Just before and after lunch I tested the macro focusing rail that I received yesterday. I bought it from the ebay seller jiakgong. It cost US $35.99 + $13.90 postage (£34.75 when I paid). Luckily the seller put the value on the customs declaration as $20, which meant I didn't have to pay any VAT/tax on it. I'm not against paying tax on imports, but am against the massive £10 post office charge whenever you have to pay tax. So if the seller had marked the real price on the item, I would have had to pay £5.21 tax and the £10 Post Office charge, which is a nearly 44% increase on the price I paid.
The first thing I noticed about the focusing rail was how it mounts on to your tripod - it has 2 1/4" screw threads, both at the side of the base mount rather than in the center of the mount as you would expect. I think this makes it a bit less stable than if it mounted with a center screw thread.
The next thing I noticed was that the knobs used for moving the focusing rails had a bit of play in them before they started actually adjusting the rail position:
I haven't used the focusing rail much, but can't see this being much of problem.
Here's the focus rail mounted on an arca-swiss compatible quick release plate on a ballhead on a tripod. I don't have a spare quick release clamp, so on top of the macro focusing rail I have mounted another ball head that has an arca-swiss compatible quick release clamp, this makes it easy to connect/disconnect the camera to the macro focusing rail, and easy to connect/disconnect the macro focusing rail from the tripod.
I think it would actually be better to connect the macro focusing rail directly to the tripod, and then use a head (preferably a geared head) on top of the macro focusing rail to adjust the angle you want the camera at. Unfortunately my main ballhead has a 3/8" thread and the macro focusing rail has a 1/4" thread so swapping between the two involves dismantling the tripod slightly to swap the screw thread size.
I tried using the ballhead so the macro focusing rail could be used to adjust the camera's position vertically. Normally to do a vertical adjustment you would need to play with the tripod legs or the center column height - not very easy to adjust accurately.
Here I have the camera facing down, using the vertical rail for adjusting focus, though more likely you would use the 2nd ball head to orient the camera to face forwards (like normal), then you would use the macro focusing rail for precise positioning on the vertical and horizontal axis, and then use the focus ring on the lens to adjust focus.
However, it seems this rail is no good for when you put it in a vertical position like this. The cog that moves the rail along no longer grips the 'track' (not sure what the correct name is). This happens because the weight of the camera hanging off the rail pulls the top section of the rail away from the bottom:
So to get the rail to move when in a vertical position, you need to push the top section of the rail back into the bottom section, so the cog can grip the track again. Not ideal. I googled for 'ebay focusing rail' and came across this thread where someone says the same thing.
For applications where you need to make small vertical adjustments I would not recommend this rail. I would expect that a more expensive rail like the Novoflex Castel-Q should work okay, though I've not used it (and obviously it's a lot more expensive).
I didn't have any problems moving the rail when mounted in a normal upright position or upside down for low shots (useful if your tripod doesn't collapse right down to the ground, mine would collapse to the ground except the center column is too long):
And here's a random photo of how to mount a full size flash unit (SB800 in this case) to the front of the MP-E:
It consists of a hot shoe bubble level attached to the MT-24EX adapter ring, then attached to the hot shoe bubble level is a Kaiser adjustable hot-shoe adapter, attached to that is the Nikon Speedlight Stand AS-19, and then the flash is attached to that. Not a very practical setup and I would worry about the hot shoe on the MT-24EX mount ring snapping.
I googled to see if you could purchase the MT-24EX mount ring as a spare part from anywhere, but couldn't find it. Then I looked at the Nikon SX-1 ring (Nikon's equivalent), but this doesn't have hotshoes on it, it will only work with the SB-R200 units that have specially designed bases that fit into the adapter ring.
After that I checked my email and checked whether urls were being rewritten on the web server - they were, but only as my rewrite rules specified. So I checked the differences between phpinfo() on my local site and the web server. I couldn't see any differences between the two that would cause the URLs to be rewritten on my local site but not on the web server. The web server had Zend Optimiser installed and my localhost was using fast-cgi rather than just cgi, but I couldn't see that either of these would make any difference to url rewriting.
I had a look at couch db, and read about that for a bit, then it was dinner time. After dinner I watched Lost (s05e06), which was ultimate as always. It did have some things that will be stupid and annoying if they don't explain them though.
After that I went on Animal for a while, then I read a bit more about couchdb. I don't think there's much point learning it at the moment as you need to install it yourself, so I wouldn't be able to use it on the web server since I'm on shared hosting, and so can't install programs.
The weather today was sunny in the morning, then became overcast at lunchtime, then was overcast for the rest of the day. In the evening it rained.
Food
Breakfast: Pink grapefruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheese on toast; ½ peppered beef with mustard sandwich; slice of chocolate sandwich sponge cake; toffee chewee bar; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken pie; asparagus; broccoli; potatoes; carrots; gravy. White wine. Pudding was waffles with golden syrup and squirty cream. Coffee. DELEE!!!
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