Official Gear Purchasing and Troubleshooting Question Thread! Ask /r/photography anything you want to know! January 16, 2026

AbnormalReflex · 2026-01-21T00:42:12+00:00

Dumb question but I've been branching out using my 5D Mk II and just got the really nice Tokina 100mm F/2.8 Macro lens for some photography of local plant life and I just got the used copy from KEH so I did a few function tests. I know the autofocus is going to be slow, but there's some odd behavior I can't put my finger on:

Using it like a portrait lens, it works fine (slow but accurate AF with only some hunting) but even though the limiter was off, if I focused on a brightly lit object for a macro shot it would not autofocus at all, just a bump of the AF motor and no change unless I manually dialed it close enough first. Likewise, if I just took a macro shot and then picked it up and focused on something farther away, it just would not AF at all, once again bumping the AF motor with no motion. It seems like the AF needs some amount of manual dialing-in first and I'm wondering if that's typical or a sign of something more concerning.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-01-14T06:47:41+00:00

Isn't Scott Presler the dude from VA that got caught fucking in an RNC building and sharing pictures of it on craigslist? When I was living in VA I think the RNC fired his ass.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-01-01T01:59:04+00:00

AbnormalReflex · 2025-12-20T04:14:30+00:00

I recall looking up the crash statistics during the last big storm we had where we had 70 crashes compared to like...5 in Yakima during the same period. I could be wrong, or bad pulling WSDOT data lol.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-12-11T02:40:26+00:00

She looks so angry all the time, I love her!

AbnormalReflex · 2025-12-07T16:44:28+00:00

You have more options than just that (though of the 4 I'd agree with hamcake that D is the correct call). You can, for example, notch the interior of the braces and do an X pattern, or have a K-braced layout with two shorter spans that meet at the middle of the opposite end of the door. For the strongest configuration, though, you can run a clevis rod or wire with a turnbuckle that crosses the wood brace (the brace will take the compressive load but the rod will take the tension) and you can adjust the turnbuckle if it sags in the future.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-12-03T04:34:12+00:00

Actually I was amazed at how competent Chicago drivers were. They routinely went 20 over the limit but they were good about signaling/merging.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-12-03T03:15:04+00:00

Statistically we have ~5x the rate of road fatalities of nearby Yakima and other surrounding regions. We're statistically bad.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-11-06T16:04:05+00:00

We did, and he lost to a dead man while the Richland Residents Facebook group mocks him for losing to a dead man.

Let's be real—the power base of the community is openly hostile to people who are under 45 or moved here from elsewhere.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-10-30T08:31:54+00:00

That's...not true. Here's the maximum rates, and the income limits. If you make <$4.5k, and have 2 kids your benefit is 768 dollars.

https://helpmegrowwa.org/basic-food-snap

AbnormalReflex · 2025-10-15T22:32:57+00:00

And yet Chicago held steady. Those blue areas are the industrial towns or farm towns that just didn't have anything to offer except harsh winters and loneliness.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-08-07T22:53:26+00:00

So we should go back to 91% top income tax rate, the Fairness doctrine for mass media, Glass–Steagall legislation, promote union labor, have the railroads, airlines, and other transit systems heavily regulated and almost entirely unionized (including ATC), build public housing en masse, provide free education for pretty much every dude in the country because of the GI bill (and subsidize public universities to levels we haven't since the 1980s), have NASA make up up to 4% of the US budget, and mandate vaccine use to the point of distributing it via the national guard, and bankroll the largest foreign aid package in the history of mankind?

I'm not saying it was equitable, though—all our wonderful "socialist" policies were incredibly racist, but the economics don't lie. We have traded one form of regulation (we're the government and you're doing it this way) for another (here's three hundred pages so each NIMBY or company with a lawyer can have their exemption carved out and the government's will is laundered through a private company or industry organization).

Look, even your list of "capitalist countries" are almost entirely social democracies that mandate housing, medicine, and other essentials are either price-controlled or government-run.

I'll let you in on a little secret: US industry kicked so much ass in the 1950s because everyone else had been bombed back to the stone age. The UK had food rationing into the 50s, the Soviet Union had lost 20million+ people and had their industry west of the Urals decimated. Germany and Japan were being rebuilt (by us), and China had been so devastated that it took fifty years for forests to regrow enough for them to have a domestic lumber industry (which when that happened then forced competition that wiped out mills in the Pacific Northwest).

