Failure is the Key to Success

Tim at The Inflatable Soapbox blind sided me this with this post and tag on Tuesday night.

I wasn’t able to reply on Tuesday as I was replacing a failing hard disc and reinstalling Windows XP on a laptop for a colleague at work. I’d forgotten how long it takes from plain XP, through Service Pack 2 and then downloading and installing the remaining 91 security patches. Still, after all that I was able to install Avast as a free Anti-Virus program and Open Office as a free office suite (much better than MS Works that was previously on the system).

On Wednesday at work, I got called to look at a printer with a paper jam. Usually a simple fix, in the worse case maybe a pair of tweezers to remove the last bit of torn paper. The printer was an old, but very serviceable LaserJet 4000, not very heavy use, so plenty of life left in it. Of course, no maintenance on it, its not worth it for a printer that’s getting on for 9-10 years, so if I didn’t fix it, we would replace it…it would be cheaper than getting it fixed. After 10 minutes at the printer location pulling scraps of paper out of it, I took it back to my desk. I ended up unscrewing just about every bit that would come off, before I could finally get the tweezers to the last bits of crinkled paper and pull it out. All in all, I removed a piece of paper about the size of my hand, but it was finally working again. Just time to get it back on the shop-floor and get the toner off my hands before going home.

Continue reading » Tuesday Tech Troubles and Triumphs

I got hold of a Nikon mount for my Tamron lenses just over a week ago and tried taking some photos last weekend. I tried my 60-300mm f3.8-5.4 SP and my original 80-210mm f3.8-4 with and without doubler to see how practical it would be to use a totally manual lens on a digital camera.

First impressions were that it seemed a lot harder to hand hold a stable image than it had been when using film, but that could have been down to exposure settings. Also, there will be a degree of guess and bracketing to get the correct exposure. I managed to get shots which were correctly exposed, but to be honest, I was disappointed with the image quality. The shots seemed very soft and not as sharp as I had been used to getting using the lens on my film camera.

I didn’t get back to looking at it until yesterday afternoon, when I put my 80-210mm lens on my camera on a tripod and shot some flowers and a magpie in the garden. The images were a lot better, but still softer than I would have liked. The magpie was shot at 210mm which is equivalent to 315mm on a 35mm camera. I really needed to repeat this with the other lens (60-300mm) that I had used more recently, but the weather hasn’t been good this afternoon. Maybe tomorrow.

Tags:manual lens,tamron lens