Category Archives: Photography

Fun, Games, Photography, Pirate Party, When Imagination Fails

What was done last year. 2023 Edition.

January 7, 2024 James O'Keefe

This year’s non-work accomplishments in statistics. FWIW:

Pirates

Organized one, two, ? surveillance camera mapping events.

Attended the Boston Anarchist Bookfair and organized the Pirate Party table. Worked the table for both days with Steve, Micky and Alex.

Organized the pirate contingent of and marched in the Trans Resistance March. Marched in the XR Boston contingent at Honk! Took too many photos/videos. Still haven’t finished editing or posting them.

28 Pirate News recordings. That count was fewer than the forty we recorded in 2022. Ran 24 meetings and four quarterly conferences. Didn’t send enough email updates. Probably sent too many social media posts.

Photography

Created 4016+ photos. Shared 106 on my two Flickr accounts and more in text messages to family and friends. Particularly happy with this one:

Took my son’s high school yearbook photograph. He was pleased. Photographed 20+ co-workers for id photos. Learned a bit about NX Tether.

Attended Victoria Sambunaris‘ talk at the Photographic Resource Center‘s Speaker Series. Attended PHSNE‘s Photographica for the second year.

Attended at least two school drama performances. Photographed one of them. Haven’t posted the photographs. Really should.

Attended two art exhibits (Hokusai and Sargent). Wanted to attend two more, but didn’t. Took too many photographs. Haven’t posted a single one. 🙁

I reviewed the Ulanzi foldable half cage.

Reading

Bought or received twenty nine “books”. Read six “books” fully, but didn’t keep to my 1/month. I use books in quotations since I am padding my numbers by including two Framelines Magazines, which I did read cover to cover, but that isn’t a big accomplishment.

Games

Played in one miniature game (at Havoc), which is the same number I played in 2022.

Finished painting 64 1/285th scale microarmor miniatures. They have been in a state of not yet done for years. Still need to Dullcoat them. Haven’t taken photos of them and posted them. Got part way through another 56. May finish those this month. They are wheeled vehicles, so may is the operative word.

Must have cleaned, glued and primed 500+ microarmor/nauts. Also, cleaned, based and primed 54 modern soviet airborne infantry stands. The basing was frustrating, but yielded the most satisfaction. Maybe I will write up my process.

The degree I increased my “pile of potential” when I should be finishing figures is depressing, so I will ignore it.

Office

Most of my office was done last year (?), but one wall remained that needed patching and painting as I have previous mounted electronics to it. I patched and primed it.

Realizing I was in over my head (decade old color matching, paint that finally dried in the cans, ugh), hired someone to paint it (and another room I patched and primed). They did a great job and dealt with my primer color misadventure. During the break, my friend David and I put up the wall shelves I have sat on for … 6 months?

Considering that the walls are not at aligned to gravity, I am pleased how it came out.

Now I just need to move books on to the shelves.

I’ll leave it at that and post about 2024 goals hopefully in January.

Fun, Photography

Nikon Zfc and Ulanzi Falcam Foldable Half Cage

December 28, 2023 James O'Keefe

I have been using a SmallRig cage with my Nikon Z 50 when recording handheld videos. Unfortunately, the Nikon Z 50 doesn’t use external power via a USB cable unless the camera is off. The Nikon Z fc does, but no one made a cage for it.

The Ulanzi Falcam F22 & F38 & F50 Quick Release Foldable Half Cage For Camera said it works with it and try it I did.

Pico review: it works

Short review:

I only played with it for an hour, but the Ulanzi foldable half cage worked effectively with the Nikon Zfc. It was pretty sturdy, though not nearly as sturdy as a full cage.

It does not come with a NATO rail attachment point anywhere, so I needed to attach a SmallRig Low-Profile NATO Rail, 50mm to the top of the half cage so I could add my top handle. I was able to move the camera around effectively that way. Ulanzi has their own Falcam enabled top handle so if you don’t have one, you can get theirs and attach it the top Falcam rail point.

There are three Falcam rail points: the top, side and bottom. The top and bottom are side to side. The side rail point is up and down. There are three 1/4 inch screw holes on the top and side and two on the bottom.

Folding and unfolding the cage was easy, and there are points every 45 degrees where you need to use a bit of pressure to rotate the arms. This feature helps since if the arms are not locked, your camera won’t suddenly rotate unexpectedly. The locks were secure, but you can get a little wobble if you don’t turn them completely to the lock position.

The Falcam quick release mount had locked and unlocked position. Only if you pressed it in the unlocked position, would it actually unlock and slide so you could take the camera off the cage. The mount is square and you can rotate it on each side and it will slide in and lock. However, with the FTZ adapter on, I found it more difficult to slide the quick release mount on in one direction, but not another. It should work, so I will play around with it and see what I did wrong.

