Neat Gear
As editor-at-large of Outdoor Photographer, I still get to see some interesting gear that I might not see otherwise. Every once in a while I like to comment on some gear that I have found interesting and useful.
Spyder Cube (from DataColor, www.datacolor.com) — this is quite an interesting little cube. At first, I have to admit, I was a little wary that this would be all that helpful. It is designed to make custom color calibration in the computer with RAW. I am not a big fan of auto white balance and setting white balance when processing RAW. There are a lot of problems from that. However, there are times that it really is hard to get a good white balance. Custom white balance can help, but the Spyder Cube is another alternative. And once I started using it, I was converted that it does indeed work quite well. It is a cube about the size of a golf ball that you put into the scene you are working with and take a picture of it. The cube has gray, white and black sides, along with a hole in one black bottom side that gives an “absolute” black. You then use the gray for white balance and you can use the white and blacks to check white and blacks in the scene. This is something that would have been great when I was doing corporate photography where the light can be all over the place and a pain to color balance. It is small enough to keep in a camera bag for those situations where you really need that extra help in getting a good white balance.
Vacu-Pod (www.vacu-pod.com) — I met Michael Corlew at a couple of programs I was doing this year and he showed me his Vacu-Pod. Michael is a bird photographer who had been looking for something that would securely hold a good-sized ballhead and a camera with a big lens, all on a soft rubber “grip” tightened by a lever to create a vacuum seal. This is absolutely terrific for working a wildlife refuge from a car. You can mount the pod on any smooth service, such as a window. It is rock solid (but always remember to turn off the car when shooting!). It can also be “vacuumed” to a pie pan, a really interesting idea, for sandy conditions. Low angle shots in the desert and on the beach have long attracted me, but they also scare me because of all that sand so close to the camera. The pie pan keeps the sand away from the camera and lets you get your camera solidly mounted close to the ground.
WD-TV (from Western Digital, www.wdc.com) — now this has been around for a while, but I had not seen it. So many of us have excellent high-definition TVs that would be great to use for displaying photos, if you had an easy way of doing it. This is that easy way. This little black box will play your images directly from any USB storage device. You can put your photos onto a USB jump drive or play directly from a USB hard drive. I like going from a separate storage device rather than a hard drive storing all photos. I have no interest in doing a slide show of all my images! Plus, like many people, I shoot a lot of images at a given location that will look too similar if you went through them all. Yes, you can control what is shown from your drive through WD-TV, but for me, it is just easier to keep my “slides” separate for this purpose on their own drive.
