they’re huge). He then “covered it in tape and sharpie marker [and] also took off anything shiny.”

It worked. Jimmie managed to snap 5,000 pictures with the fuglified camera. It even survived another mugging — the thieves ignored it in favor of his $20 cellphone. Of course, heading into bad parts of town is never a good idea, camera or not, so Jimmie went at the mission Serpico-style, going undercover while he was there: “All my clothes I had bought in the communities, and I had little of anything on me when I went out. Speaking some Portuguese helped as well.”

Photojojo offers some technical tips on transforming your camera for stealth use. Use tape that will not leave a residue, color it with markers and leave the LCD switched off. And if you’re really smart, you’ll make a stealth camera bag like we did.

My Ugly Camera [Jimmy’s Project Journal]
Make Your Camera Theft-Proof: Harness the Power of Ugly! [Photojojo]

Photo: Chris Conners/Flickr

Pentax has announced its new K-7 DSLR, and we’re going to try  something new. Here, at the top of the post, are the main points.

• Sensor: 14 MP CMOS, 28.1 mm diagonal
• Video: 1280×720
• ISO range: 100-3200 (6400 emergency setting)
• Max shooting speed: 5.2 fps (40 jpegs, 15 RAW, 14 DNG)
• LCD: 3″ 921,000 dots
• Viewfinder 100%
• AF: 11 point (9 cross type sensors)
• Storage: SD
• Weight: 737g (26.5 oz)
• Price (US): $1200 body only

The K-7 comes in at the top of the Pentax line, at $1200, and it feels like a pro body (in terms of specs — you’ll have to wait for our own Jackson Lynch’s upcoming review to find out how it actually feels). There are some concessions to the new but most of the features are decidedly high-end conservative.

First, the K-7 shoots video. It will put down movies in 720p (1280×720) and also let you shoot in a 3:2 ratio so you can send the video to grandma to watch on her old-style TV. Both come in at 30 fps, and there is a socket for hooking up an external mic. You also get a sensor-shakin’ dust cleaner and a sensor-based image stabilizer. Other than that, there’s not much in the way of fancy frills, although the small body is hewn from finest magnesium for weight and strength.

Where Pentax scores, though, is in the openness of its details. It uses a modified K-mount for the lens, the latest version of the open K-mount used in pretty much every off-brand camera ever. It also lets you shoot directly into dng files, Adobe’s semi-open RAW format, which means you shouldn’t have to wait for image software to be updated to read the K-7’s files. Interestingly for a high-end camera, the K-7 dumps its load onto SD cards instead of the more common Compact Flash. I like this, as I am paranoid about bending a pin in my DSLR every time I insert a CF card. For flashers, there is a proper PC socket for cabling off-camera strobes.

Another unheard of move is the IR remote socket, something the likes of Nikon only puts on its budget bodies so you have to buy a $100+ cable to trigger, say, a D700 from afar. Finally, the viewfinder offers a full 100% field of view, something that will cost you three times as much to see from Nikon.

The trouble is, this feature set is not enough to tempt people away from the alternatives. Nikon’s D90, for example, will shoot video and has a better low-light performance, arguably more important in a stills body than movie-mode. On the other hand, there is a definite Pentax fanbase out there, and there are a huge amount of cheap, K-mount lenses you can use — anything back to the Ka (from 1983) will work, and older lenses may work fine, or might need an adapter. Also, unlike the Nikon D90, the K-7 shoots proper 720p.

Product page [Pentax]

After getting hounded out of town by outraged Brits wielding metaphorical pitchforks, burning torches and yelling “Not in my back yard!” the Google Street View team has turned to a lower-profile form of transport for its 3D camera arrays: Trikes.

The Google Street View tricycle will be arriving in Britain this summer (this year the summer in the UK is predicted to fall on a Tuesday in July). The real reason is not to avoid angry villagers (who seem curiously oblivious to the millions of CCTVs that watch them every day) but to gain access to places that cars can’t reach — in this case sports arenas, coastal paths and the like.

This is a splendid piece of lateral thinking. I live in a warren of very old, narrow streets in Barcelona and while the surrounding, car friendly parts of the barrio are already Street Viewed, our smaller alleyways are not. Saying that, the Street View Trikester should bring a heavy chain with him, or risk ending up yet another victim of the neighborhood’s bike stealing junkie.

For more on the trike, including video, check out Autopia’s post on the Google trike.

Press release [Google]

See Also:

No Google Street View, Please — We’re British [Epicenter]

Carry On, Google Street View, Britain Rules [Epicenter]

Picture credit: Google UK

Today is a big day for Sony. The company is launching three new Alpha DSLRs and four new lenses. The cameras are an incremental improvement on the older models (themselves pretty good bodies) and the lenses are entry-level plastic models which all have Sony’s new SAM (Smooth Autofocus Motor), an in-lens motor similar to Nikon’s Silent Wave or Canon’s USM.

First, the cameras: The models numbers are A230, A330 and A380 are swap-in replacements for the A200, A300 and A350. They’re also cheaper. Sony is pushing the smaller size as a major new feature, and it’s easy to see why. The actual internal changes to the cameras are minimal. The sensor sizes stay the same (10.2MP for the 230 and 330, 14.2 for the 380), exposure modes are unchanged and the top two models retain the flip-out LCD (which itself is the same size and resolution, 230,000 pixels, as before) although the angle of flip has increased slightly. The A330 and A380 also keep the quick-focus live view, which uses a seperate, dedicated sensor to speed up the usually slow auto focus when using the rear LCD to compose shots.

The other “major” changes are the addition of an HDMI-out socket, a poorer battery life of around 500 shots per charge against around 730 with the older range (and this drops to 230 images with live view). Even the maximum ISO of 3200 remains the same, which is arguably one of the main reasons to upgrade a DSLR.

The lenses are fourfold, and – as we said – all contain their own motor for faster, quieter operation. Here are their names which, as always, tell you everything you need to know, other than that they are cheap, plastic and lightweight. Fisrt, the fixed-length ƒ2.8 30mm Macro SAM, then a ƒ1.8 50mm SAM, and then a couple of zooms, the ƒ3.5-5.6 18-55mm SAM and the ƒ4.5-5.6 55-200mm SAM.

The important thing to remember here is that the lenses are all designed for crop sensors, in this case APS-C which is 28.4mm on the diagonal (compared to 43.3mm for full-frame sensors and 35mm film). This means that the 50mm will act like a 75mm on a full frame camera.

The prices are for kits, starting at $550 for the A230 with one lens, $650 for the A330 with one of the lenses and $850 for the A380 with a single lens kit. This compares to a launch price of $800 for the mid-range A300, which came with an 18-70mm lens. Full prices info is over at the product page, although the new macro lens has yet to be priced.

Smaller, lighter and cheaper. What’s not to like? If you already have a mid-range Sony DSLR, there is little point in upgrading. If you don’t (and you really want to buy Sony) then these look like a good deal. Just remember — a lot of the price drop likely comes from those cheap lenses, and lenses are the one thing you don’t want to go cheap on. Available for pre-order today.

Product page [Sony Style]