DavidHam Photography | the Blog » Gadgets

Re: California Hands-free Legislation

david of DavidHam — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:24:26 +0000

In case some of didn’t notice, there is a new California law that went into affect last Tues, July 1st that requires everyone using a cellphone while driving to utilize a handfree device like a bluetooth headset.

According to Cnet, headset.com wanted to bring light to this new law by giving away a free Plantronics Discovery 925 if you happen to get caught using your phone while driving without a handsfree headset. We’re not sure if headset.com is promoting the safety of driving with a proper headset or encouraging you to break the law and get a free bluetooth headset. Either way, if you find yourself with a ticket, you may lessen the sting by getting a freebie. ;)

iPhone 3G

david of DavidHam — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:58:54 +0000

It’s Monday and Apple’s developer’s conference begins this week with the traditional Steve Job’s keynote. The most anticipated announcement is the sucessor to the last years most hyped and Time magazine’s “Invention of the Year.” The new iPhone 3G features faster internet speed, a hardware based GPS and version 2.0 of the iPhone software all at a $199 price point.

Here at DavidHam, we are pretty demanding of our gadgets and gear. And though the iPhone in it’s current incarnation does have it’s shortcoming , there is no doubt that it is a very useful business tool that allows us to stay abreast of news and important communication while on the go. With the release of the SDK that allows third party developers the opportunity to create feature rich application to extend the capabilities of the iPhone even further, it will definitely make this communications device even better. July 11th can’t get here soon enough!!! That is when the new iPhone 3G is available for sale here in the US. Are you guys gonna buy one?

In other news…I’ve just got back today from an awesome engagement session in the bay area and can’t wait to share that with you guys. Plus other things that have kept me really busy in the last month. Traveling puts us a day or two behind and it adds up when you’ve been traveling back to back the last 3 weeks. At least there’s only remnants of the flu remaining in my body. :D

***update: news today shows that the announce price is already subsidized and that all iPhone purchase must be activated instore on a qualified 2yr AT&T plan. Furthermore, they increased the unlimited data plan for the 3G iPhone from $20/mo to $30/mo. I don’t think this is very good news for iPhone fans and certainly not good news for current iPhone users who want to upgrade to the new 3G device. :(

Radio Poppers First Look

david of DavidHam — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:15:45 +0000

We’ve been waiting on these to help take our lighting and photography to the next level. At OSP West, we got a chance to get a live demo of Kevin King’s Radio Popper. At DavidHam, we currently use the industry standard Pocket Wizards but always wished we had the ability to control the flash output using the FEC on our camera instead of manually on each flash head. When you think of how many you may use through a dark room, you can see why we pray for more control. Canon has the ST-E2 infrared based solution and Nikon has their own, but both systems are highly unreliable because they require line of sight. That’s where the Radio Popper comes in to answer our prayer. The flagship P1 model is shown in the follow pictures.

Radio Poppers basically intercepts the infrared signal our camera flash or Canon’s ST-E2 system puts out and transmit that data via radio. All this has to happen in real time with virtually no latency in order for the remote flash to sync with the shutter curtain. Because the E-TTL or ITTL information gets transmitted to your remote flash, all the smart logic Canon and Nikon programmed into their gear is utilized to best expose your photo. And if you need more or less light…a simple FEC change on camera is all you need to do. Very slick.

Like the old generation Pocket Wizard, there is a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter attaches via velcro to your hot-shoe flash or ST-E2 as shown in the picture and “magnetically” picks up the TTL info. You also have your choice of two antenna sizes. The short one shown, and a longer one if you need more distance. On the flash receiving end, you have a Radio Popper receiver with a detachable fiber optics cable (shown with the red arrow) that serve to relay the infrared back to the optical receiver of your flash unit.

During the demo, the prototypes work really well and triggered the flash placed in the next room. Some things we would like to see in future revision is some mini jacks like those found on Pocket Wizard in case we want to hook up studio strobes and simply trigger them in “dumb” mode. Also, the ability to have multiple channels or some sort of pairing mode so multiple transmitter could be used without conflicts. Additionally, maybe some thoughts to better mounting options that velcro could be devise. Having said all that, we recognize the awesome achievement Kevin is able to bring to the photographic front with these Radio Popper and we can’t wait to see what the future has in store.

Like I said, the Poppers shown here are still prototypes and I know Kevin said that some of the element were hand drilled and assembled. The machine assemble units should be even more refine than the units shown in these pictures and I am not sure what final design changes may be reflected in those. The good news is that Kevin expects the manufacturing run for these should be happening soon and we can not wait to get our hands on some.