Category Archives: Photos

2017 Product watch

Either I’ve stopped thinking ahead or markets are finally catching up: I’ve found existing or possibly imminent sources for most of the innovative products on my wish list:

High speed video is creeping into the mainstream: The just-under-$1000 Sony RX100MV can record a few seconds of HD (sort of) resolution at up to 1000fps.

Usable thermal imaging is widely available under $1000, and digital “night vision” is getting close to supplanting perpetually too-pricey image intensifiers. I found enough businesses working in this space that I’ve decided to wait to see what comes to market, rather than pushing for the particular integrated consumer product I have in mind.

In the consumer gun industry:

I haven’t written about them, but Flat Line bullets have brought revolutionary monolithic projectiles for long-range shooting to the masses.

Two years ago I asked for a three-mode trigger. I still haven’t seen what I specified, but the Echo trigger is a clever variant I hope to try soon.

Mantis has promised a second generation of their IMU that mounts to gun rails and interfaces with smartphones, allowing us for the first time to conveniently quantify and analyze recoil effects on firearms.

Bullpups continue to storm the mainstream. If you don’t like any of the increasing number of native bullpup autoloaders (AUG, Tavor, RDB, RFB, PS90 etc.) you can find conversion stocks for many popular platforms like the M1A, Ruger 10/22, Saiga, et. al. The KSG pump-action shotgun can actually be found at retail. From Europe we have clever single- and double-shot bullpups that should eventually be available at reasonable prices in America.

I don’t know that it’s in development, but at least someone thought it was worth patenting a new sealed-gap revolver.

Inexplicably, however, I’m still waiting for more heavy subsonic .22LR ammunition!

Swordplay

I recently supplemented my 6-year-old Sony Alpha-300 DSLR camera body with a mid-grade Sony A-77II SLT: a clever body that uses a fixed semi-reflective mirror instead of the moving mirror that dominated the field until the recent advent of mirrorless digital cameras. Though still stuck with the APS-C format this was an upgrade to a much more sensitive and higher resolution 24Mpx sensor (from the 300’s 10Mpx sensor). The other salient features are vastly improved auto-focus, imperceptible shutter lag, and a machine-gun fast 12fps continuous shooting rate.

The other upgrade I just made was to my lighting kit. Until now I have relied on natural light, reflectors, and a lone Sony 43GN speedlight. For this shoot I added two $60 Neewer TT 660 flashes, which despite their low price are fully featured for manual lighting and sport a Guide Number of 58. I also bought a cheap radio trigger system that is able to sync all three flashes up to 1/200s. The Neewers take two seconds for a full recharge from batteries, but dialing them back to 1/16 power they can keep up with full-speed shooting bursts.

For this shoot I relied almost entirely on the light from these three flashes on a 10′ x 6′ stage. At 1/4 power I could shoot 100 ISO f/6 at 1/200s. For the action sequences I had to reduce the flash power to keep up with the shooting rate, but that revealed another strength of the speedlights: lower power means faster discharge rates, so even leaving my shutter about 1/200s the effective exposure was in the neighborhood of a motion-freezing 1/1000s.
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