A woman and her dog (black and white)

 

 Took this today. 

 

 

Why reinvent the wheel?

 

Seriously, why the constant need to "make things better" and mostly things that no longer work?

 Why am I having a rant?  Well my bathroom is the answer.  I've redecorating and have more or less done the bathroom, the toilet roll holder needed replacing so we bought a new one.  How hard can that be?

 Not esy is the answer, or the local shops had plenty, all arty-farty chrome and glass all clever, what they didnt have was a simple roll holder with a screw at each end.  Oh no!  chrome and glass is modern, better ect.  Except it just isnt.

 The old holder lasted for years, two bloody great screws holdng a wooden roller at each end..  The now one uses a single screw in the middle, at least thats the idea.  Except the roll and the holder is fastened to that screw by one tine grub screw, honestly it should be in a watch or camera.

 Why?, it now swivels about it's center hanging point despite being tightened as much as possible.  At what point during the design and development and the tooling up and building of these things did nobody say "hang on, theres not much holding that together?"  "Thats not going to last long!"

 It's like the terrible remakes of classic films, Oh I know Get Carter was a great film in 1971, lets remake it 29 years later and make it shit, or the bloody awful Swalows and Amazons remake.

 So I'm going to reinvent the wheel, I'm going to make it hexagonal.  The fact it will be shit doesnt matter, some dozy company will still happily make it and because the old boring round wheel will vanish off the market I'll clean up with loads of sales.  lets face it who wouldn't want a glass and chrome 6 sided wheel?  

Some avaition news

 

 The number of commercial aircraft with burning smells or smoke in the aircraft seems up on recent months, so far none has resulted in a fire.

Light aircraft have had a weird week, one landed upside down on a hanger roof (the pilot survived) another hit a deer on the runway and my favorite, hit a golfcart (that wasnt on the runway)

 Theres been a few fatal accidents with 5 or 6 people involved, and a number of light planes ending up in water suggests a life jacket might be a good idea if you plan on flying over water.

Commercial aircraft on the ground have had a bad week, one had a truck paked under it catch fire with a fair amount of damage to the aircraft, another had a cabin door ripped off by the airbridge, thats going to cost a lot to fix too.

Tamron 28-300mm for Canon

 

 One of my mates bought one of these so I thought I'd do a test and very brief review.

The Tamron 28-300mm is a so called superzoom designed for full frame camera  it will still work on a crop sensor camera as well, although depending on make the lens will be the equivalentof around 45mm to 480mm, so on a crop sensor you loose the wide angle end of the zoom range, but gain on telephoto.

Obviously a lens of this range has to make some compromise, this means it it's a 3.5 to 6.3 F stop, that means you'll need to bump up the ISO on a dull day or struggle with hand holding the slower shutter speeds.

The lens itself is light, very light in fact, it's also supprisingly small... well until you zoom in then the barrel extends in two stages to around three times it's closed length.  It does have a zoom lock to stop it slipping open (you lock it in the closed position) but my tester didn't have any issues with it opening, the zoom seemed stiff enough not to suffer creep, yet not so stiff as to be any problem zooming.

 Optically it's not bad, ok it's no L series, but then it's a cheep budget friendly lens, and replaces a couple of lens really, you'd need a 28-70 and a 70-300mm to cover this lens.   I'd say it's good enough for most people unless you need to crop a lot or pixle peep.  As a walk around lens for full frame it's pretty good, I was expecting it to be a lot worse.

 Below are some test shots taken at 28mm, 100mm, 200mm and 300mm, all hand held shot on a full frame Canon 6d2.  If you click on a picture then right click and view image you can see a larger version.  All the pics went through photoshop and had my normal sharpen and resize action.

Also all the airshow pictures I posted were shot on it on the same camera.

 So would I use it?  Well yes as a walk around lens it would be fine.  Would I use it on a critical job?  Probably not if I had something better, but I suspect most people would never know the difference, and thats a hell of a handy range and weight saving for a day out walk.

 

 

Few more Panosonic TZ80 shots

 A few more test shots off a TZ80.

Swansea bay airshow 23

 

 This time I went knowing I wasnt going to get any great pictures, the planes are miles away and I knew from previous experience you need about a 600mm lens to get close to a decent shot from where I go.  So I took a 28-300 on a full frame body, way too short for decent pics.

 To be honest my heart and head wernt in shooting pics, I ended up going for a walk and meeting up with my brother who was working there.

 Yes I did take some pics, but they are all heavy crops.  I only got one shot I really liked, and that was a shot of the beach and seagulls.

A few pictures

 

 A few pictures for today. 

  I'm off to the airshow soon and truth be told I dont really want to go, it doesnt fire me up like airshows used to, probably because it's painfully slow with big gaps between flying, and my heads not right the right place to enjoy myself.  I'm temted not to even take a camera, the planes are so far away from the crowd it's a joke, you need a telescope just to see them.