Bic stylus - cheap and great! ...and a little bit of rant, for good measure.

Whenever I saw a stylus that was reviewed or hanging in a store it was several if not all of these things:


- "Revolutionary" in some way. A paintbrush, why??
- Whatever crazy color the anodizers could provide.
- Heavy.
- Too short.
- Usually round and slippery. At least slippery. My Targus is.
- If it had a pen on one end, it was not of high quality.
- If it had a pen on one end, there was nowhere to put the cap that covers it. I mean, come on!
- Made of metal that goes "clank" against my iPad screen. Ouch.
- More money than I want to spend.



You know, since nobody pays me or sends me stuff to review I can say whatever I want. While I'm at it, isn't it a little annoying that most people who write "reviews" write about new stuff, not things they have had for some time and really used and tried out? It's so easy to mention this new thing with these specs that you can buy at this place for these kind of money. Kind of useless when what you really need is people with experience of that thing you are ready to spend money on telling you what is good and what is not so good about it. Ok, I'm done for now heh heh... And to be honest, there are very good reviews out there too!

My favourite stylus is not the latest whizz bang gizmo in pink or blue anodizing with amazing features. No, it is as long as the standard ballpoint Bic, as lightweight as the standard ballpoint Bic, as grip-friendly as the standard Bic ballpoint and writes as good as the standard Bic ballpoint. It is in fact a standard Bic ballpoint pen - with a stylus on the end. And yes, the cap fits right over the stylus end while you are using the ballpoint, and I paid a whopping 1,90 EUR for it. Actually, I bought five of them (hey, when you find good and cheap stuff you've better stock up) and it was still cheaper than the stylus I used until now. (UPDATE: next time around I bought ten heh heh)


This is what I'm talking about - The Bic Cristal Stylus:

Sure looks cheap but it's sooo good! - iPhone 4s, Camera+

I find the light weight keeps my hand relaxed and the hexagonal shape is easy to hold (you can try the grip and feel yourself - just grab a Bic pen!) The stylus tip responds with a light touch and the pen works.... well, as a pen should. The plastic has more friction to it than the slippery paint on my Targus  and improves the grip. Those guys or girls who made that Bic the first time new a thing or two, didn't they? Besides the obvious, it works great for drumming. You can make little buzzes and rolls with it, and that is something you can't do with that short, clunky metal one. Even if it's pink or whatever bright color the anodizers... ah, you've heard that before. You can also use a Bic, this one included, to test the sharpness of knives - but that's for another time.

Perhaps it won't make you feel as special as the guy who spent a fair bit of cash on his unique, elegant design thingimabob, oh yeah I spent some google time and words like "nostalgic", "dynamic" and "good looks" come up, but you won't have a $39,90 hole in your wallet either. What you will have is a perfectly good lightweight stylus on a perfectly good pen, and that's a winner folks!

Oh, and everyone I give one to agrees that it is very, very good! Now also has the wifes approval!

Don Nepo - good food in Fuengirola!

If you are in Fuengirola, Spain, and want good food served by a nice family you should visit Don Nepo, a small restaurant along the beachwalk.

As we are regulars, we have a sort of close relationship with them. They are lovely people and they make delicious food. Try their "Gambas Pil Pil" - hot, spicy prawns served in a clay bowl, sizzling as it is served. Don't burn your tongue, they are HOT when served. And quite the spicy meataball too.

Gambas Pil Pil - iPhone 4s, some cropping

The entrecote is big and juicy, the black pepper sauce is quite spicy and the fried potatoes are well made. Quite a meal for a price well worth it:

Entrecote with pimiento sauce - iPhone 4s, some cropping

The chicken fillet in garlic sauce is a mainstay for me - a tasty meal perfect for lunchtime.

Chicken fillet in garlic sauce - iPhone 4s, some cropping

While you are there in the sun and heat have the daughter in the family make you Sangia - you'll get what is probably the best Sangria in the entire city of Fuengirola!

If you are not that hungry try their Tapas - smaller portions of delicious food. The Gambas Pil Pil above is served as a tapas dish. You're bound to find something in the menu that fits your tastes.

There are many good places to eat at in Fuengirola - Don Nepo certainly is one of them!


Here´s a quick video of the food above:

NightCap - iPhone low light, night, photos

One thing my iPhone 4s won't do well is night photographs. There is just not enough shutter time available using the Camera app. Of course some clever guy decided to make an app that gives longer shutter times and better low-light shots.

