Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Gadgets

Canon EF 70-200 First Impressions

I posted a few weeks ago about our new Canon R8. After buying that, I traded in almost all our old camera gear at keh.com to swap it for a used Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens. In Canon lingo, the L series lenses are as fancy as they get, and this 70-200 lens is one of the most popular lenses that Canon makes. Our R8 body takes the newer RF lens mount but since that is still very new, there aren’t a lot of lenses on the market and very few on the used mark. We already bought a mount adapter that lets us use the older EF style lenses and since those have been around for so long, there are tons of great options on the used market.

I’ve eyeballed this lens for probably 10 years but we’ve never been able to justify the cost. But with Elijah participating in more school activities, we wanted to be able to capture them well. But wait you say. Isn’t that the justification we used to get the R8 body? I have no idea what you’re talking about. Moving on.

The lens from our old camera that we kept is a Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 SP XR Di LD. Until recently, that’s the nicest lens I ever used and I thought it was great. The f/2.8 aperture helped a lot with collecting enough light into the lens for indoor shooting and I got some great photos out of it, especially when combined with the new full frame sensor on the R8. Never having used anything nicer, I was a little nervous spending so much money on a nicer lens because what if I couldn’t tell a difference?

My concerns were unfounded. This EF 70-200 blew my mind. I took it out for its first real test at Elijah’s basketball game. During the game, I was trying to review the photos on the camera and sure, they looked good, but it’s a tiny screen. How much could I really see? When I got home, I was amazed at how sharp the photos were. That lens combined with the amazing focus tracking of the camera body left me with way more good shots than I used to get and those shots were all of a much higher quality level. I now feel like I’m more limited by skill than by camera gear so that’s a fun place to be.

But maybe this was just cognitive dissonance. Maybe I want to believe it’s better because we spent extra money on it. It’s time for a test.

I set up a tripod in our living room and, using both lenses, I took a photo of Elijah’s science fair posterboard across the room. Both photos were f/3.5, ISO 2000, 1/100 sec at a focal length of 75mm. Zooming in on my PC revealed this comparison. The new lens is remarkably clearer.

I’ll leave the professional reviews to other people, but in both my subjective and objective tests, this new lens is wonderful. Physically, it’s a beast to carry around. The lighter weight of the newer RF lenses is a major advantage, but for the price savings, I’m ok with the extra weight. However, for regular shooting days, I’ll be packing the 28-75 lens… and wondering when I can replace that one with the L series equivalent!

benmartens March 20, 2025 Gadgets, Photography No Comments

Canon R8 First Impressions

For our first Christmas as a married couple, Tyla and I decided we’d do “family gifts” instead of specific gifts for each other. This year it was tickets to see the Piano Guys when they come to Seattle, but that first year we decided to get a nice camera. I had some SLR experience from high school when I bought a Minolta 500si but that didn’t prove useful too long as the world moved from film to digital. I was interested in getting a modern dSLR so we dipped our toes in the water with a Canon T2i and the 18-55mm kit lens. I later added a 55-250mm f/4-5.6, a 50mm f/1.8, and a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.5. None of it was fancy or expensive but it helped me learn a lot more about where I was pushing the limits of the gear and where I just need to learn more.

The main roadblock with that T2i was the “crop sensor.” Lower end dSLR cameras have smaller sensors than the higher end full frame sensors. The full frame sensors have 2.6 large surface area than the crop (APS-C) sensors. The extra size is particularly beneficial in low light situations, so I used Elijah’s desire to play basketball again this year as a good excuse to upgrade.

I ended up getting a Canon R8 which is on the low end for Canon’s full frame camera bodies, but it also has the advantage of being the more modern mirrorless style camera. As the name implies, mirrorless cameras do away with the mirror which means the cameras can be lighter, smaller, and faster.

