Episode 365: Toyota Corolla Mods, Fujifilm X-S20 & More…

Show Transcript

Greetings, you’re listening to the Liam Photography Podcast, I’m your host Liam Douglas and this is Episode 365. In today’s episode, modding my new car, shooting with the new Fujifilm X-S20 and XF8mm F/3.5 and some news stories as well.

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So, if you are Subscribed to my Youtube Channel or Follow Me on Social Media, then you probably already know that a couple weeks ago I traded in my 2017 Nissan Rogue for a newer 2021 Toyota Corolla LE. Now, although the Rogue was a good vehicle that I drove for five year and I do miss the All Wheel Drive, I’ve always like the Corollas and I have owned several of them over the years. My latest Corolla comes with some pretty cool tech, including Automatic High Beams, Adaptive Cruise Control, Road Sign Assistant and an Electronic Parking Brake with a Hold function.

The Automatic High Beams are pretty self explanatory, but the Adaptive Cruise Control is really cool. Basically the car has radar built into the nose and when the Cruise is engaged, it will scan for other cars in front of me. Let say I am cruising down a road at 55mph with the cruise set and I come up behind a vehicle that is going slower than the speed limit. Well, my Cruise Control will actually slow my car down to maintain distance from the car in front of me and if I pull out to pass them the Cruise will automatically speed the car back up to 55mph. Additionally, with the Radar system engaged, if someone stops quick my car will respond by slowing or stopping to avoid hitting them.

The Road Sign Assist is really nice as basically my car has a front facing camera at the top of the windshield and as I drive it will “spot” certain road signs such as Speed Limit signs, Stop or Yield Signs and it will put them in the gauge cluster so I always know what the speed limit is on the road I am traveling or if there is a Stop or Yield sign coming up, which all of these can be handy for situational awareness. If I am over the Speed Limit it will light up the border of the Speed Limit sign in red to let me know I am Speeding.

The Electronic Parking Brake with Hold is pretty wild as well as my car had no handle or foot pedal to engage or disengage the Parking Brake. The brake applies automatically when you shift into park and releases again when you shit back into Reverse or Drive. I like this as on many vehicle since most people hardly ever use their Parking Brake, they are prone to seizing up over time from lack of use. Additionally, another issue common with normal Parking Brake is the cable that operates the handle or pedal that engages the brake tends to be the first part of the brake that breaks.

Now the other cool part about my Electronic Parking Brake is its hold function. Behind my shifter there is a pair of Parking Brake buttons. The one on the left is for the normal on and off of the Electronic Parking Brake and the second button on the right is the Parking Brake Hold function. When you press this button down you get a new Parking Brake icon on your instrument cluster that lights up green indicating that the function is now turned on. When you stop at a stop sign or red light or at a drive through and stop, a second Parking Brake Hold icon lights up in yellow letting you know that it has engaged. Now you can safely take your foot off the brake pedal and the car will hold itself in place without creeping forward and hitting the car in front of you! The Parking Brake Hold function has a three minute timer so after three minutes it will auto release but it gives you a warning before that happens by making the car beep at you.

Ok, so what about the mods I have done and plan to do on my new car? Well the first mod I did was I went on Amazon and bought a new LED Tail Light kit for the car that is completely Plug N Play. What this means is that you unplug and unbolt the current factory tail lights and turn signals on the rear of the car and the new LED kit bolts in the same way and plugs into the existing wiring harnesses! By default the Corolla has a plain black plastic strip that runs under the trunk lid and that is replaced by an LED light bar that fits in the same slot. Additionally, the kit I bought has a really cool start up sequence that runs when you turn your headlights on where it chases around the back of the car and then the entire new light kit lights up and stays on for your new rear lights at night. This kit also gives you animated turn signal indicators on the back of the car that are easier for drivers following you to see especially at night but also during the day. I’ll include a link to the mods I have and am installing in case you have a 2020+ Corolla and want to install them in yours.

