Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

If you don’t know what the Quick Disc is, it’s worth checking out the Quick Disc homepage. In summary, it’s a way of seeing how much you are magnifying the image by comparing a known size object with a calibrated ruler on the ground glass screen.

The standard quick disc is printed on cardboard and hence gets smeared when wet and is difficult to read in the darkness of a dark cloth.

I had a look around for something that I could use as a replacement for the disc and found a small mini cd that I got with my sans disk compact flash reader. It was just the right size and is obviously waterproof but has the bonus of standing out well from the background when measuring.

For the ruler, I cut a peice of black plastic to size, sellotaped a scale on it but also cut notches in the ruler so I can read the silhouette against the ground glass screen.. Only a small thing but it makes it easier and hence more likely to be used..