Well a few more years have passed, i lost both my grandmas and an uncle, my sister got married and gave birth to her first kid.
I replaced my old car, with a newer one.
And we made a new fence and gate (and many many other things)
Recently (~2.5 years ago) me and my family moved to a village called Gadalin, where we more or less built a new house (long story), or should i say we are still building it.
The skeleton of the house was built before we moved, but the interiors and exteriors were not, since then it’s been insulated on the exterior and me and my parents are working on finishing the interiors, which is about 80-90% done (we ran out of money). So because of that i had basically no time to work on this site, let alone have the time to take any pictures, ones worth sharing that is, because smartphone pictures of products from building centers I’ve got thousands.
We still have fences and a garage/workshop to build, plus paving the courtyard. All this while still making money and gardening.
So i might not post anything new for a few more years, when i do i will probably be redesigning this website, if i don’t abandon it in the mean time.
It’s not like anyone reads any of this anyway.
Around this time last year i bought a Upstart BG-E8 aftermarket battery grip for my Canon 550D/T2i.
What i liked about it is that it was pretty cheap, ~$75 including 2 replacement batteries. I was also supposed to get a mouse pad that they “forgot” and they also made it sound like i was getting an infrared remote control for my camera, but on closer inspection (which obviously i only did after i received it) it says that it’s an optional extra (even though it was included in the picture of the bundle). That’s some pretty gray hat stuff and i won’t be buying anything from them again. (i’m not even gonna link to the Amazon page i bought it from)
One of it’s biggest faults initially was that the battery indicator no longer worked, it always showed full, and because of that i would get various errors when it was close to empty, like getting errors when trying to take a picture with the built in flash or it just shutting off out of the blue, and it always took me a second to figure out why this happened, not before panicking that my expensive camera died or something.Also draining the batteries to 0% is never recommended.
I haven’t had any experience with other battery grips so i don’t know if this is a common problem or not.
Only about 2-3 months later, while on a field trip and having a pretty heavy Tamron 70-300mm VC on, it broke.
4 of the 5 screws holding the metal plate (that holds the big screw you attach the battery grip to the camera body) came out of their threads, why ? because they were small metal screws with fine threads that were screwed into plastic.
They were obviously meant to screw into metal like the last screw that kept the camera and lens from falling to an expensive death and maybe rolling down the mointain, but the funny thing is there was metal there they could have screwed into but bigger holes than needed were drilled and plastic risers made instead.
Either the Chinese who designed it did it intentionally to make it last less or they have almost no idea what they are doing and were reverse engineering it, but this is a very common problem with stuff made in China.
Anyway i bought a cheap battery grip for a reason, lack of money, so the solution was not to go and buy another one (like most would have done) but to fix it (this is what less wealthy people do or at least try to do).
Why didn’t i send it in for warranty i hear you say ? well it’s because the shipping would have cost more then the grip itself and because i didn’t buy it myself. (My aunt bought it since it only cost $10 to ship to her and she was sending a package to me anyway.)
So i made some aluminum nuts. First i poked a whole through a piece of aluminum from a strip i had lying around (less wealthy people also don’t throw everything out), fortunately a thumb tack was just the right size, then i just used the screw itself to cut threads in the piece (if it was a harder metal i couldn’t do this) then i used regular scissors to cut them out.
Then came the tricky part, assembling everything. The problem was that the nuts would turn together with the screw, so i had to think of something clever again, what i did was to use some glue to hold the nut to the base. (see photo)
The result looks fairly messy, also because i had to file down parts of the nuts, because they were interfering with the rotation of the main screw.
But since then i haven’t had a problem with it, and if it weren’t for the battery level indicator issue and of course the plastic threads i would have recommended it.
Now just because the one you bought isn’t an Upstart brand or that it’s more expensive doesn’t mean it’s any better built.
If you can, take the cover plate off and take a look at what those little screws grab onto, doing this should not void your warranty or cause any other problems, but it’s good to know if you can trust it with your $$$ camera and $$$-$$$$ lens.
I hope this was useful to someone, either way please leave some feedback and share any experiences you had.
These photos were taken on a 1 day trip to Balea Lake in the Carpathian mountains. It’s located on the Transfagarasan, which is a pretty famous road that cuts across the mountains, as you can tell by the first picture it’s famous for it’s corners, making it somewhat of a drivers paradise, make sure you watch the episode that Top Gear UK did on it.
It was a very nice excursion even if it was pretty short, and i’m told we were very lucky to get such good weather.
Just after i took this photo my camera started acting up and after wasting precious minutes i figured out that the problem was, the battery grip broke. Read more about that here.
It’s interesting how different the lake looked from one minute to another.
On the way home it was really hot in the minibus, the air conditioning was on but it was as effective as a mouse coughing on you, but at least we had a pretty nice dinner at Hanul din Ardeal (The Transylvanian Inn) and a brief but pretty sunset.
I sometimes do people photography too and Gabriella Tamas is my most willing model. Here are a few shots from the May 2012 photo shoot, in which she’s wearing a dress that she made.
I only had the kit lens at the time (18-55 IS), so the perspectives aren’t the best and the background blur is … lacking.
Here are some of the pictures i took during this years Saint George town celebrations.
There were a few colorful rides that made interesting pictures when exposed for a longer time.
There were also fireworks marking the end of the week long celebration, they weren’t very spectacular, it’s a small town with an even smaller budget after all, but still worth photographing.
I did my first night time Full HD video a couple of days ago at this years Saint George Days town celebrations.
Shot with my Canon 550D/T2i DSLR and a Canon 18-55mm IS lens all mounted on a tripod.
Any comments are appreciated.