I am easing back into the photography world after taking a hiatus due to kids. I've found myself carrying dedicated camera a lot more frequently than I have in the past (even before kids), which has resulted in me spending some time thinking about what the right camera for me is. I've "short-term-rented", via lensrentals.com, and "long-term-rented", via buying and selling used equipment, a number of bodies and lenses over the past 1.5 years to try to find what clicks with me. So far, I've spent the longest amount of time with Sony's A7III. I just started a long term rental on an OM-1.

The goal of this exercise is to help me understand how I'm using my gear empirically, to help guide my lens selection and body needs. The intent is to ignore feel and quality of life (for now).

To make this possible, I cobbled together a quick and dirty application that uses MetadataExtractor to aggregate EXIF data into a flat file that I fed into Power BI.

My only two lenses for the A7III are Sigma's 35mm f/1.4 DG HSM and Sony's 50mm FE f/1.8. Looking only at these two, the first insight is that I tend to grab the smaller and lighter lens. This is despite the fact that I like the way the Sigma 35mm f/1.4 DG HSM renders images. It's also despite my enjoyment of the 35mm focal length. I know 35mm isn't super popular, but I've found it works well with my kids. I'm usually "the right" distance away from them for the 35, and often have to back up for the 50. Backing up also isn't always possible - especially when we're visiting places like indoor museums.

That said, the Sigma 35mm is a fairly hefty lens at 755 grams. Sony's 50mm FE f/1.8 is 186 grams in comparison. The results speak for themselves.

takeaway: maybe I should grab a more compact 35 (or maybe the 40mm G f/2.5) to use when we're not going to be somewhere with very dim lighting

Next up is another obvious one, but one that's worth saying anyway: I've shifted from shooting mostly outdoors in decent weather, before kids, to a more mixed environment in terms of lighting. This is clearly visible by calculating the exposure value from all my photographs and then looking pre-post 2022.

There are two stories to be told for the photographs taken in low light, but to get there let's look at the aperture I used for low lighting levels (say under 6.0 EV, which is a brightly lit home interior)

Let's then carve this into two groups: one that was shot (nearly) wide open (f/1.4, f/1.6, f/1.8) and everything else.

For the wide open group, it's amazing what a fast lens can do for you in terms of keeping ISO down with low light. Of the 269 photos I've kept over the past year that were wide open in under 6 EV, ISO was at or below 3,200 on all but 35 of them.

takeaway: fast lenses are good for low light, but also maybe I don't really need a FF camera for low light... at least with my current shutter speeds

A quick note on the scatter chart - the y axis is logarithmic.

For the second group, the majority were stepped down for increased depth of field. The photo below isn't super interesting, but shows this. It was shot on the FE 50mm @ f/4.5 and 1/125 s shutter. The resulting ISO was 4000.

If I had shot this on say micro four thirds, I could have used a 25mm lens at f/2.2 for the same field of view and depth of field, knocking the ISO down to 1000. This sure sounds a lot better than ISO 4000, but when you consider that something like an OM-1 is 1 2/3 stops behind my A7III in terms of dynamic range the difference isn't as large as it sounds. At ISO 1000, the OM-1 will return a dynamic range of 7.73 where as the A7III returns 7.15 at ISO 4000.

takeaway: darn you FF for your shallow depth of field, but maybe the advantages of a smaller sensor aren't that big on overall image quality when you step the FF body down

As a final thought, I used to do a spend a decent amount of time taking photos of cars going by with my D5300 and the excellent VR Zoom Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED.

takeaway: I could have probably used a longer lens for a number of these photos. A 100-400 with a teleconverter, or a 200-600 (or 200-800 in the case of the Oly 100-400) would cover 88% of these shots.

The part is a 345mm x 60mm spice rack that mounts to the inside of our pantry door.

About 7 years ago, I made four spice racks out of wood and painted them to match our cabinet door. Wear and tear (and kids) have resulted in them getting glued back together multiple times. I finally gave up, modeled the design, and have been printing replacements in PETG as they fail. So far they've been holding up a lot better. They're also a touch deeper than my original wood design, so they can fit the round spice island containers more easily.