I bought just the body for the camera since my old lenses would be compatible and would be enough to get me started. With the change to mirrorless tech and the change in form factor, Canon introduced a new camera mount called RF lenses. These lenses are smaller, lighter, and have all the latest tech. But thankfully you can still use all the older EF lenses with an adapter. To complicate things a bit, both the EF and RF lenses have “-S” variants which were specifically made for crop sensor cameras. They technically work on full frame cameras but they’re typically cheaper build quality and will also produce vignetting on the bigger sensors. My 18-55mm and 55-250mm were EF-S lenses but my 50mm and 28-75mm were EF lenses since I had bought those hoping I would upgrade to a nicer camera body in the future.

So that’s a lot of text before I talk about actually using the camera. Honestly, it’s frustrating. I had tens of thousands of pictures under my belt with the T2i and I barely had to think about it. Now there’s a lot more futzing around for the setting I want, missing shots because it’s focusing on the wrong place, etc. I believe all of that is just a learning curve and I’ll end up ahead of where I was.

To help speed up some of that learning, I took the camera to Elijah’s multi-school competition last weekend. He was competing in a Lego building competition and Lego robotics. I took a lot of pictures and ended up with a few passable ones but nothing stellar. Mostly it was interesting to see how the camera behaved indoors with unpredictable kids and lots of stuff moving around as I tried to hold focus on the right spots. The camera does do some pretty amazing eye detection and focus tracking. It seems natural to post some images here but as I said, none of them really show off the capabilities of the camera. Here’s one which is nice except that Elijah’s back is to the camera.

That 28-75mm lens is my favorite and is generally the only one that was on my old camera unless I had some very specific reason to get out the ultra-fast 50mm lens for very shallow depth of field. That 28-75mm lens had enough reach to handle most situations I was in, but that zoom feels inadequate on the new R8 body. This is because the crop sensor camera bodies have an unavoidable 1.6x zoom compared to a full frame sensor. So on the T2i, that 75mm zoom behaved like a 120mm zoom. Now on the R8, I lose that which is great on the wider end of the zoom but not on the narrower. More on that in a future post.

I had been using a copy of Lightroom from back in the days when you could just buy the software and be done. That copy of Lightroom doesn’t work with the more modern RAW photo formats. Now Lightroom is a subscription model and I’m not willing to pay that much per month for something that I don’t even use every month. I hunted around through a lot of alternative software including darktable and RawTherapee. I’m sure those tools can do what I need but I’m not interested in devoting months of my life to learning their painful UIs. Corel PaintShop Pro was included for free with my camera and I figured I would just move to that but unfortunately, they don’t support photos from the R8 yet. If they do, I might switch to that. For now I’m using my existing copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements. The Organizer app lets me flip through all my shots, tag some specific ones, and then I can edit them in their native RAW format. I’m mainly adjusting white balance and making a few other small tweaks so it’s good enough. It’s a major downgrade from Lightroom but I wasn’t using most of what Lightroom offered anyway.

I’ll have mercy on you and stop rambling, but this has been a fun process to work through. I know I’m the weird dad at Elijah’s events who is walking around taking pictures of everything, but I love having the pictures when I’m done, and let’s be honest, I’d be the weird dad at the event even if I did have a camera in front of my face.

benmartens February 20, 2025 Gadgets, Photography

DIY Wireless Pool Thermometer

When we visited my parents last summer, they were talking about the idea of having a pool thermometer that they could read from inside. There are various options on the market already but none of them met their criteria. I went home thinking this could be an interesting project and Christmas gift.

While I’ve done electronics projects before, I feel like very much of a newbie and there was a ton of learning involved in the project. My first challenge was learning how to read temperatures with a sensor that would be submerged all the time. Some research led me to the DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor and I found a nice tutorial about using it with Arduino. I bought a couple official ones from Adafruit even though there are cheaper versions on Amazon. I only needed one for the project but I figured there was a good potential for me to screw one up. I had some ESP8266 boards left over from the LED panel project and that seemed like a good fit for this project. The boards are only a couple bucks and they have WiFi built in. With a little breadboard action, I was able to see the temperatures from the debugging output of the board.