One of those apps is NightCap, an app I use and like. It gives you manual control over shutter times up to 1 second among other things. Oh, forget handheld use. I use tripods or my DIY suction cup mount. I'll write about that one some other time, it works really well when I use my iPhone 4s as a dashcam.

Anyway, brace the iPhone 4s somehow and launch the native Camera app, and you'll get this:

Fuengirola by night - iPhone 4s, silly tripod, cable release

And then let's fire up NightCap, set the manual exposure for 1 second, wait while the display sloooowly updates (yes, forget quick snapshots), start the self-timer and you'll get this:

Fuengirola by night - iPhone 4s, silly tripod, NightCap, self-timer

The cable release won't work with NightCap, but there is a self-timer as a kind of workaround. Just be gentle when you tap it so you don't shake or shift the iPhone too much. A stylus can be a great help.

While the small sensor in the iPhone 4s just can't perform any better than a tiny sensor can, the difference is there when you use NightCap. No way you can compare this rig with say my Nikon D200 with the 50mm F1.8, but then you already knew that. What you can do is get perfectly usable photos instead of dark, grainy ones. Nobody who is half serious about photography would compare the iPhone 4s with a DSLR anyway.

If you want to shoot night photos with your iPhone, I recommend NightCap. It won't give you perfect night photos, but perfectly usable ones. And thats a lot better than no photos at all!

Pop-A-Graph your photograph!

I played around some with the PopAGraph app from Flambe Studios LLC, an app that is mainly for adding 3D-effects to your photos. Probably not what the developers would say, but you can read what they think in the description on AppStore heh heh.


 This one was shot with my DSLR and "popped" on my iPad mini:

Popped flower - Nikon D70s, Sigma 70-300 F4-5.6 APO Macro Super II, PopAGraph

This is the original photograph:

Flower - Nikon D70s, Sigma 70-300 F4-5.6 APO Macro Super II

The auto mode works so-so if you intend to blow the image up. I had to manually mask and tweak this one to get the result I wanted - smooth masking and the right details included. Not a bad thing as long as you understand that you have to invest some time and effort to make things look good. 

There are a bunch of filters and effects you can use, as well as different frames. 

So why bother with this app? Well, you won't use it all the time, but for those shots where you want to add some wow-factor or really make the subject stand out, this is it. Better yet, if you plan the picture before shooting it, with a clear subject and well planned composition and background, you can create some stunning images with a little help from this app. Even if the viewer can't see that the subject extends beyond the frame, they will feel it. Thats what it is all about.

Now, off you go and Pop-A-Graph that photograph!

Fun stuff! Old gentleman's cow clipper...

Yup, time again for one of those fun little jobs. This old gentleman came into the shop with an old clipper machine. It had this brass adjusting screw that goes into the gear housing and pushes on a bow-shaped spring that in turn pushes the moveable clipper blade against the fixed one. On the end of the adjusting screw there is a small shouldered steel screw that holds the spring and screw together through a hole in the spring. That small screw was broken off and the gent had tried to drill the remains out.

Well, brass with a bit of steel stuck in it is not that easy to drill, so now the thing was messed up with a hole poking out the side of the brass screw. As we talked, we arrived at the price of the repair. Sadly, the size and the price of things like this seldom match. This nice old man understood that I charge for my time, and replied that this repair would be cheaper than a new clipper anyway so go ahead and fix it. Man, I like to hear that!


So, here is new screw assembled with the spring:

That's fun & done! - iPhone 4s

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures during the making of it, but it involved turning and knurling the brass stock, turning the major screw diameter, single point threading it M6x1 (IIRC) to a nice tight fit for the locking nut, drilling and tapping the end for a M3 thread and then parting off the screw. For the securing screw I took a shortcut, I actually loctited a nut on a M3 screw and then turned that into a shoulder that fit the hole in the spring. This is hidden inside the gear housing so it was function before looks on this one and it does the job just fine.


I really enjoy these little jobs that comes every now and then, especially when the customer is as nice as this old man was! Now cows, you better watch out...

The Blue Planet in Copenhagen

If you are in Copenhagen you might want to visit The Blue Planet - Northern Europes largest aquarium.

