Improving autofocus

Earlier I mentioned having pretty egregious autofocus issues with the Canon 7D and the Tamron 150-600 lens, and sat down to see if I could improve things. My efforts were quite successful, so I’m going to go over what I did in the hopes that someone else may benefit from this. Virtually all of these will apply to any DSLR camera, with perhaps minor variations.

Clean the contacts. read more

The real Carter

This is what comes from procrastinating. I’ve had “Jimmy Carter” as a topic in my list of potential posts for years, waiting for me to get motivated to do a little more research to clarify details, because I felt that his presidency had been badly misrepresented in the media since before he even left office, and now that he’s entered hospice, articles (mostly along read more

Rehab rehash

The date that I originally posted this is now just one day shy of a decade ago, but it remains relevant and so it tends to return at this time of year, right before birthing season starts for many of the local species. So, here on National Wildlife Day, let’s consider what we should do with injured and orphaned wildlife.

I used to work in this field a fair amount, both in administration of read more

Save time, eliminate dross

This is directed primarily at the people who get into these kinds of discussions, from any angle, but the perspective might be useful to others as well. And by, “these kinds of discussions,” I mean all of the fringe, esoteric, paranormal, supernatural and suchlike topics like alien visitation, crypto-critters like Bigfoot and Nessie, religious miracles… you know the range. Because read more

Playing the rubes

I’ve had this one sitting in the blog folder for a while, and since it’s Freethinker’s Day, I decided to tackle it (especially since photographs still aren’t happening too often.) If I don’t finish this, I’ll set it aside for Freethought Day instead and just change this paragraph.

The U.S. really has an inordinate number of religious politicians – or at least, read more

Tomorrow, let’s… keep on

Tomorrow is, honest and for true, Freethinkers Day, and as god as my witness (a ha ha ha ha haaa!,) I don’t really know what to post about it.

I mean, I don’t really even like the label: freethinker, as opposed to, what, a paid thinker? The idea is that a freethinker is not hampered by religious dogma or cultural restrictions, but in reality, nobody tells you, or can read more

Our ignorance made it plausible

That’s a new phrase in my critical-thinking arsenal now. By itself, it seems counterintuitive, but that’s really the point. Let me explain.

A century or so ago, as telescopes got better and we began to understand more about our closest stellar neighbor Mars, we realized that it was not too much smaller than Earth and not too far away, and surmised that, given these conditions and the read more

“Mean?” Please.

It’s been a while since I’ve tackled a post of this nature (instead of a post of nature,) and I’m out of practice, I think. More, my reading and web surfing hasn’t been related to this as much anymore, so I’m not inspired to address such topics anywhere near as much. But in light of recent developments (as well as re-reading Richard Dawkins’ The god read more

Rehab redux reload

It’s slow of course, and I have little to post about – some lens tests, if I can get motivated to do them – but it’s also approaching that time of year, and so I’m once again reposting something that originally fell into the ‘Amateur Naturalist’ category, but now with a new name while lacking any actual new content (thus, like most product upgrades anymore, read more

But how? Part 30: Responsibility

[As a throwback to the early days, I did this one as a podcast too, so you can hear the audio of it immediately below. But if sounds like a long-overdue brake job bother you, you can simply read the text version.]

Walkabout podcast – But How? part 30: Responsibility

This is one that I’ve touched on here and there before, but I was reminded of it while watching Julia Sweeney’s read more

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