Tale of the Sticky Grip

A couple of weeks ago I had a nice all-day walk in the forest. In my backpack was the Pentax K10D with the DA*16-50/2.8, a lunch box, some extra fruit for boosting blood sugar at need, and some clothes. My backpack was one of those with a built-in collapsable chair, so I could have my break where ever I wanted to.

After some 7-8 km walking, I came to THE spot. A clearing in the forest on a high ridge in the landscape, with a beautiful view across a lake. Muted autumn colours and near-perfect reflections in the water.

"Better take some shots before eating", I thought. As I grabbed the camera in the rucksack I sensed something cold, wet and sticky.

Uh-oh.

Out came the K10D with mashed banana smeared all over the battery grip. I forgot about the scenery and cursed myself for not packing the food separately. I SHOULD have known. Aaargh!

Today I picked up the grip at Pentax Norway after the cleanout. The repairman commented that this was the first time he'd had a K10D grip open for "maintenance", and remarked that it was quite neatly constructed inside. However, he also said that the banana goo had found ways into it that he didn't expect. All the buttons were quite fine because of the rubber seals, but the seams between the plastic parts that make up the hull are not sealed the same way. The goo had slipped through in some places in small amounts.

So, memo #1 to self: Weather protected the K10D may be, but it's probably no more than lightly splash-proof at best.

Memo #2 to self: Cameras do not make good fruit blenders.

Colour management, Vista and nVidia

A while ago I bitched a little about colour management in Windows Vista, and how my system would discard the loaded profile from ColorSpyder after about 30-60 seconds.

I must denounce my accusations towards Vista. It turns out to be caused by video cards having the nVidia geForce 8600 series chipset, and is the same on XP and Vista systems. The nVidia control panel which installs with the drivers has its own way of managing colour. Due to a delay in startup, the Spyder profile will load first, and then be replaced 20-30 seconds later by the nVidia application. The bad news is that the nVidia software does not support ICM or ICC profiles. There is only a crude, manual adjustment of gamma and colour balance. Solution is either to get a new graphics card, or resign to reload the Spyder profile manually on each startup.

Wonder if any of the other graphic chipsets are safe for manual colour management. ATI and Matrox are the first that springs to mind. Maybe Santa has any qualified advice? Hmmm... probably not.

Update 24. November 2008:
A little freebie bit of software to the rescue: Startup Delayer. I made a post about it here.

Writing for a select audience...

I stumbled over a blog readability test today, tapped in this blog's URL, and got the below stamp.

No wonder I have few readers... LOL...

Prolonged pause

So October came and went, and no text at all emerged on this blog.

Sometimes Life doesn't match the scope of a blog. At all.

Oh, but there's some photography related stuff, though. I keep submitting stuff to the Pentax Online Gallery, an activity that keeps pulling me back. Perhaps because of a fairly decent rate of success; currently amounting to two images. To the power of six. :-) The voting pulls me back too. Much to my own surprise. I thought I would be quickly bored by that procedure, but flipping through lots and lots of images gives a nice bird's perspective on what other Pentaxians are pointing their cameras at.

But that's all for now. Back to the treadmill. :-(