I’ve been using an A-series Cokin filter system for years but with the transition to bigger lenses I had to transition to the larger P-series Cokin filter system. Now I’m using the rather slim wide-angle holder P299 to reduce vignetting for shorter focal lengths. I don’t need the possibility to hold more than one filter as I’m only using a single graduated neutral density (GND) filter anyway. Cokin filters are expensive in my country. The P-series filters have a price tag of around 50 US$. They cost half the price on Adorama or B&H but they charge 50 US$ (!) just for shipping the filter to Switzerland.
So I searched on eBay for less expensive soft edged graduated filters and found some P-series compatible filters from a Chinese company called Tian-Ya. Read more »

We just returned from a two week holiday in Scotland. I hauled my complete photo gear (which added almost 10kg to my backpack…aww) with me because I planned to spend quite some time photographing. It turned out that the scottish weather can be rather challenging to the passionate photographer but that’s another story. Of course I took my Holux M-241 GPS logger with me because I wanted to geotag all our photos. I also decided to take my small 13″ notebook with me, just in case the GPS logging device runs out of storage. As it turned out at the end this wouldn’t have been necessary. More on that later on.

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I’m using Google Calendar Sync at work to synchronize all my Outlook meetings to my Google Calendar. This works pretty well. It even enables me to synchronize my Google Calendar to my iPhone using the MS Exchange server infrastructure from a company called Nuevasync. Nuevasync also supports push technology to send new meetings to my iPhone. This is a very nice way to synchronize all my private and work calendar data automatically and immediately to my iPhone without having to use (and to pay for) a .me account.

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