Introduction

I work for a retail company and one of the consequences of this is IT not being a core competency of the organization. This is driven by a variety of factors—from internal customer demand to the sort of talent the organization attracts to where budget money gets allocated—but the net impact is an IT infrastructure and tooling that can be extremely limiting. This is in stark contrast with my peers, many of whom work in tech directly or in closely related fields, for whom provisioning a new VM is as simple as clicking a few buttons on an internal tool.

As an analyst, my work involves a lot of data wrangling. Most of this can and should be automated, but our IT limitations can make this a challenge. Figuring out how to automate with the available tools, which usually don't offer APIs—and if they have reporting at all it's to PDF or RTF documents formatted for printing and faxing (and can't be scheduled), has been a challenge.

These limitations have offered opportunities to get creative. This post outlines some of the convoluted processes I use to automate reporting with constraints on data retrieval, data processing, and report distribution.

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Introduction

Macro photography (I dabble) requires a lot of available light or good artificial lighting. Small apertures for wide depth-of-field and close focusing distances limit the amount of light that gets to the sensor. Normal speedlites can work fine to augment or replace ambient light, but when you're shooting freehand it's difficult to handle a flash and the camera.

A flash like the Canon MT-24EX is a good solution for keeping all of the parts on the camera, but at close to \(1,000, it's difficult to justify on top of your existing flashes. [Wimberley's F-2 macro flash bracket](http://www.tripodhead.com/products/flash-bracket-macro-brackets.cfm) is an excellent compromise. With it, you can mount one or two regular speedlites to a tripod colar and position them using the balljoint arms. Problem is, they run\)169 per arm.

The Wimberley components are of very high quality, so the price is justified, but since they use slightly-customized RAM Mounts equipment for most of the flash arm, it's simple to construct a DIY solution slightly more cheaply.

Other people have documented this approach, but based on my difficulty finding the correct parts from their instructions, I'm not sure how many of them have actually assembled the bracket.

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