The next step was to somehow publish that data. There are endless options, but to keep things simple, I started with Adafruit IO. It’s free for the small amount of data that I’d be sending and there were good tutorials about using it with the ESP8266 boards. That was quite simple to set up and before I knew it, I had a temperature sensor that sent data to a website!

I was going to explore ordering a custom breadboard and I did start down that path but I got a bit overwhelmed trying to find all my specific parts in the tool. My circuit wasn’t very complicated, so I ended up just using some perf board and manually soldering the components in place.

I wanted to make it easy to replace all the individual components so I ended up using connectors in quite a few places. I put a headphone jack on the end of the temperature probe and it plugs into a jack in the box. Then the box jack has another wire that plugs into the board.

Before I could figure out the box situation, I needed to figure out how to get power to it and that ended up taking me a lot of time. I landed on a power socket that’s meant for RVs connected to a buck converter to bring the 120v down to 5v. It was bulky but I made it easier by removing the long cable and plug on the power socket.

That just left the box and for that I opened up Fusion 360 to make a custom box that I would 3D print. It had all the holes in just the right places, the lid fits snugly, and all the screws are countersunk. The only problem was that the standoffs I built in for the ESP8266 were too tall/thin and they broke but ultimately it’s not a big deal.

I was nervous about whether the WiFi signal would reach from their pool, but thankfully they don’t have any competing WiFi traffic in the area and it worked fine! I got Dad set up with the development environment so he could make changes to the code, and he had an idea to make the probe wire much longer and keep the box in the pool house. There are endless possibilities since I’ve basically handed him a prototype and walked away, but hopefully it will work at least for a little while! I’m expecting it to take a couple more iterations to work through bugs and maybe we’ll build nicer software for it, but at this point, I’m kind of amazed that it actually worked.

benmartens January 16, 2025 Gadgets

PTZ Optics Move SE Review

I help with a lot of the audio visual stuff at our church. It’s slowly being upgraded from “random stuff that people were trying to get rid of and donated to church” to actual AV equipment that is fit for the purpose. In 2014, we upgraded an ancient VHS camcorder to 1080p Canon Vixia camcorders. They were… sufficient. They worked but since we don’t have a ton of light in the sanctuary, the cameras struggled to get a good image. It was blurry and there wasn’t much detail in the image. Additionally, the mounts had to be easily adjustable for the times we needed to point the cameras at something else, but that also meant that they frequently got bumped and needed to be adjusted back to level.

This year we made a major upgrade to the Move SE cameras from PTZ Optics. They are 1080p cameras but the image sensor is 1/2.7″ versus the 1/4.85″ sensor on the Canon’s which means they do a lot better in our low light scenario. They also are pan/tilt/zoom cameras and can be controlled via remote, over the network, or even with the MIDI protocol. These cameras come in 12x, 20x, and 30x optical zooms. There’s a zoom calculator on the PTZ Optics website so I was able to stick with only the 12x zoom cameras which seem to fit our space perfectly.

They have a huge range of features that we won’t need for a while, but it’s nice to know we have room to grow. For now the HDMI comes out of the cameras and goes into our Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro video switcher and the cameras are powered via Power Over Ethernet cables. We aren’t using the PC software much yet, but there’s a lot that can be done with them in that configuration too.

When I plugged them in for the first time, I was nervous that we had spent a bunch of money for somethign that wouldn’t be much different, but these cameras exceeded my expectations. Here’s a short comparison video:

Now that we have two cameras, I’m already itching to buy one more. We typically have one wide shot and one zoomed in shot but it would be handy to have one more for random purposes. I caught these on a Black Friday sale for 15% off so maybe I’ll add a third one next year.

I like to tell people that no matter what you’re interested in, there’s a way for you to use your talents and interests when you volunteer at church. This is a great example. I don’t know in what other situation I’d get a chance to play with fun electronics like this!

And of course, if you ever want to come see these in person, I’d be happy to give you a tour any Sunday morning! www.calvarylutheranbellevue.org

benmartens December 15, 2023 Gadgets

Desk Light For Videoconferencing

I spend a lot of time in virtual meetings from home. During the day, I usually have reasonably good light coming through the window next to me, but when it’s darker outside (or when it is so bright that I have to close the window shade), my video doesn’t look great. Does it really matter? No, but I like to have good quality audio and video.