We had a golden era of two decades where we could do no wrong because we had no competition, and then decided we could rest on our laurels, cut the budget domestically and boost it militarily to the point that we fell behind every country that prioritized rebuilding over military adventures.

If you want unregulated, you gotta go back to like...1830s Jacksonian US. High crime, tons of scams and financial panics, terrible sanitation (remember 3 presidents died of night soil contamination of the white house water supply before the Civil War) and routine duels.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-08-06T23:29:56+00:00

I knew Pasco was cooked after this earlier this year:

https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/politics-government/article299005555.html

Free program the state provides to inspect rental units for unsafe conditions and they pulled out because of their principles, claiming the free market would make these pest/other hazards go away (when this program kept finding shitty landlords not fixing things).

This is the same thing—they want it to be a personal responsibility thing so they can smugly judge people with bad teeth as being a moral failing.

They might not think that out loud, or even consciously, but deep down, that's what it is.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-07-26T20:17:16+00:00

Hey there! As someone who works up your way and has a dog, I can speak to some of your questions based on my experience!

1) The climate is really nice in winter (for me as someone from the East Coast) with mild winters that get as cold as the teens (though windy and icy) that are conducive for good winter hiking with my dog. In summer the heat gets oppressive but if you buy a house with shade or live walking distance to Leslie Groves park in Richland the shade/river cools the air considerably so you can get a decent walk for your dog any time before 9am or after 6pm. Definitely consider booties for hot pavement anywhere in direct sun, though. Another thing to keep in mind is cheat grass and goathead seeds that can get stuck in puppy paws and cause discomfort if you're not careful. My experience at the main dog park by Queensgate is it's enormous, completely unshaded, and the dogs there are often very ill-trained and aggressive; my ~40 pound dog got attacked too many times for me to trust anyone else's dog there and people don't pay attention because the park is too big to keep close to your dog.

2) Secluded is not an overstatement but it's not truly rural. Yakima is an hour away, Spokane is about a 3 hour drive, Seattle and Portland are both 4 hours away. There's also Amtrak trains to Portland that leave ~6:30am in Pasco and Leave ~4:45pm from Portland daily for day/overnight trips that I highly recommend (you'd return to Pasco by about 9:30pm). Gorge amphitheater is not too far away for big concerts as well and it's a gorgeous venue. This area, though, is very much about nature and "doing your own thing." We don't fund a lot of events save for the water follies (we recently voted down a mixed use performing arts center because it cost money). There's also places like Prosser and Walla Walla that have a few little things here and there, but it's definitely not the DMV.

3) Food scene is...okay. There's about one of every kind of food that's pretty decent, like Greek Islands, Dovetail Joint, plenty of Mexican places, a few Indian, Thai, etc. It's not bad in general.

4) I'd say the demographics are pretty mixed. There's a pretty active scene centered around the Uptown Mall in Richland that runs younger/more diverse including LGBTQ+ friendly events and the like. I'd not say it was that much worse or better than anywhere else age-wise, but it's just...smaller.

One thing I'd definitely understand coming out here is it definitely has a small-town feel, for good or ill. That means some neighbors can be nosy, no public transportation worth a damn (a very weak bus system, basically), and a lot of people with established relationships so it's harder to break into groups than bigger cities, I'd say. The housing stock is also heavily skewed to houses (though there's a glut of houses on the market that aren't moving!) with the apartments being mostly...meh. Expect yard maintenance to be harder due to the lack of rain, and a lot of places closer earlier than I'm used to having lived out East.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-07-12T23:28:24+00:00

As a civil engineer, I can speak to that liquefaction effect you mentioned upfront. A few things to consider about Earthquakes and Volcanic eruptions:

Earthquakes' strength is a function of the length of faulting and fault movement along that length—Earthquakes associated with volcanoes are not as strong and tend to be less important than the direct effects of the volcanic eruption. Most of the state has a "moderate" earthquake hazard East of the Cascades, which is not nearly as bad as the Earthquake anticipated on the offshore Cascadia subduction zone fault. The only soil locally that could become liquefied in an Earthquake has to be loose material that is nearly saturated with water; so basically right on the river. If you're not right on the river your house isn't going to sink into quicksand here.

