MorseBlog

Last December Vicki and I spent a few days at Borrego Springs and Anza Borrego State Park. We had been there the year before and it is a great destination after visiting friends and family in San Diego. Like last time we spent most of the days hiking. The weather is perfect and with blue skies we were blessed with beautiful scenery. The desert is great for black and white photography giving up high contrast images. This desert was surprisingly good as the rocks and sand are very light coloured giving exposures where the sky has tone without a color filter.  One day we hiked to a series of small palm oases in a series bowls or small rocky valleys. Each of these has a small spring to sustain the palms there. There a couple theories about these palms the most appealing is that they are left from the Pleistocene. The area was much wetter and tropical and hosted mega-fauna like Mastodon. Later the mountains rose up and created a rain shadow and the desert conditions that persist. The...

Last Christmas my Dad's wife Joann gave me a couple of old flash units as she knows I am into old cameras and what not. One of them is the Canon Quint. The Quint takes 5 AG1 flash bulbs and fires each in sequence saving the need to reload after each photo. On the back is a small window that shows which flash will fire next indicated with a number 1 to 5. Unfortunately this was stuck at the number 3. With all AG1 bulbs loaded the flash fired on number 3 but the number did not advance. The subsequent shutter closure did not cause the flash to fire again. I had also read of another person who had a Quint described with the same problem. Disappointed and not wanting to just reload on each flash I disassembled the unit to see if it could be repaired. (See comments section for help in disassembling that some helpful reader has contributed.) In the photo below is the view from the back with the case removed. The silver square on the right shows the window (with a 1 sh...