Hot shoe to jack cable mod

Make your own hot shoe to jack/phone cable

With only 35 minutes left of my 26th birthday I give to you the knowledge you need to save yourself a whole bunch of bucks.
If you own a camera flash without a jack/phone/pc sync socket you'll find it quite costly to hook up your Pocketwizard or Elinchrom Skyport trigger. You can spend £30 on a HOT SHOE TO MINIJACK or you can spend £7 on a HAMA HOT SHOE TO PC SYNC and 79p on a jack socket and solder them together.

Now let me make this clear, I am not an electrician, I am a photographer so you will find no schematics or fancy electricians terms here, what you will find is a couple of pictures and that is all you should need cause you just have to stick 2 wires down.

This is what you will end up with:



...and this is how to make it. (click photos to view them bigger)
Take your Hama hot shoe to pc sync and cut the pc sync end off with a scissors, strip the wire about an inch, what you will find is a central wire and a load of bits around it, score your jack socket a tad, twist up the wire bits, pop them through the hole at point (A) and solder it...



Now, take the central wire, stick it in the hole at point (B) and solder. I didn't know whether point (B) or (C) was the correct one to attach the central wire to so I soldered another piece of wire between them to make sure it would work, as I said I'm not an electrician ;-)



You could stick a jack plug to the cable instead of socket, I chose the socket cause the Hama cable is quite short and my Skyports came with a 40cm jack to jack cable which would go between the receiver and the socket.

I hope this has helped all you poor photographers out there, the best thing is you could plug your headphones into your hot shoe now in public and when other photographers see you they'll think "what the hell is he up to?".

Don't forget that STROBIST.COM is the best lighting site in all of the world. Go there now.


MP3: Big Black: Cables (Live) From Atomizer

DISCLAIMER: IF ANYTHING BREAKS IT IS YOUR FAULT AND NOT MINE. BOTH OF MINE WORK FINE, TIME AFTER TIME AFTER TIME. :-P

National Transport Festival of Wales 2007

National Transport Festival of Wales
Sunday 17th June 2007

This year "the car show", as I call it, was brilliant, for some reason it seemed better than last year, in fact it was better than ever. The Liberty Stadium was the place to be on Sunday, I may have gone down on the Saturday if I'd known it was a two day thing. I found out about it from a banner on the footbridge by Tesco in town, the left hand side of it was covered by a tree so when coming up to it in a car all I saw was 'Truck Show', I was pretty excited cause I thought the missing word was MONSTER. It turns out the word was WELSH which, very obviously, isn't as exciting as monster. After that blow I must have only seen 17th and not noticed 16th.

There was a bit of a military operation to get there, I suppose getting to the stadium from Clase isn't that much harder than getting to Singleton Park from here but it felt a bit more exciting, I got all our bus options from firstgroup.com (which turned out to be a bit wrong) and set off. It was all going smoothly until we got to Somerfield in Morriston, they only had jumbo packs of bourbon creams when I wanted a normal sized pack and when I went to get a bottle of pop they didn't have any Diet Coke. Some woman had a basket full of goodies at the only open till so I left the biscuits and went to Woolworth for the good old "2 for £1.40" on pop and some crisps. We missed a bus and had to endure a mildly bonkers guy talking him to himself for 10 minutes until the next bus came.

There were a load of cool cars at the festival as well as trucks, vans, buses and coaches, we didn't bother going over to the bike bit cause it was a bit boring last year, the best part of that was seeing a stuffed golden eagle in the museum stores. As I was saying, there were loads of cool vehicles but I don't have much of an interest in that kind of stuff, I was there for the old men and their dogs (the four legged kind), also the poster on the bus said there would be 'autojumble' which sounded pretty special (unfortunately it was just a load of old greasy engine parts). Within 5 minutes of arriving there was a great dog fight by what appeared to be a quiet little collie type of thing and one of those brownie/reddish curly-eared ones. The collie type went for its jugular and curly-ears whimpered like a baby. After his scare he was free to enjoy the rest of the day, he seemed to be following us to make sure he didn't miss out on any cool stuff.

There was also a chihuahua there that was proper 'ard, it was barking at everyone like it was three feet tall, he was great. My favourite cars were probably an old police one complete with a little police officer marionette hanging from the rear view mirror, and one with a tiger on the roof (click tiger face above) which I was informed by its biggest fan was from North Wales in the 1950's, to me it just looked like a modern stuffed toy from a corner shop. We had a bit of a sit down on a railing and what should appear from a parked car window but a baldy bodied, hairy-toed, curtain-haired snaz dog. He seemed bored to death and was happy to pose for a few pictures in between crying and dashing around the back seat. He was actually pretty good lookin' but most of the pictures were out of focus cause he was fast as lightening so he is unfairly represented by the photo below.

I just realized that I've written another post about dogs which wasn't the intention, what I really love about this kind of event is that they are chockablock with ENTHUSIASTS. In this world there are too many people that go through life with no interest in things, they finish school and go straight into a dead end job and that's their life. Get up, go to work, come home, watch TV. I'm not dissing that life because it can happen to anybody, millions of people are a victim of circumstance and that is a real sad thing. I love when people talk about something and there is passion in their voice, the transport festival is perfect for this, everyone that has brought a vehicle wants to talk about it, they want to tell you everything about it and i mean EVERYTHING, for someone with no interest in cars (me) you may think this could be boring but its the complete opposite, it's great.

There was music, it sounded terrible, there was no way we could leave without inspecting. We got to the marquee and the first thing we saw was two townies in all their tracksuit glory dancing, waving their arms in the air and singing along to Sweet Caroline, singing it was the one, the only 'Real Diamond', I'm no Neil Diamond fan but this tribute act was absolutely brilliant and the highlight of my day, he was like the dude in Only Fools & Horses that sings "cwyyy-yyyy-yyyying over you". Seriously, he was brilliant. He had the hair of a star, the shirt of a cowboy, the backing of a pub band and the trousers of a tramp. You know when you take everything out of the washing machine and there is a sock missing? Well I think I know where you can find them, if they aren't in there then he was packing some serious heat (click on the picture for a closer inspection)

We had allowed ourselves time to pop to Morrisons before the bus came cause I had to stock up on Potato Crunchies (four packs) and Diced Carrot & Turnip (ten tins). It was much further away than I thought and my bad back was killing by the time we got to the bus stop. In Morriston we were lucky enough to wait at the bus stop with another guy who enjoyed talking to himself as well as stinking of booze and having a big weeping wound on his forearm. Man alive them Crunchies tasted good.


(Click on photos to view them bigger)

MP3: Red House Painters: All Mixed Up From Songs For a Blue Guitar
(First person to post a comment with the relevance of the song to this post wins a cool prize)

We are all going to die

Tyron Francis
26.06.81 - Present

I will never forget the first time I realized I was going to die. I was 17, laying on my bed watching a programme on tv about the universe, they were talking about how, in 2 billion years, Earth will crash into the sun and be destroyed. My heart sank and I was overcome with terror, a single tear ran down my cheek, this was the beginning of what was to become a serious depression that lasted for years, and to some degree continues still.


For 7 years I was plagued by a very unhealthy obsession with death and not in the "I listen to Marilyn Manson" sense of the word. Every single day I thought of death, specifically my own and when and how I would go, it was unbearable, but being the stubborn little bugger than I am I did bear it. These thoughts chipped away until there was nothing left of me, during my 22nd year I was completely useless, nothing could stop the thoughts, my life completely fell apart. At the time it was horrible, in fact horrible doesn't do it justice, I don't believe there is even a word that can describe the living hell that is the bottom of a pit of depression. Resisting the urge to put an end to the misery is the most difficult thing I have ever done. There was only one thing that stopped me from 'doing it' - fear.


In no way, shape or form do I believe in God or Satan or Heaven or Hell but these were the things that prevented me from jumping in front of a car, or slitting my wrists or overdosing (I kept my options open). It was the not knowing, the fear of what awaited me, would I just become worm food as I truly believed or would I go straight to Hell for putting a big dent in someone's brand new BMW? The stakes were too high and luckily I found the right medication just in time. These drugs continue to suppress the evil, nasty little thoughts of dying. These days I can look at an old person struggling to get on the bus without too much mental anguish, I can enjoy a walk in the cemetery and I can listen to The Magnetic Fields without bursting into tears.

For a few years I've wanted to shoot photos at a funeral directors to face up to my fears man to man but I was never man enough so to speak, I feel like I could look a corpse in the eye now, I feel like a gamble. This is a call to funeral directors, funeral directors' sons and the friends of funeral directors, I would like to spend some time photographing the time between death and burial, spread the word and if you think you can help me out contact me through my site at tfrancis photography

(Click on photos to view them bigger)

MP3: Scout Niblett: Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death From I Am