It took me a while to find a light that I wanted to buy. These were my criteria:

  • Ability to adjust the color temperature – during the day I have daylight coming in and at night I have warm white bulbs. I didn’t know it would look to have different light colors at the same time.
  • Ability to adjust light brightness
  • Ability to work well whether my desk is in sitting or standing mode.

I ended up with the Lume Cube Edge LED Desk Light (Amazon referral link: https://amzn.to/3ZZF1js) It clips onto my desk so it’s always in the same place whether I’m sitting or standing, and it has adjustable brightness and color temperature. The arm is easy to move around to work either as a desk light or to light up my face for video. The light is also diffused pretty well so I don’t get a lot of shiny spots on my face. Below is a before and after comparison. Not only am I more evenly lit with the new light, but the background blurring algorithm has a lot easier time identifying the edges of my head.

benmartens March 23, 2023 Gadgets

Google Pixel 6a Upgrade

After buying flagship phones, Tyla and I tried out a midrange phone last time: the Pixel 4a. It has been stellar! Other than a lack of wireless charging, I can’t think of anything I miss from the flagship phones. Our batteries still last a full day, and they don’t feel too sluggish.

We were happy enough with it that we went for another Pixel: the 6a. This phone has been out since last summer, but when I saw the 6a’s were selling for only $299, it was hard to pass up!

It’s hard to give much of a review for a phone that I just unboxed, but I can say that the transfer process was nice. When the new phone booted up, there was a point where I could connect to the old phone via USB and suck over all the content. Not only did it bring my list of apps, but for many of the apps I didn’t even have to log in again on the new phone! We also use Microsoft Launcher so everything works very much like it did before the upgrade. Connecting the phones to the Tesla and the truck was a breeze and went much quicker than with our old phones. I had been having trouble getting Android Auto to work in the truck so it was nice to see it fire up much faster than it did before.

Unfortunately switching our SIM cards to the new devices was not easy. Xfinity Mobile is typically easy to work with. Most things are done through an app or the website, but for some reason, the “replace your device” workflow was not accepting our new phones. It took a total of two hours on the phone to get both phones upgraded.

I was tempted to wait for the Pixel 8 and Pixel 7a to launch this summer, but those would be sold at full price again and getting two fantastic phones for a total of $598+tax was too hard to pass up. After experiencing our 4a’s, I’m fully onboard with this mid-range phone idea. Not only do they work great for years, but I feel less bad about upgrading since they were more affordable.

Here’s an updated list of my cell phone device history. If we’ve come this far in 22 years, imagine what the next couple of decades will look like!

Sanyo SCP-4000 (?)
May 2001
LG 4500
April 2004
Motorola Q
September 2006
HTC Touch
May 2008
HTC Touch Pro 2
January 2010
HTC Trophy
June 2011
HTC 8x
December 2012
Nokia Lumia Icon
January 2015
Samsung Galaxy S7
October 2016
Google Pixel 4a
September 2020
Google Pixel 6a
March 2023
benmartens March 20, 2023 Gadgets

Limited Laptop Charging

Most battery chemistries don’t appreciate being charged to 100%. That’s why we only charge our Tesla to 80% on most nights. It’s a very expensive battery so we want to take care of it.

I was thinking about this recently when we got a new laptop. The laptops in our house spend a huge percentage of their life plugged in and that’s not great for long term battery health. It turns out that there are apps which will help you optimize for battery life if your laptop is plugged in most of the time. The settings aren’t in Windows though. I don’t know why Windows can’t handle it, but it seems like you need to find an app from your manufacturer. On Lenovo it’s called Lenovo Vantage and Dell calls theirs Dell Power Manager. Those cover our laptops but I’d guess that your brand has a similar app too. Both of those apps have a setting for either a specific charge limit (e.g. 80%) or just a “this laptop is usually plugged in” setting.