In the past, I had to print these in two halves on my i3 clone (a Monoprice Maker Select Plus, which is a rebadged Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus). Now that I have a printer with a 350 mm^2 bed, I thought I would see if I could print the rack in one piece. My single ASA attempt was an epic fail due to warping, but the PETG print went very smoothly with very minor lifting. I've read others say PETG does not like enclosures, but I've printed a number of PETG parts with my Voron fully enclosed and they've come out very well. I struggled with PETG warping on larger parts with my unenclosed i3 clone.

Here are a few photos comparing a rack I printed on my i3 clone to this one. The print quality is quite a bit better, but now that I have a higher ceiling to shoot for I'm realizing I have a further to go on my tuning journey. I will say that I never noticed things like the Slic3r buldge, that's also present in Super Slicer, until now.

I personally find it helpful to see other's prints under unflattering lighting, so with that said...

Somewhat flattering lighting (eg ambient)

Voron:

i3 clone:

Direct light, provided via a flashlight, perpendicular to the surface

Voron:

I3 clone:

direct light, provided via a flashlight, nearly parallel with the surface

Voron:

i3 clone:

Bonus photo of my ASA attempt

Sadly, I forgot to change my print temp back from 250 to 240, so there's quite a bit of wispy stringing. I suspect the print would have separated from the bed anyway. Any pointers here would be appreciated. The bed was clean (soap + water), was at 100, I let the printer heat soak for about 45 minutes with the filter going full tilt, first layer squish was solid good, smooth PEI (the textured side seems to have prints come loose more easily).

Printables link first

For the past 5 or so years, we've hard two bird feeders: one for larger birds and one for smaller birds. Another instance of the bird feeder in the photo above has been the smaller bird feeder until now. Over the years, I've fiddled with slip on adapters for the perches and eventually had to model a full replacement perch after a squirrel broke one of the original pot metal perches. My large bird feeder met the end of its life recently, and rather than replace it with a smaller capacity/larger perch unit I decided to modify my existing perch design to accommodate larger birds.

stock mount:

new mount:

back of new mount:

I printed all the parts I needed for my 2.4 build on my Monoprice Maker Select Plus (a rebranded Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus), enclosed under a couple of cardboard boxes taped together. The parts were... functional, but not exactly pretty.

Motive for reprinting:

• My z-homing isn't that consistent and I need to fiddle with live z a bit for each print. My StealtBurner didn't fit together that well, so I'm hoping that better fitting parts will result in more consistent homing
• Moving to a Bondtech BMG Integrated Drive Gear Assembly in hopes of having fewer z-artifacts. If I'm going to rebuild my CW2, I might as well print it again too

While disassembling, I noticed that one of the bolts attaching the carriage to the linear rail was... very very lose (backed out 3+ turns). Maybe that was another contributor to my inconsistent homing.

More photos:

My first print with the rebuild is underway! I'm very excited to see if there's any change to the random z-artifacts I was seeing before, but I'm sad to report that my first klicky attach probe failed.

My oldest kid dropped this light... way too long ago and it stopped working. The light is very simple electrically and the switch was fine, so off to get a new Nichia pill/driver/LED combo. As a bonus, the newer (since like 2018, I've had this flashlight for a while) driver has much better mode spacing. The part was pretty cheap ($25), Benjamin was friendly/helpful, and I'm a happy camper.

Removal was a massive pain due to the tight packaging and threadlocker. Amusingly, the switch side had no threadlocker and came out easily using snapring pliers. I had to make a 'custom' tool to remove the driver. Annoying, pill itself was also threaded in addition to the retainer. The pill also didn't have as great of a spot to key into it, so removal was a one way road.

Thankfully no threads were harmed, everything went back together easily, and I have a working tiny pocket light again.

I took this in Aruba before kids in 2016. Nothing special gear wise, thanks especially to a large bird that wasn't phased by me walking around near it..

D5300 + Nikon AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm F/4.5-5.6G IF-ED

300mm, f/5.6, 1/4000, ISO 1800

This exhibit has been in place for a while, I'm guessing they had to replace the computer for some reason.

I just got this assembled last weekend.

printables, complete with F3D file.

