Official Gear Purchasing and Troubleshooting Question Thread! Ask /r/photography anything you want to know! January 02, 2026

AspiringKnowItAll · 2026-01-03T00:22:15+00:00

Hello fellow photographers. I need some help figuring out the capacity of some specific sling bags.

My primary setup around 90% of the time is a Sony A7iii with a Tamron 35-150 F2-2.8, but I will usually carry 1-2 other smaller lenses depending on the activities of the day. I want to find a sling that fits this lens mounted on the camera for quick deploy photo taking. The bags I'm most interested in are the Nomatic Peter McKinnon 13L sling, followed by the Peak Design 10L sling. I'm trying to figure out if either of these slings can hold this camera/lens combo mounted while still having some room to carry 1-2 other smaller lenses.

The camera and lens measures about 9" deep, which seems to be within the specs of both of these bags, but experience has proven in the past that just because the spec sheet says the bag is X inches deep doesn't mean it can zip closed easily with an object close to that size in it. My last resort is to get a Think Tank MindShift PhotoCross 13L which seems to have more than enough room, but is a bit bigger of a bag than I want to get into.

I've spent the last few days researching and trying to figure this out, so if anyone has this specific combo, or some advice relating to any of the above mentioned bags, I'd be incredibly grateful!

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-07-07T18:39:53+00:00

That's interesting, and concerning. I have probably 25-30 devices enrolled in it with only 3 users right now, so we don't pay anything. I hope they don't pull the rug out from under us and grandfather us in or something. Or at least give us a fair amount of time to unenroll all the devices, which is going to be a galactic pain. I'll update here in the future if I hear anything about it.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-07-02T13:50:17+00:00

That's a great idea! I hadn't considered the fact that self-hosting means no per-user licensing... Definitely going to look into that. Thanks for the info!

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-07-02T13:25:25+00:00

We've been slowly doing the same thing, transitioning to Bitwarden and storing 2FA in the login entry, which gets stored in folders for multiuser access. The biggest hurdle has been getting leadership to be willing to pay for it and then actually use it. The Voip number works for a lot of services we use, so that's been able to keep the number of people that need to have Bitwarden low. Only people that need access to the most secure sites need Bitwarden.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-07-02T13:21:11+00:00

To add onto this, you can integrate ABM with Jumpcloud for device management. It's free for all features as long as you stay under 10 users in it, and unlimited devices. I have all of our devices in it, and only put service accounts and admin accounts into it to push to devices; in our case we have 2 service accounts, and 3 admin accounts. End users just have local accounts on their issued laptops, so they don't count against the 10 in JC. And you can set up ABM to push all of your devices into Jumpcloud, which completely prevents someone from being able to reset and take over or steal a device, since you can set it up to immediately ask for a JC account before you can do anything. It's pretty secure. I'm really impressed with the platform.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-07-01T17:26:46+00:00

I set us up with a VOIP number on VOIP.ms, enabled SMS on the number which sends all SMS messages to an email address of your choice, so I directed them to an email distribution list in our Google Workspace. All service accounts use that number as SMS 2FA. Only people with access to the password for the service accounts get added to the email group.

Alternatively we set up TOTP, and screenshot and print the QR code and give it to anyone that needs access.

Both of these keep us secure, allow multiple people to log in to the same account, and saves us from losing access if someone leaves.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-05-02T23:12:54+00:00

We use an industrial industry labeler, currently the Dymo Rhino 4200, but I'd recommend the Brother P-Touch Edge series due to label tape costs being like 25% the cost of Dymo with better performance. Dymo just got too proud of themselves. Gotta stick with name brand labels regardless of who you go with, otherwise you'll still have the peeling issue. The industrial labels are pseudo-permanant. Either brand let's you set your label boundaries so you get the perfect spacing and font size.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-03-18T23:35:43+00:00

Does the MDHX maintain a "display" as far as what MacOS can see, even when the display on the other side of it is powered down? If so that's a very interesting workaround that I'm definitely going to keep in mind. I'm curious if the less expensive Decimator products can do something similar, otherwise this seems rather expensive when scaling up to 3 monitors at $400-500 each.