It’s hard to tell how it will play out over time, but if it squeezes some more long-term life out of the batteries without much downside, it seems like an easy choice to me.

benmartens February 16, 2023 Gadgets

The Birth of AI

The OpenAI group is making a big splash with websites like Dall-E 2 and ChatGPT. The other night I asked Elijah for the basic plot of a movie and had Chat GPT write the script, write the lyrics for a theme song, and then tell me which voice actors would fit the roles. Then I had Dall-E 2 make a movie poster for it. For this blog post, I asked Dall-E 2 to draw “a van Gogh style painting of a cute penguin sitting in a datacenter typing on a computer” and you see the result on the right.

Experiences like this have led to a lot of conversations about how people feel about it and how we should manage these AIs. It seems like many of the podcasts I follow have spent episodes on this topic and I end up getting bored and frustrated. There are three main points I always wish they would realize:

  1. This isn’t new. Sure, these two specific examples (Dall-E 2 and ChatGPT) are very popular in the news right now. Lots of people are getting introduced to AI in a way they can readily understand, but AI has been around for a long time in many incarnations. AI isn’t one specific thing, but the term appears to have originated around 1956. The range of what people call “AI” is enormous. At some level, you can think of it as “math.” AI doesn’t only mean a sentient robot that’s going to exterminate human life. It’s math that makes things more efficient in your daily life. Here are some examples:
    1. A grocery store deciding how to place items in their aisles
    2. Lane keeping technology in cars
    3. Smart speakers
    4. Junk mail filtering
    5. Motion sensors differentiating between people and shadows
    6. Online advertising
    7. Bank fraud detection
    8. Video game opponents
    9. Social media feeds
    10. Filters on your camera phone
  2. It doesn’t matter whether you like AI or not. It doesn’t matter whether you think there should be rules for its use. That’s like saying there that you need to control the dangerous implications of addition. Anybody on the planet can click a few buttons and spin up “AI” to do any number of built-in tasks on a cloud service like Azure or AWS, and there are plenty of people that have the skills to code things for themselves on top of other platforms or from scratch. We can’t control it like we try to control nuclear weapons material and knowledge.
  3. The technology is progressing faster than you can imagine. I’ve written before about how hard it is for humans to grasp exponential growth, and this is another place where that comes into play. Think about your tech life today (phone, internet, etc) compared to 2000 when we thought flip phones were amazing and iMacs were the hot product from Apple. We’ve come an incredibly long way in 20 years. Not only is it hard/impossible to imagine what another leap of that size looks like, but it’s going to happen in ~10 years this time. And then the same leap will happen in 5 years, then 2 years, etc. So if you think ChatGPT is impressive today, don’t turn your back for too long before you try it again.

So yes, these new technologies are impressive, but for people who work with this stuff every day, the reaction is “Hey, good job. That’s impressive.” It’s not the “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! LOOK WHAT HAPPENED OUT OF THE BLUE!” story that you get from the media. It’s almost like you shouldn’t rely on things like TV/cable news for your news…

benmartens February 2, 2023 Gadgets

Battery Backups

We don’t lose power a lot here anymore, but we have a lot of power flickers. Those rapid shifts in current can be bad for electronics, not to mention that it’s annoying when I’m in a meeting and my computer reboots because the power blipped a second. I started protecting my equipment with battery backups and now I have five of them spread around the house:

  1. My home theater is all on one. When the power goes out, my projector, Xbox, and sound system keep running for a while.
  2. Our home networking gear is all on a bigger unit than it needs to be. I can run our cable modem and WiFi for about 45 minutes. This is helpful not just for keeping the modem from resetting in a power blip, but it also lets me continue my work meetings for a while even if the power goes out.
  3. My main desktop machine and monitors are on one.
  4. Our downstairs TV is on one.
  5. The most recent addition was one for the 3D printer. We had a power blip in the middle of a long print and that meant I had to start all over.

These units give me a little piece of mind about protecting the units from changes in voltage but they’re also nice to smooth out the blips. What I really want is a whole-house system that smooths my power and provides some battery backup but those are not really targeted at home users yet. I expect that will change over time with all the research going into battery tech.