This is a battery adapter that will allow you to insert D cell batteries into a LiitoKala Engineer Lii-500. I included the Fusion 360 file, so you can customize it to fit other applications, but odds are it will fit most 4+ 18650 based chargers that are also compatible with Ni-MH.

It prints in two halves that I simply hot glued together around their perimeter. It's not like this part is going to see very high loads… The parts are designed to print without supports. My copies are 20% infill (you could easily go with less) and 3 walls for an overall wall thickness of 1.16. Wall thickness is something I wouldn't change, at least for the battery side so the battery terminals don't eventual fail. The batteries are a very slight interference fit to ensure a robust electrical connection.

For terminals, I used 8mm wide nickle strip. I'm sure you could use something else, but I had some on hand and it seemed like an obvious application. Connections between the two halves were made via wires and solder.

Klipper started throwing an error and shutting down while trying to heat the extruder. The extruder was cold, which basically meant a heater wire break. Thankfully it was very easy to find. So much for buying a nicer harness. Grumbles aside, I wonder if this wire got pinched when I assembled the chains, which lead to an early failure.

I didn't have any spare PTFE wire on hand, so I spliced in a length of 16 gauge silicone wire and made sure to land the solder and heat shrink sections well away from any possible motion. I have replacement wire on order, but am tempted to run as is until it fails again...

Working on a wall mount for my NAS to get it out of my basement airspace and into a closet. It's a tray that the NAS fits fairly snugly in and will screw into an exposed stud.

Once the UPC holder is printed, I'll post completed/mounted pictures over in [email protected]

Skirt to give a feel for bed footprint:

Looks like I have some ringing/ghosting to take care of. Maybe it's time for me to use that accelerometer I have mounted to my stealth burner...

Our kids are starting to outgrow our double stroller, but will still want to ride from time to time. We've had this wagon for years, but it needed some upgrading. Rather than toss it and buy a new kid wagon, I decided to modify this one. Its biggest deficit was its wheels. They had metal sleeve bushings instead of real bearings and the wheels themselves were basically just an ABS doughnut with a narrow/thin rubber bands for tread. The treads had all cracked and fallen off. All this made the wagon hard to pull and loud.

I decided to make my own wheels to solve both problems. The new wheels consist of two halves and a TPU tread. The halves are keyed to mate with each other and are held together with m3 nuts/threadserts. Each half contains two skate bearings, resulting in four bearings per wheel. It's probably overkill, but I didn't want to leave the two halves unsupported in the center of the wheel at their interface.

Built in bridges for the somewhat weird shape to trick the slicer.

Now my 3 year old can pull me around in the wagon.

The build was completed about 2 months ago. In that time I've gone through probably 5 KG of filament.

These stats are a little misleading, so here's some detail behind them

• The majority of the shutdowns are the bowden tube getting caught between the gantry and the rear extrusion it rides on, causing y-homing to fail. I think I sorted that out now
• The errors were generally klicky mount errors while the printer was young. That's also sorted
• I've only had one aborted print that was aborted more than 2 minutes into the actual print where I lost bed adhesion due to not adjusting my offset after decreasing my print temp and lowering pressure advance
• That 18h 22m and 22s was repeated three more times printing TPU treads for some ASA wagon wheels for the a wagon I'm messing with for my kids. At this point, I would call the printer pretty reliable and I'm treating it like my old I3 clone - if the first layer goes down well the print will go well

The printer is... fairly lightly tuned, but the quality is quite a bit better than my old I3 clone while printing faster. I'm sure I could tune more, but at this point I'm happy. I ran e-steps, got my z-offset nailed, ran a temp tower, ran Ellis's pressure advance, and ran a retraction test (spoiler: it didn't matter).

Here are some test prints that some of you may be familiar with. Everything is in ASA, 240 extruder temp, 0.4mm nozzle. Since I tend to print larger functional parts I'm going to probably move to a bigger nozzle.

Screws smoothly after running it up and down the threads once

Super Slicer's built in retraction test. No stringing to see at any value

Voron cube

Same cube, cnother face, somewhat harsher lighting

Same cube, same face as two photos ago, very harsh lighting. It's kind of amusing how bad the print looks with direct light at such a steep angle relative to the face. It would be kind of nice to improve this, but under normal lighting you'll never see this.