While waiting in Back Bay this afternoon for an excessively late model, I wandered over to the Public Garden and did some outdoor range tests with the Canon ST-E2 wireless flash controller.
The methodology was to prop a Canon 580EX strobe against a tree or on a bench or sign, with sensor and strobe pointing towards me, note the ambient light conditions, point the ST-E2 directly at the 580EX IR transceiver, directly in line with it, and attempt to test-fire from various distances to determine the maximum.
In all my tests, there seemed to be a threshold distance at which the trigger rate went abrupty from 100% to 0%. When I hit 0%, I tried to adjust the vertical angle, thinking I might be outside of the cone of the IR emitter on the 580EX, but that did not help. So more likely it is signal strengh with a strength cutoff or an error rate cutoff. If nothing else, this all-or-nothing reliability makes specifying the maximum distance easy.
With both 580EX and ST-E2 under shade from tree leaves, I got approx. 20 ft. With both out of shade but sun behind clouds, I got approx. 25 ft. Out of shade and in direct sun I got somewhere between 15 and 20 ft. Under those last conditions, but at a 45 degree angle off being direct in line, I got approx. 10 ft.
I'm guessing roughly the same maximum distance numbers might hold under harsher sun in July and August, if it's harsh enough that we need to have a large overheard diffuser on a boom anyway.
The cold shoes of my umbrella brackets rotate, permitting the strobes' IR tranceivers to be turned toward the camera, so I'm hoping to keep the angle under 45 degrees.
These max. distance numbers therefore might be adequate for the outdoor model shoots this summer. I plan to custom-build some backup E-TTL II cables just in case.
Also, in an emergency, I will not underestimate the utility of handing a reflector panel and a $20 bill to a bystander.
I did a test shoot with a dancer this afternoon, and am happy to report that the 580EX high-speed sync worked fine for nailing leaps at 1/500.
1/500 is arguably a little slow, since her feet had slight motion blur, but the 580EX's high-speed sync can cover faster shutters if necessary.
Lois Greenfield reportedly likes 1/500, so that's good enough for me.
I needed some flash grids, so I picked up a sheet of corrugated plastic and a sheet of foam-- but didn't get around to the measuring and gluing and cutting. Then I happened to see saxonpc.com's $5 flash grids online. I experimentally ordered one a few days ago, and it works great from eyeballing the circular pattern on the wall with a couple quick test fires from a 430EX. They could easily charge twice as much for this; I recommend ordering one before they realize that fact.
I woke up way too early this morning, and my brain wasn't warmed up enough for paying work, so I decided to tear apart my Web site.
My home page was basically, by intention, a huge flat site map put into a structured narrative form. It was mostly a good design for my purposes, but I got tired of seeing my old projects distracting from my current intent.
So, I divided it up among three new pages -- Scheme, Consulting, and the catchall Projects -- and banged out a first pass of new little narrative.
Eventually I will find time to replace the "web5.el" system backing this site with the SXML-based "web6". Paying work keeps getting in the way.
Here are some more thoughts on workplace productivity, which I wrote as a Reddit comment recently:
Most of the time in most office jobs is spent doing things inefficiently, doing things that shouldn't have been done in the first place, and just plain screwing around.
(Surprising Fact: all that weekday Reddit activity does not come from people relaxing during their unpaid lunch hour.)
I'm an hourly consultant now in certain technical niches, and usually work from home. This experience has reinforced my belief in something I'd suspected for years in office jobs...
Working 8 solid hours -- in which you're doing the right thing, and doing it efficiently -- is actually very difficult for most kinds of thinking technical work I've found.
When I sometimes find that 8 solid hours is easy, a little introspection suggests I'm doing something that's actually rote and that probably should be automated or abstracted.
This evening, I sold my very last last tower/desktop PC. I've owned many dozens of such machines in the last few years, so getting to 0 is a significant milestone.
Starting a few years ago, I decided that the ideal would be to have a sufficiently powerful laptop workstation, wireless link, and remote file/backup server. No having to go sit in front of a fixed desktop whenever you need to use a computer.
As of tonight, I'm down to a few laptops, a 1U server at a remote data center, and a spare 1U server of the same model as the deployed one.
I do most of my consulting work lately with one or two laptops at a time, mostly on my kitchen table and living room sofa. Now that I have a new home office room, I'll add that to the locale mix. (Still not comfortable working on my current consulting projects from a cafe or park, like I've worked in the past.)
The only drawback to working in this environment is that I have to be strict about work vs. non-work. When I'm working at a client's site, I start the billable hours clock when I arrive, pausing it only for breaks and social chatter. Working from home, I don't run the billable-hours clock except when I am actively sitting in front of a computer and typing on the actual problem. I haven't figured out how to run the clock when I am pondering a creative solution to a problem before starting typing, since my brain will often be thinking about non-work things at the same time until it starts to hit on the solution. Doing eight billable hours this way is at least as hard as putting in a regular 10-16 hour day in a corporate office was. Occasionally I finish a particularly intense hunk of work that I might have considered a solid morning's accomplishment, then go to my time log and realize that only, say, 1.5 billable hours were accrued.
For the most part, it's quite luxurious.
No, not for their wool.
I'm selling some photo gear on two different online venues, and the last three inquiries I've received are from Canadians asking whether I'll ship to them, even though my ads state I'll ship only to the contiguous US 48.
Makes sense that Canadians should be snapping up items in USD, now that that the Canadian Dollar is no longer the Canuckian Peso.
Even before the USD started sucking, one could sell used Canon lenses on eBay for roughly what they can be gotten for new in the US.
Now, if I can only find a shipping method to Canada as affordable and reliable as USPS Priority Mail. I haven't had perfect experiences with USPS taking responsibility end-to-end for international shipments.
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