Photography: Professional flash gun!

Earlier this week on one of my frequent visits to the local Goodwill I found this little gem: A Sunpak 522 Auto Thyristor professional photostrobe. It only cost me $5, and I figured if nothing else it'd be something fun to play with. After doing some research I determined that this was in fact a professional strobe (which I had guessed simply by the number of controls when I first saw it), and a rather a powerful one for one that can run on standard batteries!
This strobe came with a camera shelf, which if I ever use it for it's intended purpose I will most likely NOT use; as with any digital camera I can afford I will have to use it as a slave flash I would want to mount it to it's own tripod.









An alternate view of the strobe, showing both it's back panel and it's 3-dimensional aiming.

Of course I decided to try to test this strobe with my "pocket" camera by simply trying to manually synchronize the strobe with the camera's built-in flash, and actually succeeded!




















Here is a photo using the Sunpak 522 Auto at maximum power in a quote-unquote "Open Flash" shot (meaning that I managed to manually trigger the flash gun whilst the camera was actually sampling the image). The field plants are at least one hundred feet away from the camera (which has a 3/8 inch objective).For $5 I am rather impressed...

Stereo (rack) Envy... Resolved.

After spending the morning after Church at my parents' house, while waiting for the local Goodwill to open (which, incidentally, is the place I purchased my receiver) I got to looking at my dad's stereo racks. Finally I got fed up with my lazy set-up (with the receiver, EQ and Phase Coupled Activator, simply stacked on one of my speakers)...
Today I purchased a cheap ($15) "bookshelf" to use as a new stereo rack, and finally arranged my stereo components, Media Center PC and one of my game consoles in a far more logical and elegant way.
Here is a picture of my new setup featuring (from top to bottom) my Media Center PC, my Optimus (RadioShack) Equalizer, a Phase Coupled Activator, my Pioneer 5.1 Ch Receiver, and my Xbox 360, between my television and one of my pair of Rectilinear speakers (with the cover purposefully removed to show the 6-way driver system) given to me by my father as a housewarming gift (and one I appreciate on a near daily basis). These were my father's college speakers; and as he and his roommate were the "stereo guys" in their dorm in college needless to say these are EXTREMELY good speakers! Given a clean input they sound as good at low volumes as they do at "permanant hearing damage" levels! Though the setup works exactly the same as it did before it is now much more accessable than it was, and definately looks better. I feel it was worth the time spent.