Category: frugality
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Kondo Your Camera
Marie Kondo, the famous Japanese désencombreuse, is welcome in my camera room, my computer room, and my hard drive. I might baulk at her moving through the rest of the house – particularly in the scale model workshop or the library, but she can do her best in the photo section. For far too long…
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The Second Time You Leap Off The Cliff
This is not about love affairs or business ventures…it’s about home-designed engineering. The fine art of making a limousine out of a kiddy-car and a bag of dead fish. In my case I have a car so no need for the smelly Roller. But I always need newer and weirder photographic gear, and the prices…
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When Does Frugal And Sensible Behaviour Start To Say…
” Bah. Humbug. “ When it starts to see people spending money they do not have on items they do not need. Then discarding these for newer goods upon the urging of advertisers. Of course the miser will be scorned by those who have the shiny new toys, and those who wish they could have…
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If It’s Not A Hustle, It’s A Side Hustle.
Or else it’s nothing…so the Internet seems to think. Everything is a sale. I want to write and illustrate a book. The topic will be scale model tabletop photography. I am assured there is ample technical support for writing and editing it, publishing, and promoting it, selling and branding and optimising…and it sounds like a…
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If It Works…
And does exactly what you are trying to accomplish. Do not replace it with the next advertised product. This may seem to be basic Franklinian logic, and welcome, but you would be surprised at how it grates upon the sensibilities of major equipment makers. It is anathema to every department in their company. Change is…
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Kerb Collection
We have several religious holidays each year – and supplementary civic and commercial one’s as well to break up the routine. But none are more welcome than the biannual kerb collection of hard goods rubbish. My life is balanced between two councils, so I get four a year. You can be no richer than that.…
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Disenchantment
As opposed to dat enchantment… The state of sobriety that lets you look at internet advertisements for new cameras and lenses and not go all weak and fuzzy. The part of you that looks to the bottom of the blurb and notes the price. The cynical tendency to want value for money and realise that…
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You Cannot Expect Much For $ 200, Eh?
Or so say the YouTube experts. And who better to say… Well, you could ask someone who has spent $ 200 on a piece of equipment – a Chinese lens – then used it and analysed the results of a careful studio shoot. In the case of this writer, I’ve just done this. The firm…
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The Old Shooters Remember The Old Tricks
Like the business of putting one SLR lens in front of another, but reversed. It made for a cheap macro lens. But not a bad one – you sometimes had to do some fancy footwork figuring out the exposure if your camera did not have a TTL meter, but the optical performance was often very…
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Never Buy A Solution
Before you can operate a problem. Far too may photographers buy the solution to a problem they have not got – because the advertising industry connected to the retail photographic industry has persuaded them to do it. Sometimes that persuasion takes months or years out of the saved capital of the shooter, and never returns…
Dr. Stein's Photographic Establishment 