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We headed down to the Kids’ Parade for a Better Waterfront today, and it was a blast. It was raining out, but we dressed appropriately, and brought the rainshield for Mason. He wasn’t too thrilled about being pushed around in a bubble, but the music and other kids seemed to make up for it. Orkestar Zirconium broke out the brass, and it was awesome.

We started out at Victor Steinbrueck park, walked down to the waterfront, back up the stairs (elevators for the strollered) and then through the market. Originally we were supposed to head over to the new Sculpture Park (which I would have liked to see), but it was pretty cool watching the band play on up three flights of stairs. As we walked along, it became really obvious to me that the people crying for a rebuild haven’t spent a lot of time at the waterfront. Even as a carless Seattleite with a bad photography habit, I haven’t spent a lot of time at the market looking around, Taking the time to walk from Pike Place to the water is just a shocker. The Viaduct, even on a rainy Sunday is loud, ugly, and a blight on an otherwise touristy area. If you stand at the park, you’re instantly aware of it, If you walk down the hillclimb, you have to walk under it, and if you walk down to the piers, you’re surrounded by parking lots and freeway. Granted, there were Tourists wandering around at the Market and the piers, but I can only imagine what it would be like if the area didn’t have a freeway running through the middle of it.

I’ve heard people talk about a working waterfront. Tear down the Viaduct, and we might just get one.

Vivace’s David Schomer is featured in Business Week. Good article on a great coffee shop.

A while back, I picked up a Nikon TC-16A teleconverter as part of an ebay auction. It seemed like a nifty little widget. It’s an older piece of hardware (1985), from when Nikon first came out with Autofocus bodies, but still hadn’t caught up with their lens line. It allows you to mount a fully manual lens on an AF body, and get about 5mm of autofocus (get the full rundown at mir). Since I have a lot of Manual lenses at this point, it seemed like it could be pretty useful, if not just a great novelty.

It turns out however, that this widget only works on the cameras from that era, and 2 modern day DSLRs, the D2H and D2X. If you’ve been watching prices on either of those, the minimum buy in for this thing to work is about $1300. So it has sat on the shelf.

Yesterday, everything changed. I was reading the Nikon forums on photo.net, and ran across a link to this page on converting a TC-16A for use on a D200. The step by step instructions made things look not-too-difficult, and it was just sitting on the bookshelf, so I broke out the tools. A couple hours later (lots of time looking for springs on the floor), I had a semi-working TC-16A. It does AF, as advertised, but it doesn’t handle aperture settings. It has a CPU, so you can actually shoot in A on a D50 with a manual lens, but the chip reports the min/max aperture as f/1, and the focal length as 8mm, so EXIF data is pretty messy.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a great hack, and I think it can be a pretty useful addition to the camera bag. It’s small, it allows one handed shooting (with the other holding a light or beer), and for the most part, it works. I even got to test it and my portable strobist kit last night at EN. I think this shot of Frank drinking came out the closest to what I was looking for.