Learning all of the technical aspects of digital photography can be quite mind numbing for newcomers. Trying to learn about aperture, f-stops, shutter speed, depth of field, and other technical terms can be a bit overwhelming. So what do you do when you know what you want to accomplish but you just don't know how to go about it? That's were Scott Kelby's new book, The Digital Photography Book comes in. This is a kind of recipe book for tons of common ... Read More

If you look at my B&H Photo wish list you will find a nice set of Pocket Wizards, but at $295 per unit, these little beauties are simply not in the budget for a while. Over at photonotes.org we saw a writeup on the Cactus PT-04 wireless flash trigger and decided we needed to give them a try and see if they were worth picking up. At $29, they fell into the "if it sucks, you throw it away" price point so ... Read More

Muslin is an excellent background material because it can be stored easily, hung on almost anything, and takes light well. However, muslins are quite expensive, often heading into the $250+ range. As always, we try to save money where we can and finding muslins on eBay from Amvona for under $30 was just too good to pass up. When something is under the $40 mark, we usualy consider it to be disposable, meaning that if it really sucks, we can toss it ... Read More

I listen to a lot of photography podcasts every week (and I suggest you do too) and the issue of color management comes up on a pretty regular basis. The whole color management process is getting pretty solid as printers are more accurate than ever and if you are using a known paper, you will get great prints. However, the weak link is the monitor, if you monitor isn’t displaying accurate color, if you tweak and adjust your image to match what ... Read More

If you have been reading along lately, you know my battle with cheap lights and my discovery of the Lowel Omni light which totally changed my mind about trying to do things on the cheap. But did it? Yeah, I knew I should have just kept bidding away on eBay until I won another Lowel light, but hey, I have been trying to save you all some money along the way as well so I decided to try some of the cheapest ... Read More

As you get more into photography and Photoshop, eventually you being to think you would like some extra control over what you are doing in Photoshop even if you cant quite put your finger on what that means. This is usually the time to plunk down a couple hundred bucks on a Wacom tablet and gain a whole new level of functionaly from the brush-based tools (brush, eraser, healing tools, etc) than you had with just a mouse. However, good Wacom tablets ... Read More