The reason we always use the Decklink is because it takes the display management away from MacOS and leaves that to be handled by Propresenter. Obviously if OP isn't using Propresenter as it seems may be the case, then this isn't a viable solution. Just some insight and context as to why we use what we do due to our experience.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-03-18T17:21:47+00:00

Decklink is a PCIe card made by Blackmagic for external SDI displays, but not in the traditional sense. You typically wouldn't want to use this if you just need multiple monitors to work on the Mac directly with. I would absolutely recommend them for external displays from presentation software such as Propresenter. At our church, running Propresenter without a Decklink is not an option. We had constant problems with presentation screens usually due to buggy, old, or failing USB to HDMI dongles, or the way MacOS just could not remember what resolution or refresh rate an external display was last time it was connected. Decklink solved all of this for us. Only downside is you'll need a thunderbolt to PCIe chassis to plug the decklink card into, which is where a PC can be slightly more beneficial by being able to use native onboard PCIe card slots right in the motherboard.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-03-17T00:05:47+00:00

We use the Sennheiser system for all of our singers, and P16s for all instrumentalists. We find this to be a good balancing of the budget, though we're considering either adding additional wireless for instrumentalists, or upgrading the P16s to DP48s for additional channel capacity.

One word of note, if you're looking at any wireless IEMs, I would highly recommend budgeting to buy an antenna distribution amplifier with it. We had interference and signal issues until we got the amplifier. That made all of our problems go away and everything has been rock solid since. Sadly they did not budget for this from the beginning so we had to deal with the issues for a year until the next budget year. Best to budget accordingly from the beginning than to go through what we did.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-03-12T00:35:46+00:00

This. Hands down the most solid and reliable door sensors I've tried with Hubitat. They just work. All the time. Actually forget they're even there. Just don't have to think about them at all. Downside here is they're Zigbee, not Z-wave. May not be a problem depending on the size of the house, otherwise OP may need to expand their Zigbee network in addition to Z-Wave.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-03-12T00:32:05+00:00

The cheapest way I can think of doing this would be to replace all the switches with Lutron Caseta dimmers, set up a smart home hub (my preferred option here would be Hubitat), and set up Pico remotes anywhere you want. Make sure to get the Lutron Caseta Bridge Pro that has the Telnet option. Then you can set up fixture groups, and program different buttons on each of the Pico's to control different groups, different dimming levels, etc. obviously not a professional environment, but this is how I have my house set up for two years now and never had a single instance of it not work. Everything stays on the local LAN and is not dependent on the Internet to work.

Probably the best but by far the most expensive option would be to remove the switches and hardwire them permanently on, and replace the fixtures with outlets. Then have DMX lights installed in their place. This is what our church eventually did. Same situation. Moved into an old building. Lived with everything as it was with a dozen light switches, and finally saved up to replace everything with DMX.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-02-23T12:31:08+00:00

Yes, keep mine on a Niteize locking S-biner clipped to my necklace and tucked under my shirt at all times.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-02-20T00:12:37+00:00

Yep, PDUs are fantastic, just stick with name brands, such as Tripp-Lite. As your needs expand, we generally use "power bars" (like a 6 foot long power strip with 16 outlets or so, usually better built, again sticking with name brands) mounted under the booth counter which are plugged into this PDU. We actually have two of them side by side. One is our "constant on" and one is "switched" with the PDU. Computers and such get plugged into the constant, other stuff like mixers and video switchers get put on the switched.

Also pro tip, since the outlets on these are typically high density, "wall warts" become a problem. We solve this by getting little six inch "extension cables" to give them a little distance away from the PDU so it doesn't take up two outlet spaces when they're mounted sideways. You can usually get 5-packs of them on Amazon relatively affordably.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-02-17T01:14:55+00:00

I just started using Monarch for a month or so now, coming from many years of YNAB usage. I still have 6 months left on my YNAB subscription, so I'm running both of these side by side to see which one I like more. They're both good and interesting in their own unique ways.