Another mod I added to the car since I bought it was a Start-X remote start kit, which is also completely Plug N Play with no need to cut or splice any factory wiring to make it work. The kit comes with three wiring harnesses to make installation easy for anyone to do. The main “T” harness plugs into a series of factory plugs on the driver’s side under the dash and has paired plugs so when you pull the factory plug you have a female receptacle to plug them into and then the “T” harness plug takes the place of the factory plug in the wiring blocks. It has a second, small harness that plugs into the Immobilizer on the passenger side of the car, behind the kick panel and another that plugs into the TPMS spot behind the driver’s kick panel. These two smaller harnesses then plug into the main “T” harness and complete all the circuits. The “T” harness also replaces the ignition plug on the driver’s side of the steering column inside it and then has a paired connector for the original one as well.

Once you have the Start-X fully installed, you have to go through a physical programming sequence using the programming button on the Start-X control box and using your key in the switch to perform sequences and then you remove the Start-X and take it into the house, plug it into a Windows computer with a FlashLink module and use the free software to decrypt and link the Start-X kit to your existing key fobs!

The Start-X does not come with key fobs unless you order the log range RF extender kit to it for additional money, which allows you to start your car from greater distances and they also have a cellular module you can add on to remote start your car from anywhere in the world similar to the OnStar remote start on GM vehicles. Now the Start-X remote start kit for my car was $200 and the add on for cellular is another $150 and then you also have to pay $40 a year for the Subscription to be able to remote start via cellular. I didn’t see the need for this expense, although I had that functionality on my 2017 Chevy Malibu I had a number of years back and do miss it sometimes, I don’t miss it or use it enough to want to pay the extra expense.

The next series of mods I am doing on my car will be while we are up north in PA/NY in a few weeks. My car did not come with the LED fog lights in the front, instead it had black plastic accents in the fog light slots. I went on Amazon and got the fog lights for $55 and I also bought replacement LED corner lights to replace the red reflectors on the rear bottom corners of the car as well. While we are up north I am going to enlist the aid of my son Alex to help me get those installed since you either need a car lift or a nice concrete floor with a floor jack and jack stands. These lights do have to be spliced into the existing wiring for the lights but I have the 3M wire splices to do that with.

Ok, so enough on the car stuff, lol, next let’s talk about the new loaner I got from Fujifilm USA, thanks to my contact Daniel Carpenter. So, if you remember, back in May of this year Fujifilm held their latest X Summit and during this event they released the new Fujifilm X-S20 consumer level camera body as well as their new XF8mm F/3.5 lens. The X-S20 is the latest upgrade in the X-S line of Fujifilm cameras and is really remarkable. It has the older X-Trans 4 sensors but they added the new 5th generation processor so that it has better AF performance. In addition, they made the hand grip bigger so it could accommodate the larger NP-W235 battery from the X-T4 and other cameras. This allows the X-S20 to shoot longer on a single battery and also improved the ergonomics.

The X-S20 also added a new VLOG mode on the PSAM mode dial that activates enhanced AF and Product Showcase capabilities which allows it to better switch from you to an object you hold up in front of yourself during filming and then lock back on yourself when you lower the object again. This feature makes the X-S20 more on par with Canon’s cameras with their Dual Pixel AF, which performs a similar function. The X-S20 is compact and light weight and has lots of features that will allow even beginning photographers make great images.

Ad far as the XF8mm F/3.5 lens is concerned, I was puzzled as to why Fujifilm released this lens since it wasn’t anything that the world was clamoring for, but since getting my hands on one I can appreciate the lens overall. At 8mm, this lens is equal to a 12mm in full frame field of view. With this field of view, the XF 8mm is a great lens for landscapes as well as astrophotography and the F/3.5 aperture will allow you to capture a good amount of light as well. Granted it’s not F/2.8 but by not being that wide it allows the lens to be so small, compact and light weight. Over the next couple of weeks I will be spending some time shooting with this new combination and making Youtube content on them as well so make sure you’re Subscribed to my channel and turn on all notifications so you will know when the new content drops.

News:

Sandisk Portable SSD are garbage:

According to a news story on PetaPixel, it appears that Western Digital who now owns SanDisk is having some massive issues with these Portable SSDs failing at random and people are losing all their content over this debacle. Just a few months ago, one of the folks over at TheVerge had a 4TB version of these portable SSDs that suddenly failed and he lost 3TB of content that was being stored on the device. The person reached out to WD about it and they replaced the unit under warranty but made no offer to recover his lost content. WD has released a firmware update that was supposed to correct the issue, but the users new 4TB had failed already after only 3 months of use and other have reported that the 2TB models have been failing as well.

