As excited as we are that major lighting companies are bringing out lines of affordable lighting systems, we are really impressed that some of these systems go beyond just being a light and are complete educational packages. Wescott’s line products that fall under the Photo Basics brand are a perfect example of this new product positioning.

For photographers that shoot in RAW one of the biggest problems is not being able to see thumbnails of the images in Windows Explorer or do quick checks of RAW images without having to open them in Lightroom or Photoshop. I have been using dpMagic for over three years now and had thought that the project had completely stalled out.

All of us here at The Dojo are HUGE fans of products from Think Tank Photo. David and I both wear Modulus Speed Belts with different accessories. My old eBay-special backpack was really beginning to fall apart and has become quite heavy with gear. When you use a backpack and get to a point that you don’t trust the straps to stay on, it’s well past time for a new bag.

We have talked white balance in the past and have reviewed different products that help you get a good white balance setting. A new product has hit the streets that does the same thing, and since the Dojo is all about helping you to improve your images and doing so at a decent price, we needed to take a look at the new Colorright disc. So let’s take a quick look at why we need white balance and if the Colorright disc is worth the cost.

For almost everything in photography there is usually a simple way to figure out what it is you are trying to accomplish, whether it is figuring out how to light something, what shutter speed to use to stop motion or to create a sense of movement. The hardest thing to do is to figure out how much depth of field will be in your images.

Today we are going to take a look at the new Adobe Photoshop Express. Express is a free web-based photo editor from Adobe that allows you to upload images and do basic photo correction. While it doesn’t have the full features of Photoshop or even Photoshop Elements, it may well be the perfect tool for many home users who want to make basic corrections, share images in a gallery, and email family and friends their images.

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 a lot of people, getting into photography is all about creativity and imagination while trying to find unique ways to express yourself. However, take a look through Flickr and most pictures are boring and bland. One of digital’s greatest strengths is that it’s simple, fast, easy, automatic, and doesn’t require much thought or effort to take a picture with a modern DSLR.

As you develop a good digital workflow and learn the power of tools like Adobe’s Lightroom, one of the tendencies is to take less time to perfect your exposure and white balance in the camera because it is so easy to correct these things during post production. However, when you think about it, if you spend 15 seconds per image and you do a wedding with 2,000 images, that’s 8 hours of fixing white balance and exposure.

We are certainly fans of constant lights for beginners with their “what you see is what you get” approach and some of our favorite lights are our Photo Basics kit which we use all the time for different projects. The main problem with constant lights is the heat generated by the bulbs. On a recent product shoot we added up 3000w of lights running which brought up the temperature in the room VERY quickly and I swear I ended up with a mild sunburn by the end.