I recommend it.

I posted this review at dpreview.com.

Fun, Photography

Random 2023 Photos

December 7, 2023 James O'Keefe

Various photos I took randomly in 2023. They are all mobile phone photos.

The first is a box of bananas that looked like leaping dolphins.

Sky Shots

Street Art

Miniatures, Photography, When Imagination Fails

A Selection of Viking Forge 1/2400 Ship Miniatures

December 4, 2023 James O'Keefe

Here are a selection of photos of Viking Forge 1/2400 ship miniatures I picked up in the last year (or longer). All are Cold War/Modern. Unfortunately, Viking Forge doesn’t yet have photos of a number of them.

The photos with multiple miniatures were focus stacked. I tried to get the white balance correct, but they may be off.

German

American

Fun, Living, Nature, Photography

Rockport 2023

November 30, 2023 James O'Keefe

Should have posted these photos from Rockport months ago, but better late than never.

This photo is a panorama that would have been improved if I had taken a picture or two of the left of the wall and the ocean. Lesson learned.

I took the daytime photos with my Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8. The nighttime photos I took with my manual focus Nikon Nikkor-S.C. 55mm f/1.8.

The full album is:

Nature, Photography

Northern Mockingbird

March 27, 2023 James O'Keefe

A Northern Mockingbird visited our neighborhood. I was able to get several good photographs and one good video. Propping your lens on a car is a helpful technique for maintaining stability with a telephoto lens.

A video of the bird singing. Did I mention that placing your lens on the top of a car really stabilizes the telephoto lenses. An external microphone would have helped here too, but I wanted to get the camera out of the house as quickly as possible and didn’t expect the mocking bird to stay as long as it did.

A crow also visited the area:

Photography, Theater

Into the Woods

December 29, 2022 James O'Keefe

I attended the Somerville Highlander Theater‘s performance of Into the Woods in early December. As is my custom, I photographed the performance.

I decided to try something different and photographed it with an anamorphic lens so I could get more of the actors and stage. You can tell from the occasional lens flares. I cropped only a few of the images.

A big congratulations for the crew, cast and orchestra for a wonderful performance.

You can view all of the images in this album:

Unfortunately, the latest Lightroom update decided to change the default to exporting the small versions of the photographs and not the originals. If you would like a copy of the original, email me.

Photography

Don’t Get the Glorich EN-EL25 Power Adapter

November 2, 2022 James O'Keefe Leave a comment

This post has been sitting here and since I don’t have another post ready, I will just publish it.

I occasionally live stream. My Nikon Z 50 allows me to turn off sleep mode, but changing batteries is a pain when live streaming. Unfortunately, Nikon decided that the Z 50’s USB port can only charge the battery, not power the camera. Unlike the Z 6/7 (which uses the D850 battery), there is no battery adapter to power the camera via external power, such as a wall outlet.

I needed something to deal with this, albeit minor, issue. So back in February, I ordered and received a Glorich Z50 AC power dummy battery adaptor from Amazon.

This is my review. TL;DR I sent it back.

It didn’t come with a manual. I connected it to my Z 50 and closed the battery door. I then plugged it into an outlet, and turned on the camera. The camera did not turn on.

I tried to unplug it from my surge protector. It didn’t want to unplug. It was stuck part way in. After some work, I was finally able to wrestle it out. I repeated the same process with a different outlet. Still did not turn on. Getting it out of the socket was still difficult. Inspecting the plugs showed scratches in them. Have never seen this behavior with a plug before, but it is likely due to the circular holes in the plugs catching on something in the power strip socket.

Tried plugging it into a wall outlet and inspected it for a secret “on” switch. Didn’t find one. The power box has a green light on it that seemed to have a faint glow, but the product still didn’t power my camera.

Getting the dummy battery out was a bit of an ordeal, but once I placed the Nikon battery back in and turned on the camera and it worked just fine.

I filed for my refund that day and returned it the next. I did not bother getting another one to try. If the first unit refuses to work, then it must be of such poor quality that a working unit would likely fail just after I can no longer return it.

At least it didn’t kill my camera.

I won’t bother with the other two models since I doubt their return policy will protect me if the product fails. Also, my guess is that the AliExpress product is the same as the Glorich product, based on the photos they show. The F1TP version is also likely the same as the Glorich product.

I ended choosing another solution I am satisfied with, but not happy with, but that is for another post.

Fun, Photography

Elf Land

May 11, 2022 James O'Keefe Leave a comment

The photos of Elf Land, a neighborhood space in a to-be developed lot in Somerville, I have seen tended to be at human level and not elf level. As such they didn’t do Elf Land justice. Before the big storm in January I set out to change that. Here is the result: