A cheap remote for the Canon 5D

Canon 5D

Guess from where!

A wireless remote shutter release is a handy thing to have. I use one with an ancient Olympus 5050 for the Christmas family snap. That Olympus has more shutter delay than you want to know about, so it’s an exercise in frustration. Further, I would guess the much used Oly’s years are numbered (the plastic focus and zoom racks are the first to go in these P&S digitals) and whenever I want to include myself in a landscape picture it means resorting to the delayed action on the 5D (hell to find with all those buttons) and run for it to try and get my Olympian physique placed just so in the frame.

I ruminated about a Canon 5D remote but once I saw the price ….

And that one is wired! OK, so it has a timer and will probably make your breakfast, but at that price I’ll eat at MacDonald’s, thanks. I seem to remember they listed a wireless version for some $500 and if you read on you will cease wondering why it’s no longer available.

I remember thinking about the interminable delay of the Olympus when taking this year’s family snap (it’s been bugging me for years), and checked ePrey shortly after. Well for $10.99 and $11.99 shipping from Hong Kong I decided the risk was acceptable and as I have had nothing but success with the incredible studio flash remote I bought a while back, so I pressed the ‘Buy It Now’ button and forgot about the whole thing.

Well, it arrived today and I must say the gadget is totally awesome! It’s radio frequency, not line of sight, which translates to tremendous, non-directional range. And if interference is an issue (your brand new BMW starts itself and goes off the road, say) you have sixteen radio channels (16!) to choose from.

A CR-2 Lithium battery (provided) goes in the remote and the camera-end receiver comes with a 23A battery installed.

With the antenna extended the range is quoted at 320 feet! I gave up at 105 feet which is the length of my hallway (it’s raining outside so a longer distance was … out of range). With the antenna retracted, which makes the transmitter easily pocketable, I got 75 feet.


A couple of small pieces of Velcro keep the receiver attached to the LCD shade on the back of the 5D.

So if you need a wireless remote for your DSLR because you want to avoid shutter lag or you don’t want to risk a coronary while running into your landscape snap, blow $22.98 on one of these. I have not checked but I would bet that this device is made for most DSLRs out there. Heck, the DSLRs are made in China anyway, no? The picture on the box shows the receiver attached to a Nikon D200 and, if it helps, the inventory check-off tab on the box provides options for five different connectors, though I must disappoint you by disclosing that my Chinese is not up to snuff to make sense of these.

When you press the button on the transmitter, the first pressure gets you a green LED on the transmitter. That means the transmitter and its battery are working. This changes to red to on further pressure to indicate activation but be warned that it changes to red whether you are in range or not. To make the camera end functional, you do have to press the button on the receiver, one of whose LEDs will glow red when you do that. Fear not. The instructions state that the stand-by life of the receiver’s battery is 1,000 hours if you forget to switch it off. Based on my experience with the strobe remote, I tend to believe what they write. Further pressure on the transmitter button will make the second LED on the receiver glow red, indicating it has received the signal to fire the shutter.

Further, by pressing the button on the transmitter for 3 seconds with the camera set to bulb, the camera’s shutter will open and remain open until you press the transmitter’s button again. Use mirror lock-up and we are talking minimal vibration here.

There’s more. Set your camera for continuous shooting, hold the transmitter button for 3 seconds and the 5D (or whatever) will bang away until you press the transmitter button again. Maybe there is an option for making your breakfast after all?

It’s OK, you are not taking a job from an American by buying Chinese – the American can (and does) make more on unemployment.

And yes, every time you try to open that wretched rubber flap on the 5D you will wonder how long it will take Messrs. Canon to Fix That Flap.

One final thought and a word of advice from the instruction sheet, and I quote: “When monitor light glitters, the battery will be vanished, change new battery”. You have been warned.

Ludwig Schricker

Photographers

A forgotten name

From its post-war inception in the late 1940s, the German Leica Fotografie magazine, under its founding editor Heinrich Stöckler, profiled much that was best and most banal in European photography.

I subscribed in the 1970s (mostly because I wanted to get published there!) and managed to find most of the back issues to those from 1952, the first to come with an English translation. Stöckler was strictly a pictorialist, meaning he loved the worst kind of schmaltz which typifies the German love of all that is bourgeois, but even he saw the writing on the wall as expressionism raised its (to him) ugly head.

This pretty much came to a turning point with the 5/1958 issue – the magazine was published bi-monthly. Stöckler had the courage to publish a selection of photographs by Ludwig Schricker, publishing also their exchange of letters where Stöckler made it clear that he had no love for the young Schricker’s work. Where was the fabled German countryside and its buxom blonde lasses? Nowhere to be seen in Schricker’s dark work.

I have been thinking of publishing this piece for a couple of years but could not find any of Schricker’s work on the web to illustrate my writing. He is non-existent on the web. So I finally dug out that old issue and scanned four pictures for reproduction here.

Schricker’s is a dark vision of a nasty, cruel world. I hope you find his pictures as memorable as I do. They are scanned unretouched here and, as the magazine is now 50 years old, some yellowing and fading has occurred.

Stöckler finally retired in 1973 at which point the magazine was far more skewed to expressionism than pictorialism. Therafter it went off the rails and now seems to be published once or twice a year as little more than an advertisement for the latest overpriced and already obsolete Leica toys. But I did learn mightily from its pages in the 1970s.

Update February, 2026: For more of Schricker’s fine work click here.

Winston and Vermeer

Paintings, Photographs

Our boy is six

For the annual portrait of our son Winston, I decided to try Vermeer lighting this year. There is little new under the sun when it comes to portraiture. Winston is six years old.

Vermeer used window light often in his portraits, with the darker side of the face rotated towards the viewer. As I prefer the control that comes with studio lighting, I used umbrella flash to emulate the effect. Here’s the result:


5D, 85mm, 1/180, f/5.6, ISO 50, two Novatron flash heads with silver and gold umbrella reflectors


Vermeer. The girl with the Pearl earring, 1665.

The black background Vermeer used would be too harsh for our young subject, but for contrast I opted for Winston’s karate outfit. The gold-coated umbrella was used on the shadow side, the silver, one stop brighter, on the bright side. I moved the dark side light far enough to Winston’s right side that only one flash reflects in his eyes – the main light on the left. It seems Vermeer was a Novatron fan too! Aperture 2 (Trial version) was used to process the RAW original.

Read more about my highly portable studio flash outfit here.

Obviously you know which subject I find to be the most beautiful.

News and Standard!

Photographs

Some street portraits

When I was a student in London it was unheard of for any but the wealthiest to have their newspaper delivered. Rather, you simply bought it from the corner vendor on the way to work and the evening paper on the way home. Delivery actually cost more!

You could have your choice of any number of dailies across the political spectrum, from the stodgy and boring voice of the establishment, The Times, the typo-prone Guardian (its left leanings meant most of the journalists there could not spell, hence the paper’s moniker ‘The Grauniad’), the solidly socialist Daily Mirror (where the masses forever read that they had been robbed of something or another by the government of the day) and the paper beloved of the horse and hound set, The Daily Telegraph, though they bought it more for appearance, given their dedication to killing God’s innocent animals. The loony left got the Daily Worker, and the thinking man could be seen with The Economist, a weekly paper with a perfect grasp of history but zero ability to see tomorrow. That’s economics for you. City snobs read The Financial Times, ever so self aware that it was printed on pink paper – a color unconnected to its political leanings. Amazingly, all of these, and more, survive to this day.

One day it struck me that the street vendors from whom I bought the daily paper were far more interesting than the contents of anything they sold, so I took the tube to Charing Cross Road and proceeded to walk west across London to my home in Kensington, with the simple goal of snapping a few of these characters for fun …. and posterity.

It’s not like equipment choice was difficult, as I had nothing to choose from, so Leica M3, 35mm Summaron and one roll of TriX it was.

Now these street-aware characters are very sharp people, always ready with a joke or some political or sports snippet of news. Can you imagine a more people-intensive job than selling papers on the street? So capturing them unposed was a challenge, and it was a setting in which the ultimate street camera of the time, the rangefinder Leica, was just the right tool. And forget rangefinding. Set the lens at f/5.6 and 7 feet or so and bang away. No time for that fancy focusing stuff.

All of these were taken on one day – something you can see in the originals. September 24, 1974. And, yes, everytime I pop these onto the screen, I still find myself retouching dust. There is something to be said for digital imaging ….

The headline to this entry refers to the two evening papers of the day – The Evening News and The Evening Standard. The vendors’ cries – “News and Standard” – still ring in my ears.


Charing Cross Road


Oxford Street


Regent Street


Knightsbridge


South Kensington

Walking across London was about as much fun as you could have for no cost in those days. I suspect it’s no longer quite the same in a western Europe each of whose wonderful capital cities is now a target for some nutcase with twisted values. As for the headlines, as the French would say “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”.

Sharp and unsharp

Photographs, Technique

A little glow can make the day

My piece on some of Irving Penn’s early work with a small negative got me thinking about how to emulate the effect using an all digital approach.

Aperture does not have the horespower to do these things, as we forever wait for plug-ins that do more than import and export files. So you have to resort to Photoshop, into which I roundtripped the file from my Aperture database. Thereafter, I applied Dave Beaman’s Ethereal Glow action. Download it, click on the downloaded file (this is for Mac users; Windows users will probably need some arcane incantations to make things work) and the action will become available in Photoshop’s Action menu which you can display from the Window menu. Click on the action, click the right arrow at the bottom of the Actions palette, wait a minute and you get the original transformed to the ethereal glow effect. Back into Aperture with the file and add sepia toning and you are done. Sure, you can mess with doing the glow effect in PS manually, but why bother when it has been done for you?

I did not add noise/grain as it did not work well in this example, but you get the idea. The effect is actually quite a bit more dramatic on a large print. Some parts of the resulting image are etched, some are glowing – not too far from Penn’s effort applyying re-photographing of the original and use of the point-focus enlarger, and a lot less work of course.


A corner of the estate. 5D, 50mm, 1/350, f/5.6, ISO 250


With glow and sepia toning added, plus a light crop

I’m not that keen on picture manipulation, but if that’s your thing there are dozens of actions to be found on that click-through page above.