Quantum Cable MKZ9 - review....rant

I have been using Quantum batteries and cables for most of my 30+ yrs of doing photography.....i have used the batteries and cables for Sunpak 522's, 622's, 622 super Pro's, Minolta flashes and Nikon flashes....but the cable the cable for the new Nikon SB900 is junk....or at least the one I have is junk.....flimsy made....without 2 rubber bands and a small stack of washers to press the thing down it looses contact...it has no real locking mechanism like the MKZ3 cable that has twist locking mechanism inside the dummy battery...you pressed down and turn the lock and it stayed......with the MKZ9 you have exposed wires that will in a short while wear thru and possible short out......This is the worst made piece of PRO photo equipment I have ever had my hands on....I emailed Quantum and pretty all they had to say was so sorry your are displeased maybe you should consider moving over to the turbo line which the cable connects to the front of the SB900 instead of thru the battery compartment......my answer was...I will sell off my Quantum Equipment and buy from China...for less than the cost of 2 MKZ9 cables I can get......complete battery, charger and cable to connect to the front port of the SB900.......normally I do not like spending money overseas with our bad economy, but a so sorry email from you and I will not do business with you any longer and I will sell all of your products that I am using currently...and Chinese products have been climbing in quality for a while now.......so it looks lie it will be good bye to usa made Quantum...........

Flash Brackets.........a new dilemma ......A Rant

I have used flash brackets for over 30 yrs...I have tried dang near every type on the market and settled on the Camera rotation type as they kept the flash centered above the camera and it was much easier to get camra flipped and not worry about the flash, rather than turning camera side ways and then reorienting the flash...too time consuming.....
Now I have a dilemma....on my old brackets I had a place for a cable release to be held and of course that made firing a camera a lot easier than trying to hold the set up , focus camera and then find the shutter button and press it......NOW THE DILEMMA....Digital cameras do not have a cable release socket on the shutter button and digital releases of any sort are cumbersome when it comes to being used like this....why did the camera companies not put a simple socket on the release button for a simple straight forward cable release to connect to.....It would have made life for us photographers that love to use flash brackets a whole lot easier and simpler.....

Have a great weekend.

Mozilla Firefox Weirdness

The weirdest darn things have been happening.....I had about 10 browsing windows open ...some with as many as 65 tabs going......and all of a sudden my computer slowed down so slow and firefox kept crashing...I mean crashing 20-30 times a day....not good when trying to fil out job apps or doing an online interview for a job or just trying to answer questions sent off your website......Dell could not find it....then I decided to see how many tabs were on my main browser window...it had almost 400...then I noticed I had 2-3 times the browser windows than I should have........the dang things were multiplying like bunnies....no viruses found but that was truly weird......

I know the [people at Firefox are wondering what the crap was happening......and I have no idea....one window that should have only had 62 or 63 tabs...had 194........now i have tons of junk to sort thru and delete.......Crazy Weirdness......

Letting Go.......of Items NOT used in a long while and just Gathering Dust

I am putting lots of goodies on EBAY for Auction...some photographically: Minolta, Quantum and Nikon for starters...my ebay alais is ST Vitas.....
Here is a link to the Nikon MB-D10 Multi-Power Battery Pack just click other items on the right side near the top to see other things and check back as I do not have time to have a garage sale and this is to clear out storage space and allow for a new tool or 2.......

Multiple Email Accounts...can be a Pain but.......

If you have several email accounts you may really want to look at Mozilla's Thunderbird, unless you are tied to MS Outlook....I went from Outlook express to Windows live email / hotmail ..it only allowed 4 accounts but when I answered an email from my say Lycos account..it sent the reply from Hotmail, and that confused tons of people.....so....I was out looking for an email client and looked back into Outlook express (never was a fan, but it was all I could find at one time and it was also included with teh Winders OS's......so.....I used it)......Since I do not use Internet Explorer and other MS stuff and I do use and really like Mozilla's FireFox, I went a searching thru Mozilla........and took a look see....and I tried out Thunderbird...now I am not a geek so having to do any coding is out....I mean it is O.....U.......T.....that is why I am still running winders OS and not LINUX....god I would love to be running all my photo software on Linux.....anyway........I gave Mozilla's Thunderbird a try a few weeks back and sang its praises (on FaceBook).......Today...I will say I love Thunderbird and when you reply to an email, it signs into your actual email account and leaves the sent message in your sent box there.....and the recipient sees it comes from the email addy they sent the message to originally........and I do not see the Mozilla Thunderbird team just dropping the support for it...........

It is so nice to click on one icon and being able to once again read all of my email.....by simply clicking on the corresponding email inbox........

Have a great Weekend.

Website Changes.......

Got major stuff done to the website { http://www.artscottfotografie.com } that make it much cleaner and organized.....but I made the mistake of not taking a screenshot of it first so I could actually show the difference....now I just need a nice elegant Header and I would be very very very very pleased.....as it is I am just pleased.

take a looksee and send me a message using the contact me link just under the Header.....

Have a great week!!!

6-3-2011 Making some Changes

Well today would have been my mothers 91st birthday, but cancer got her a very long time ago.....but the changes have nothing to do with cancer, dying or my mother....this is a photography blog......

Well I am not a coder so coding for a website is extremely tough, especially when you have to sit and wait for someone to tell what code to put where.....but.....
I have started redoing my website and it is truly looking better.....I need to get a nice pretty splash page and then some tidying up on the inside and it will be much better looking.......my eyes are killing me, I have thru 2 bottles of eye drops in the last couple of days....but a small expense for much better results down the road.