Buying some puffers

This morning my 450d and 18-55 IS lens arrived back from Canon. I took them out for a quick test. Unfortunately its still front focusing, although not quite as bad as before and I even got 1 shot (out of 6) that was correctly focused! Canon had included a print of some test shots (4 images each printed about 3.5" x 5" on a sheet of A4 photo paper) to show the lens was working correctly. However, all the shots (maybe not one of them) look like they were taken at less than 10m from the subject (the camera only seems to front focus with subjects that are over 10m away). Also at that print size you probably couldn't see any focus problems.

Anyway, I think I will give up on sending it to canon again, since it costs money to post it to them and also means I am without the camera for a week. It means I won't be able to use the camera and lens instead of my D200 and 18-70 lens for a walkaround combo, but it may be useful for larger insects e.g. butterflies, I will have to try it.

After doing the quick test I went down town to post my creative CB2530 headphones that somoeone won on ebay ages ago, but only paid for yesterday. When I got back I went on the pinternet for a bit, then tested out the 450d with MP-E65 and MT-24EX for a bit. I didn't do too many test shots really, but it looked like bare flash or milk jug diffuser, tissue, tissue paper in front of the flash still give you harsh highlights and relatively harsh shadows. A mini softbox made from cardboard, foil and tissue paper seemed to give the best results.

Unfortunately the mini-softbox I made is quite large and I would need to make another one to go on the other flash head, it might be hard to get them both at the right angles with the size of the mini-softboxes. I had done some research on diffusion (and made the mini-softbox) for the MT-24EX over the last few days since I knew it was important. Most of the info I found was posts by John K (He seems to post at a lot of sites!) suggesting the Gary Fong puffer diffusers. However these are expensive, about £17ea. on ebay, shipped from the US, so I didn't want to order any before I'd received the flash and tested cheaper alternatives. Also I'm sure that John K posted a few weeks ago that he now thought the puffers distrubute the light too widely and so destroy the shadows, and was now using some specialist diffusion plastics he had got as a sample from somewhere.

Even with the mini-softbox, the soldier beetle I was testing on still had a large white shine on it's back (just not as harsh as with the other diffusion methods I'd tried). So I decided it would be worth trying to get a couple of puffers to see how well they worked, I did some searching and found some info that said that cheap knock offs used to be available on ebay, but had all been pulled. They also gave 2 websites that sell the knock offs, which made me think of dealextreme, so I tried there and they did have them. The pics on dealextreme are of a blue one, but I assume they actually send you a clear/white one, so I ordered some of those, plus a couple of flash diffusers that looked a bit like the cardboard one I made.

I went on the pinternet a bit and read that some other people were having the same focus problems with their 450ds as me, although the large majority of people seem to have them working correctly.

After dinner I helped Ben make some fruit have Maccy and Moohars faces on. Then we watched a couple of episodes of Get along gang (A good song by Wiley reminded me of it).

Food
Breakfast: Honey nut loops; cup o' tea.
Mid morning snack: Choc chip cookie; bits of nice, butter and malted milk biscuits; coffee.
Lunch: Cheddar cheese with iceberg lettuce sandwich; clementine; slice of madeira style cake that Ben made; caramel rocky; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chilli burger with tomato relish, cheddar cheese, iceberg lettuce & sliced cherry tomato; chips. Pudding was trifle spong, sliced pear half and the chocolate mousse that Ben and Mac P made yesterday. Coffee.