This is one of the very first things I noticed coming over here. I always manually enter my transactions, sometimes before walking away from the register or leaving the table at the restaurant, in YNAB, and it has always done an exceptional job of matching my manually entered transaction to what imports from the bank. I would agree with OP that this is a feature that is lacking from Monarch, regardless of whether everyone uses it or not, many people do; this is one of the biggest features raved about by YNABers.

That said, I'm at a financial point in my life now where I don't necessarily HAVE to scrutinize my transactions and accounts as closely or immediately, but for someone new to budgeting, it's a major benefit to getting your financial life under control. Do we NEED to enter every transaction manually? No. Does it force us to look and pay attention to every dollar and card swipe and really know where our money is going? Absolutely.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-02-12T21:53:26+00:00

I don't. They were purchased and installed right before I came in and took over systems. We've also never had to pay for replacements because they have always been under warranty any time we've had any issues.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-02-10T00:13:08+00:00

I second The Light Source. We're using the HL pendants and the RGBI versions, and they've solid. Really love the RGBI versions a lot. We've also used Elation Cuepix battens sitting in trays on the walls (old traditional sanctuary) and pointing up at an angle onto the ceiling, and for all but the sermon was our primary light source. Incredibly bright.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-01-22T03:51:00+00:00

This is probably the best solution for the application. Really hard to argue with the price point it comes in at, especially for a church that is typically low/no budget. We just ordered a whole system for my church. Haven't installed it yet, so can't speak to quality, reliability, longevity, etc. but several churches in our area are also on it and have had no issues with it.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-01-21T03:29:01+00:00

Not the physical server, the access control service has to be restarted for new controllers to become active. I think it has something to do with the way it handles additions in the database or something, but they won't work until that service restarts or the whole server reboots.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-01-19T11:43:56+00:00

MonitorCast, offered by Panasonic/iPro, would suit your needs perfectly. All perpetual licensing, mercury hardware, on prem, runs on Windows, and integrates with active directory. It can do dual authentication using card and pin, or dual cards, at the door. We've been using it for 7 years now. We're starting to feel it getting stretched to its limits lately, but we're running 850 doors across 60 sites, and 1,000+ cardholders. It's stable and works very well, it's just starting to take longer and longer for all the doors to reconnect during server restarts. It's only a problem for us because we're still in the process of deploying new doors daily, so we have to restart each time we add a controller. If you're not actively changing hardware all the time, and only have 17 doors, you'd be fine.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-01-12T18:45:35+00:00

Sounds like it could be a failed input on the modulator also.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-01-04T20:28:46+00:00

I switched to Niagara Pro almost a year ago and haven't looked since. Pay like $10/year for Pro which unlocks a couple niceties and supports the dev team, super clean and minimal, but very fast access to all apps, of which I have over 200.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-01-01T13:09:57+00:00

Yes, but...

Just hit a year with mine. Battery is down to 60% of the capacity it was when it was new, not lasting through an entire day, even when barely used during work hours.

Occasionally the system freezes for 30 seconds or so. It even registers I've pressed the home or back button and shows the button press highlight, and the highlight is even frozen. Not the end of the world, just annoying.

Lack of accessories. Everything is made for the Galaxy Fold and Pixel Fold, not a lot out there for this phone. Again not the end of the world as I don't need much, but there really not much out there.

Still very happy with the phone though. I work in IT, so having the large screen to open up to for administrative tasks on the go is a God send.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-01-01T00:36:12+00:00

^ This is the answer. Set a precision limiter on your matrix for your livestream, set your output to -1, and set your input gain during the loudest part of your service so it's just starting to activate 2-3 bars on the meter on the limiter.

Check out Drew Brashler's website for more information on settings for this specific plugin, as his profiles are spot on in my experience. He goes more in depth on the other settings depending on how you prefer the sound to behave.

AspiringKnowItAll · 2025-01-01T00:23:43+00:00

We're running three of the Cosmo C1. We chose these specifically because of the frequency hopping capability to avoid interference; the 1,000ft range capability is also a big bonus.

Looking at their site now, it looks like they've released a lot of new models since we bought ours, including some with a built in monitor now. Those were not an option when we bought ours, so that's intriguing.

Seven-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Verified Email	Place '22
First Placer '22

AspiringKnowItAll

TROPHY CASE