Microfibre Cleaning Cloth

The most versatile cleaning cloth that I’ve come across. Abrasive enough to get at hard to clean gunk but soft enough to use on filters and lenses. I have several packed away in bags and cases for use anytime I need a cleaning of a camera, accessory or lens. The most common one available in Vancouver is the Pentax microfibre cloth, which costs about $15 for an 8x8 inch piece.

Cotton Gloves

These are thin cotton gloves that are worn when handling sensitive materials that one should not risk having finger oils reach, such as filmstrips. Finger oils can wreck havoc on film and optical surfaces and be a bear to wipe clean fully and completely. Using these gloves is literally an ounce of prevention to forego a pound of cure. About $0.60 per glove at stores that carry them. Also good for handling vacuum tubes for the audio enthusiasts for the same reason as handling film, to prevent greasy fingers from damaging the glass tube. My son, as a two-year old, got hold of a friend’s Nikon 20mm lens a couple of years ago and proceeded to fingerprint the lens in a most disheartening fashion. By the time I noticed I despaired at just how oily his slick little fingers were and how the lens could be ruined. Thankfully, the lens had a Hoya filter mounted on it and all the fingerprint damage was done to the filter only with the real front element perfectly fine – whew! Unfortunately, it appears that the fingerprints did too much damage and no matter how I tried to clean the filter, some stubborn streaks refused to be cleaned off, whether by microfibre cloth or via lens cleaning solution and cleaning tissue paper. You can question the veracity and merits of using protective filters, but I do humbly suggest that if young children are nearby, it would be wise and very cost effective to have them on your lenses. And yes, I replaced the Hoya filter on the friend’s lens with a B+W and all lenses are now placed well away from my young children’s access.

Leatherman Multi Tool

There are knock offs of this multi tool, but the original is the Leatherman and it costs a pretty penny. I bought mine some years back for about $75 and mine is just a basic tool with no really exotic features, as can be available in other versions. The main use I have for the tool is not as a knife but as screwdriver and pair of pliers. The scissors have also been handy too. You could look at Swiss Army knife tools that have close to the same functionality, but those fat red tools do not have the trim elegance of the Leatherman. I always pack mine in my bag when out doing some shooting.

Hot-shoe Bubble Level

Can there be any accessory that a photographer will pay an extraordinary premium for vis a vis the accessory’s true cost? If there is let me know because so far, I think this little handy accessory takes the prize. It is merely a two-way bubble level that has been shaped to fit onto the standard flash hot (or cold) shoe.

The material to produce this product would normally price it at probably $1 if it were anything else except a hot-shoe level but because it caters to photographers and has its shape, it costs around $40 in some Vancouver stores. I bought mine a few years ago for a mere $25 and at that time I thought I was being taken, so $40 is just bloody and brazen highway robbery.

However, if you have as much difficulty as I do in getting straight horizon lines, it is but a small price to pay (and cheaper than a grid screen) to not mutter and curse your blind eye as you review your slides or digital images. Of course nowadays, one can easily do a digital rotation in Photoshop and do away with that one-sided bias you may be born with, but at the loss of the edge and corner elements of your image due to the need to crop.

Here we have the $40 hotshoe bubble level (left side) next to the $1 bubble level bought at a Canadian Tire hardware store.

To save some bucks, buy a cheapo level like you see on the left and a PC sync to hotshoe adapter (as seen further down). Use double-sided tape to attach the level to the hotshoe adapter. Attach it so that it provides a horizontal level, not vertical, because the horizontal level is most important to keep your horizon lines straight. Total cost $15 CAN, which is 1/3 the cost of the expensive two-way level seen above. If you want a two-way level, buy another cheap level and attach it to the horizontal level to create a T-shape. A bit big and ugly, but a cheapskate's delight.

Dedicated Camera Mount Cap

Do real caps cost the manufacturer so much that they chintz on this giveaway product and give the consumer nothing better than a soft white cap instead?

Nikon is notorious for doing this and every camera body (even the top F5, as I’ve seen) comes with this cheapskate push-on cap instead of a dedicated mounting cap that fits the mount like a lens would.

Curiously, my D100 came with a nice dedicated black cap instead of the usual cheapskate white push-on. However, even some Nikon lenses, which once upon a time came with the nice and solid rear lens cap, come with the cheap, white push-on ones. These lenses are usually the lower cost, entry-level lenses. Camera and lens caps cost about $6 per unit.

Rechargeable Batteries

Photography equipment chews through batteries like I do a bag of nachos during Super Bowl Sunday, which shamefully means a whole lot more than my wallet or my waistline would prefer. Thankfully, almost all of my equipment runs on the common AA cells and I have since purchased a number of rechargeable Ni-MH cells for use in my cameras and flashes.