I have a mix of devices from CyberPower and APC, but most of them are either the big 900 watt units or the smaller 550-600 watt units. I like to put a Kill A Watt meter on whatever I’m going to buy the backup for to see how many watts I need and then I give it plenty of headroom (like 2-4x). There are calculators online that will help you translate all that into runtime, but like I said, in most cases I’m trying to protect against the 1-5 second outages so as long as I have a few minutes of runtime, that’s enough.

These battery backup devices only last a few years before the battery dies. The battery is a major component of the cost so in the past, I’ve usually replaced the whole unit to avoid frustration, but with five of them in the house, that’s a lot of extra unnecessary replacements. In the last power outage, I discovered that two of my devices had batteries that wouldn’t sustain the load anymore. I replaced one of the big 900w batteries and now the unit works great! The old batteries take some work to dispose of properly but I had that problem when I’d replace an entire unit anyway. I need to get better about remembering to periodically unplug each of these units from the wall while things are running to ensure that the battery is still good. Some of them do a self-test but it doesn’t seem to always catch bad batteries properly.

These units have other benefits too. When the power goes out for longer than a few seconds, I walk around turning most of the units off so save battery power. I can run lamps and charge phones for hours with them and I’ve even though about taking one of them camping when we’re off grid for a long time.

benmartens November 14, 2022 Gadgets

I Lost It

[UPDATE] I have created a new woodworking Instagram account @martenswoodworks.

The other day my Pixel 4a got into a boot loop, and I couldn’t figure out any way to fix it. It would restart, show a few things on the screen for a couple seconds and then restart again. I found my way into the root menu but none of the easier choices did anything, so I was left with a factory reset. I knew it would be annoying, but it shouldn’t be that big of a deal because everything is backed up to the cloud.

Everything was NOT backed up to the cloud.

There were a few things that I lost forever:

  • Photos I had taken while we were away from the house (and Wi-Fi) weren’t backed up but that wasn’t a huge deal.
  • We use the ScorePal app to record every board game we play. I thought that was all backed up to the cloud, but the last backup I had was from August 2020. Oh well.
  • When I started up my Microsoft Authenticator app, it either hadn’t backed up or I went through the wrong flow and erased the backup. Either way, I was left with no way to do two factor authentication for many of my most critical accounts.

Uh oh.

Thankfully, most of them had ways that I could reset my two factor auth either through backup codes, email verification, or text message verification. But there was one that I couldn’t get back: my @martenswoodshop Instagram account. When you set up two factor auth, they give you backup codes and I’m always good about saving them, but I can’t find the codes for that account anywhere. Instagram has an automated flow which has you take a video of your face with the app and then it looks through your account photos to see if it recognizes you. But guess who didn’t post any pictures of his own face on his woodworking account. Oops.
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I’ve tried every way I can think of but it’s just gone. The account will sit there forever, but it’s dead in the water. I’m frustrated but it is what it is. And I think it’s worth mentioning that I don’t blame Instagram for any of this. I set up my account to include a super-secret, no-exceptions password and I lost the key to it. Meta has 3.6 billion users and my valid attempt to reclaim my account is drown out in a sea of millions of attempts to hack other accounts. They use the same protocols as everyone else but I made a mistake with how I configured my account by not having a secondary auth two factor auth mechanism and by not saving the recovery codes.

So please consider this yet another reminder to think about what you would do if your laptop or phone were suddenly wiped. Would you be able to recover everything? I thought I was ready, and I mostly passed the test, but I clearly had some holes. I’ll learn from these lessons and hopefully have a better experience next time. Never let a crisis go to waste. (And in the big scheme of things, losing an Instagram account is hardly a “crisis.”)

As for the woodworking content, I’m going to focus more on posting pictures of my projects here and not worry about posting woodworking stuff to Instagram. There’s a lot to be said for putting my content into a system that I control, and I could do with a little less time staring at Instagram.

benmartens August 29, 2022 Gadgets