Error 20 on Canon 450d

Recently some water got inside my camera and I had to disassemble it and clean it. The final casualty was that the clock battery (MS614SE) had been damaged and I had to buy a new one. Including the shipping fee the repair cost was $4.

However, after the assembly when I tried to make a photo I got:

Err 20
Shooting is not possible due

to an error.
Turn the camera off and on

again or re-install the

battery

The solution turned out to be simple: unscrew the long screw next to the zero mark and replace it with a short screw. The fix works because the long screw is mechanically blocking the gears inside. 

Panoramatic pictures and HDR

The best application for panoramic pictures I have found is ICE from Microsoft. The application is small to download, easy and fast to operate and it creates the best seamless pictures I have ever got from any panoramic software I have ever tried. And a bonus: it's free.

In the case of HDR I am indifferent. HDRtist is extremely simple to use and it aligns the pictures correctly; however, it creates a strong hallo around dark objects and the processing is incredibly slow. Furthermore, in respect to the main idea of the application, simplicity, the application should automatically crop the pictures. So the resulting HDR picture doesn't have dark and light borders caused by the aligning of the source pictures with different exposure.

Luminance HDR has a good automatic alignment tool and it creates nice realistic photos. It's my choice.

Picturenaut has a bad automatic alignment - it just shifts the pictures, but it doesn't rotate them. Hence for handheld shots it's unusable.

EasyHDR is maybe good, but in may hands it felt like rubbish.


HDRExpress has a bad alignment tool and creates strange white lines in the processed HDR photos.