Bring your camera! You get to see beautiful, strange, weird and funny animals. You can read more at 

National Aquarium Denmark

If you can read Danish, you can download their app for your iPhone or iPad at https://itunes.apple.com/se/app/den-bla-planet/id616898584?mt=8 

It is a challenge to get good iPhone pictures through the aquarium glass. I found out that the iPhone 4S has difficulties focusing on smaller animals when there is a lot going on in the background. This picture shows that:

Why the long face? - iPhone 4s, as shot

I tried to get the eye in focus but was not able to even after several attempts. Kind of annoying, the roots confused the iPhone. I would like to have a smaller focus rectangle so I really could pinpoint the focus, I thinks it's the large focus area that makes it so hard to focus on small details in the image.

In retrospect, I could have locked the focus on something the correct distance away and then moved the iPhone to get the eye in focus. Didn't think of that when I was there though. Aha! Camera+ would have worked great for that since I could have controlled focus and exposure independently!

Trying to photograph sea horses with flash proved difficult as well:

Sea horses - iPhone 4s, flash

Turning off the flash gave this:

Sea horses - iPhone 4s, no flash

You can see quite a bit of distortion because of the glass, especially in the lower left corner. But if you put the difficulty of taking pictures aside, the visit is still worth it. You get to see many interesting creatures. The walk in the glass tunnel through the large tank is really something!

But the fish and chips in the restaurant were not:

Tasteless meal - iPhone 4s

The plate, or stone slab, was the best thing about the meal. There was a hair in my dip so I had to get a new one, of course that can happen anywhere but still.... The fish was quite tasteless, (hey guys ever heard of salt and pepper?) the chips ok but a little cold and for 115 Danish crowns the whole meal was a disappointment. You can bring your own food if you like, there is a separate area with chairs and tables for those who bring their own meal. I recommend that, or that you plan to eat somewhere else.

There is an area with open aquariums where you're allowed to touch and hold any of the animals in them - fishes, crabs, sea stars... Be prepared, the water is really cold! Then there are the piranhas, the sea lions, and many more!

You can buy tickets online at www.denblaaplanet.dk/en/

"Ghetto Style" Cable release for iPhone camera

If your hands are anything like mine, they are shaky. I'm not exactly brain surgeon material, and while I've never had the ambition to go down that route I would like to take sharp pictures.

From the DSLR world we are used to tripods and cable releases, so why not bring them to the smartphone photography world? That's the reason we have technology, to help us do what we want. I want sharp pictures.

Before iOS7, you could hold the shutter button, and when you released it the iPhone would take the picture. This helped you take sharper pictures as you could hold the button while you steadied your hands, braced your body and waited for things to settle before releasing the button and taking the picture. With iOS7 this is gone, the camera takes the picture as you tap the button. And that, in my case anyway, tends to introduce camera shake. Even if you are on a tripod it's far too easy to bump the camera as you touch the button.

Solution? Plug in your cable release! The Earphones that came with the iPhone doubles, as you probably knew, among other things as a remote for the music app and as a remote for the camera.

Tap the screen as usual to focus or change exposure. Any shake here won't affect the picture so hammer away if you feel like it. When you are satisfied, press any of the volume buttons on your Earphones to take the picture. This also works with Camera+ but not NightCap and Camera! I think NightCap would benefit from this so let's hope they fix it with an update.

I have a broken pair of Earphones just for this. When I yanked (no, don't ask) on them one time too many the left earpiece went silent. But they work perfectly as a cable release, and since they already are broken I don't mind jamming them into my pocket. They are more manageable ever since I cut away the earpieces:

Butchered Earbuds = cable release - iPhone 5s

Perhaps a bit disgusting for some, but when I shoot things where I need both of my hands such as Though The Lens I use my teeth to press the button. One hand holds the phone, the other the loupe and my teeth substitutes the third hand that´s never there when you need it. 

For the more creepy people out there, using the remote may enable some stealth-mode photography. You could easily look as you are playing or shuffling music or talking while you are in fact taking pictures. 

If you are on an iPhone 5 something you have the EarBuds instead. They work the same but are much more comfortable and sports a better sound. And come with a clever case that let's you wind up them neatly. I really like them! 

UPDATE January 12, 2014:

I just heard from Chris at Interealtime Software regrading NightCap. I wrote a quick mail suggesting they should enable the cable release. He told me that the reason why NightCap doesn't support the remote: "...unfortunately it’s actually quite difficult to add this feature in a way that apple will allow on the store, which is why we’ve delayed it so far (we did add it in a previous version, but had to remove it again). 

However, it is high on our priority list, hopefully we can get it implemented soon."

So, what do you know - let's hope for the best!

Thanks Chris for getting back to me!