I am a big fan of doing interesting lighting techniques and have been playing around with using gels to create colored background effects. While using small gels can work pretty good, I have been looking for something that works better, isn’t as fragile, and basically was designed for the purpose. What I found was the Lumiquest FX kit. The FX is a complete colored filter system designed specifically to create colored lighting effects.

For the most part I come home from a shoot and dump the images from the CF cards onto the computer and then do my backups. Once in a while I am gone for a weekend without the benefit of a laptop and I want to make sure I have my CF cards backed up every night. For this reason I picked up a Wolverine Flashpac several years ago and have been using it ever since. Since you should always make backups as soon as possible, I can’t recommend some type of device like this enough.

Your’s truely was just a guest on the digital photography show podcast. Please stop by http://www.prophotoshow.net/ and download the podcast while myself, Gavin Siem, Michael Anderson, and Dennis Zerwas discuss the news, new products, Lightroom 2.0, and discuss issues like marketing, insurance, new cameras, and a bunch of other randomness. If you don’t listen to the podcast, you really should.

Adobe has unleashed a beta version of Lightroom 2.0. If you are doing any amount of photo work then you should be using Lightroom. This new version adds some long await tools such as a painting tool that allows you to paint exposure, brightness, clarity, tint, and saturation. A highly anticipated post-crop vignette tool is also a very welcome touch.