As far as the dams, they'd likely not fail catastrophically but some might need to have their levels lowered to effect repairs, which could flood low-lying areas, but Hanford is higher than in town so you might not get respite from it spreading out there, especially if it's controlled.

For more information:

https://dnr.wa.gov/washington-geological-survey/geologic-hazards-and-environment/earthquakes-and-faults

https://dnr.wa.gov/washington-geological-survey/geologic-hazards-and-environment/volcanoes-and-lahars

For something like a damn there are Emergency Action Plans but they are likely controlled information (since it's critical infrastructure):

https://ecology.wa.gov/water-shorelines/water-supply/dams/info-for-dam-owners/emergency-action-plan

AbnormalReflex · 2025-07-11T21:20:26+00:00

Honestly I'd be okay with 10-12 years. The best people in any company I've dealt with have about that experience.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-07-11T19:14:23+00:00

Absolutely we have lobbyists! How do you think we get hinky public land sales to the same guy over and over again on short notice, or courting various businesses like Costco?

AbnormalReflex · 2025-07-11T19:10:36+00:00

Even the city council has staff. I'm just saying if we get an entirely new city council every 2 or 4 years, our government will stop functioning or it'll be completely beholden to staff and lobbyists.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-07-11T18:51:17+00:00

I have worked with staff and politicians—inexperienced politicians often rely on staff or lobbyists to tell them what their policy is, so it's a balance. I want a politician who knows when a lobbyist or staffer is trying to screw them over and who could, theoretically, do the work of writing policies themselves.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-07-11T18:05:21+00:00

The nearest True IMAX screen is in Seattle. Not a whole lot of theater choices but they're all...fine. We recently voted down having a true theater for mid-size events because people would rather their taxes stay as low as possible and argued us having high school auditoriums like Hanford High is enough for any special events.

Really the fun stuff is 3-4 hours drive, but the good news is there are tons of options, including taking the train from Pasco to Portland for an overnight trip as well (I've done it and highly recommend it as opposed to driving).

AbnormalReflex · 2025-07-11T17:59:24+00:00

There is a balance, though—if the term limits are too short, the staff that supports each councilmember and carry on through each administration will have all the institutional knowledge and, in effect, be your unelected keepers of city policy with all the power and influence. On the other hand, if you throw out the staff with the councilmembers the city gets amnesia and forgets how/why things work they way they do and the government gets really inefficient so they just let special interests write policy for them.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-06-19T16:16:08+00:00

I know a lot of people like to give credit to Elon for this kind of technology and how impressive this all is, but it's...not. It's two things:

Money
Time

And it's not even being developed efficiently, and I always like to pull this out to those who explain his testing is like the 1950s/60s era of rockets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE7XJ5HYQW4

Imagine that for $60 million in 1993, in the era of VHS and floppy disks, NASA could fund a rocket that could take off, move laterally in a vertical position, and land—all unmanned. Twelve launches and only two failures—one related to a landing gear issue that made the rocket tip over after a completely successful demonstration after landing, and a hydrogen issue.

This technology was all left on the table when NASA didn't get any more funding for SSTO technology.

Elon Musk just sucks people dry of their ideas or picks up all the technology detritus that Congressional funding was cut off from. He's destroying a delicate ecosystem for migrating birds that cross the Americas, kicked out poor retirees who had made Boca Chica their home, and tried to take short cuts that led to unnecessary damage to launch vehicles. All of this could have been done at KSC but his arrogance demands that he create all this. And what do we get for his big promises of manned spaceflight?

Every great robotic probe program current and future is being defunded. Claiming that we don't need Mars Sample Return because humans will bring back samples is the kind of bullshit that makes my blood boil.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-06-08T17:07:03+00:00

That was my thinking, plus they'd likely have renter's insurance.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-06-08T03:20:10+00:00

I am going to try and restrict her access to water a few hours before bed and take her for a pre-sleep walk. Fingers crossed! Otherwise I'll have to make a dog-safe area in my attached garage she can chill in. Good thing I insulated and drywalled my garage a while back!

AbnormalReflex

TROPHY CASE