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One of the great things about working on a computing magazine is access to a lab full of all sorts of geeky stuff – including a microscope. This belonged to PCW Magazine, may she rest in peace, but on Wednesday Anthony managed to get it working again, and so during lunch we rigged up a camera to take some photos. Here's the ball on the end of a .5mm Bic Cristal biro:

.. and the embossed letters on my (surprisingly spangly) credit card:

.. and the end of a pin on an Athlon CPU, which as it turns out is made of two metals:

We also managed to shoot some video. Here's the minute hand of my watch, ticking along 1/2600th of a revolution every second:

It's quite impressive. The camera setup we have is somewhat jury-rigged at the moment (picture here) but I'm hoping to find a proper camera adapter – Nikon used to make Coolpix camera mounts for this SMZ800 microscope. In the meantime, more pictures of stuff up close can be found here.

One of my favourite parts of my job is testing DSLR cameras. Many of the new models this year are adding HD video recording, which is interesting – and which requires me to shoot loads of test video clips to accompany all the sample photos. Here's my trip to work, shot in high-def as a test on the new Nikon D5000 – click the HD button to enable maximum pixelocity.

Lewisham has a number of pawn shops, ranging from the heavily fortified "gold chains by the dozen" variety to others that are more like Aladdin's Caves full of junk. And, when passing one of the more junky ones the other day, I spotted this:

It's a Carl Zeiss 135mm f/3.5 lens – a little old, and with a huge thumbprint on the front element (now removed), but nonetheless obviously worth more than the £9 it was selling for. I snapped it up just to see if I could get it to work, and happily it did:

In fact, as it turns out it's amazingly sharp – certainly as good as my Nikkor 24-85mm zoom, and possibly better. Using it isn't easy – it needs an M42 to Nikon adapter, which is stiff and hard to fit, it won't focus beyond ten feet or so because of the Nikon mount distance, and there's no metering, autofocus or automatic aperture control – but still, on the D80 it's the equivalent of a 200mm telephoto for £15 all in. Bargain.

An incomplete assortment of things I like:

1. Ascending really tall buildings in cities to gawk from the top
2. Taking photographs from said tall buildings
3. Playing with expensive cameras and lenses
4. All of the above in one morning

Today I was lucky enough to achieve #4 on that list, as Nikon announced its new D5000 DSLR* in the Paramount private members' club on the top of Centre Point. It was a bit gloomy outside with lots of cloud, but the views were still great. A handful more are on Flickr; I'll dig through the rest at the weekend.

* In a nutshell: 720p video, D60-like body, swivelling LCD, no AF motor, 11-point AF, £720 or £800 for the kit. I'll reserve judgment until I give it a proper try.

I really should learn to use a camera properly; you know, buy a book or something. Instead I've been slowly working things out over the years, which is satisfying but often frustrating in a "wish I'd known that when I was in…" kind of way. Case in point: lately I've been having problems with lens flare.

Having attended a lovely wedding at which I was pretty much unable to photograph anyone inside because of the dark (can't afford an external flash to bounce and my zoom lens is large enough to obscure the built-in one) I decided to buy a simple, bright lens. In the end I picked up a really old Nikon E 50mm f/1.8, and it's great: almost twice as bright as the zoom, and easy to focus because it was made in the days that auto-focus didn't exist. It's also tiny – on the D40 it barely protrudes beyond the prism/flash housing – and stupidly light. Oh, and cheap. Cheap is good.

The problem, though, is flare. Point my modern zoom lens, with hood, pretty much anywhere other than directly at the sun and you'll get a clean picture. When pointing the 50mm lens pretty much anywhere outdoors I was getting the most amazing light effects: blobs, swooping arcs, upside down headlights in the sky where they'd obviously reflected somehow inside the glass (there are probably technical terms for these things, but I don't know them). Sometimes they're pretty, mostly they're a pain.

Anyhow, today I finally figured it out, and the answer is simple: just stop the lens down. At anything wider than f/4 you get crazy flares. f/5.6 or higher and things get better. Stop it all the way down to f/22, if you can, and there's no problem even with bright light sources in the frame. The photo above was 5 seconds, f/22 at ISO200.

So, there you go. Simple. And it only took me three sodding weeks to figure out. Nuts. For my next trick, maybe I'll learn how to actually take some interesting pictures.