There are plenty of choices on the market for rechargeable cells and most are quite good in performance but there are some that stand out as being consistently good. When shopping for these cells and unsure of what to buy, I would go with the highest power ratings, such as 1800 mHa or better.

I have older and relatively lower powered 1200 mHa that I bought for my Nikon Coolpix 950 digital camera. These are still being used with the Coolpix as well as my portable CD player. I also have 1700 mHa cells for use with the F100 cameras and SB28 flashes. These have also been used with my motorized Bronica camera, Metz and Vivitar flash units. The charger used for all of these cells is the Energizer trickle charger that will charge the cells to full and then trickle charge the cells while still in the charger. This ensures that the cells are at maximum power when taken out without risk of overcharging, which can reduce the effective life of the cells.

Neoprene Straps

All of the cameras I use on a regular basis have thick, wide neoprene straps instead of the usual thin nylon straps with the camera brand emblazoned on it. More comfortable for long photography sessions especially when using larger constant aperture zoom lenses. One of my neoprene straps is even wider than normal with little rubber nibs on the underside to provide more “grip” and stability if slung over a shoulder. I usually use this camera with the 80-200mm f2.8 lens.

Rubber Eyecups

I’ve been using Nikon cameras since 1997 and not one of them have I found to be comfortable to use with the stock eyepiece.

Usable yes but comfortable, no. Starting with the F90x, I purchased the accessory round rubber eyecup to provide a superior interface between my eye area and forehead with the camera.

I found a half round eyecup for use with the F70 camera that is also compatible with the D100, while not as comfortable as the full round eyecup, is still preferable over the stock eyepiece.

Anti Fog Eyepiece

I only have one of these on my primary F100 body, but it is a replacement for the stock eyepiece that provides anti fogging benefits. The stock eyepiece is a glass unit that can suffer from condensation caused by the heat from your forehead and nose if shooting in relatively cool environments. I suffered it enough times that spending $50 on this eyepiece was a worthwhile benefit. I have to be careful in cleaning the eyepiece to prevent scratch marks though, as it is made from plastic and not glass.

Grid Screen

Ever go out on a shoot and then wait eagerly for the slides to be processed, picked up and then examined only to find that you have yet again tilted the horizon line for most of your shots? Guilty here on more occasions then I care to recall. You would think that it isn’t very hard to keep a horizon straight especially with a tripod mounted camera, but for some reason I suffer tiled horizons even then. I am especially prone to tilting to one side when shooting handheld in the vertical portrait mode, hence the immense value that a grid screen provides me for keeping my lines straight. Subject lines right near the edge of the viewfinder are still best examined in the center of the viewfinder first before recomposing to place them at the edges again due to distortions inherent in the viewfinder itself.

Step-Up/Down Rings

Nowadays if I should require a filter, I buy them only in 77mm diameter size because my two most used lenses are 77mm filter size and it is much more cost effective to buy one good filter and use step-down rings instead of duplicating for smaller sizes. The lenses I have available range from the compact 49mm to the monstrous 95mm for filter sizes and except for the Bronica PS 40mm lens with the 95mm filter size, no other is larger than 77mm. I should point out that my use of filters is pretty limited these days thanks to the near infinite control that Photoshop provides in tweaking the colors and saturation of a digital image. A polarizer is about the only filter that I consider as necessary thanks to its unique qualities that cannot be duplicated with any ease in Photoshop (how does one cut through reflections in a pool of water or glass window?). Otherwise my color enhancer and GND filters are only useful when shooting film and I just do not do a whole lot of that in any meaningful capacity anymore (for my personal photography, that is). Not to mention all those forlorn Cokins stored as castaways in a plastic bin.

Wireless Flash Trigger

Although the name on my wireless flash trigger is Multiblitz, I believe it is sold under various other brand names. At regular retail, it costs about $100, but I got mine thrown in with my Multiblitz monolight kit.

It’s small, lightweight and seems built just good enough to hold together but does not seem robust enough to take hard falls in the studio, which makes its rather high cost seem silly. However, I would not be without it for use with any off camera flash units thanks to the freedom it provides from having to deal with messy wires from strobe to camera.

It has a very dark red filter at the front of the unit and when triggered, one can see a tiny little flash emit through the filter. This leads me to believe that this trigger is nothing more than a very small flash unit that will not emit any significant light thanks to the red filter, only allowing infrared pulses from it.

It is powered by two AA cells, which last forever given how little power this trigger requires. If your strobes have built-in slave sensors, take advantage of it. Of course you have to be aware that using optical slave sensors means that any other photographer’s flash unit will also fire your strobes and in these instances having to work with flash cables is still a necessity. You could buy fancy radio channel transmitters and receivers, but at around $500 per pop, it gets a wee bit pricey for multiple flash and camera units.