My Thoughts

I am seriously disappointed by this news but not totally shocked. I’ve been saying for years now that Western Digital’s drives are crap, their hard drives have had tons of issues with failures and what’s worse is WD after the years have bought out a bunch of other drive and memory card makers and since taking them over, their products are now crap as well. A few years back I bought a G-RAID enclosure with dual 3TB drives that both failed after about six months. I did not realize when I bought this device that G-Drive had been bought out by WD or I would not have bought it at all. I reached out to WD and they replaced the drives with larger 4TB models under their warranty, but I am already seeing issues with the new drives as well. Additionally, I didn’t have all my RAW files that were stored on that Mirrored RAID backed up elsewhere so I lost everything, years of RAW files. I did have the JPGs from those images stored elsewhere so I didn’t totally lose everything but I was still not a happy camper.  In my case, WD also did not offer to recover my years of lost RAW files and now it looks like they are shafting the public again on these SandDisk Portable SSDs and that is why they have been blowing them out at a reduced price on Amazon lately.

My two cents, switch to another hard drive maker ASAP and toss your WD garbage and also replace any SanDisk memory cards as well and go with someone better like ProGrade Digital.

How Much is a Photographer Worth?

A professional photographer named Roxy Facer who lives in Hawaii was recently contacted by Vogue Polska to shoot some video for them as part of an overall project they were doing in Hawaii. They only offered her $300 for an entire day of shooting video and editing it for them and she accepted the job. She then went ahead and shot the gig but then later took to her TikTok and blasted the magazine for cheating her by only paying $300 for all the work she did.

My Thoughts

This behavior by Roxy is completely unacceptable and totally unprofessional. I cannot imagine what was going through her head over this entire incident. I mean you knew going in that the job only paid $300 for an entire day of work and you accepted those terms, shot the job and then bash the company about it on Social Media after the fact? I believe in this case, she jumped at the gig as she figured she could list Vogue as a client on her website to look more professional, even though she was being misleading but not mentioning that it was the smaller Vogie Polska and not Vogue US which is Vogue’s largest publication. And what kind of crack was she smoking to shoot the job, get paid, bash the company on Social Media and then brag about having them for a client on her website? In my honest opinion, this lady sounds like she has some serious Bi-Polar stuff going on or she just figured she could get more well known clients by posting on her site about shooting for Vogue when that is really misleading since she actually shot for their smaller Polish magazine.

People, remember to price yourself accordingly as a professional photographer, you know your worth and what you need to cover expenses and make a decent living. Don’t take low paying jobs for bragging rights and then bash the client because they didn’t pay you what you are worth, especially when you knew you were being underpaid to begin with. Use your common sense people. A little while back I was shooting content for EA Games and I priced myself accordingly, but after the first shoot of several I realized that due to the beating my body took, I needed to up my rate a bit for the future shoots and they were totally fine with that. I didn’t lowball myself to start, I charged a reasonable amount and they were very happy with my content I captured for them because I went the extra mile to give them some bonus content as well. So, after the first shoot I upped by price for a bit and we were both happy with the partnership.

Start-X Remote Start for Toyota Corolla 2020+

https://amzn.to/47rE33F

LED Tail Light Kit for 2020+ Corolla

https://amzn.to/3qnpOfR

Remember I now have my own discount code for all Platypod branded products at http://www.platypod.com using my code LD20 you can save 20% off on ALL individual Platypod branded products EXCLUDING Bundles, which are already discounted and Square Jellyfish or Lume Cube branded items.

I also now have my own affiliate link for Think Tank Photo, use the link to guy any of their gear, get a free gift and free shipping!!!

https://www.thinktankphoto.com/?rfsn=7232819.5f5392&utm_source=refersion&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=7232819.5f5392

Also be sure to join the Liam Photography Podcast Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/liamphotographypodcast/ You can reach the show by call or text @ 470-294-8191 to leave a comment or request a topic or guest for the show. Additionally you can email the show @ liam@liamphotographypodcast.com and find the show notes at http://www.liamphotographypodcast.com.

You can find my work @ https://www.liamphotography.net and follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @liamphotoatl. If you like abandoned buildings and history, you can find my project @ http://www.forgottenpiecesofgeorgia.com. and http://www.forgottenpiecesofpennsylvania.com.

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