I have seen grown men shiver and quake in the shoes at the thought of cleaning the sensor on their DSLR by themselves. The sheer anxiety of sticking something into your expensive camera body has left many people with the only option for dust removal being a stop at a camera shop or repair center for a cleaning. In this article we will look at how to clean your camera’s sensor the safe and easy way and dispel some myths around the black art of sensor cleaning.

Studio strobes are expensive and when you need lots of light but when you want to use them on location somewhere you have to find electrical outlets and possibly use long unwieldy extensions cords. But what happens when there is no power available at all? Using a generator is not recommended unless you can find one with a true sine wave inverter and even then, the peak times of the strobes when recycling can put an excessive strain on the generator. Innovatronix has a solution with their Explorer XT portable power source.

I have always been a proponent of keeping my cameras looking brand new. A big piece of keeping your camera new is protecting the screens. This has been an age-old issue that affects all modern, digital cameras from point and shoots to professional SLRs. With typical protectors seeming overprices at $10 to $15 for a piece of plastic film smaller than the palm of your hand, why would you spend quite a bit more than that for the Giottos Camera Screen Protectors? We needed to try these out and see if they were worth the extra cost.

In the beginning there was the original Lensbaby lens, a simple bellows system with push-pull focus and left/right and up/down sweet spot selection. Then came the Lensbaby 3G that allowed you to fine tune the sweet spot after locking it down so that you can easily repeat the same shot and settings.

Now, the Lensbaby Composer promises a lens that is easier to use, better control over focusing, and a selection of different optic inserts to give you a variety of different effects.

If you have ever re-sized an image you know that you always lose a lot of image quality whenever you do that, especially when having to blow things up really large. The solution may just be with OnOne Software’s Genuine Fractals 6. This tool is designed purely to handle your image resizing needs. For myself, I often have to scale things like screenshots for use in the books that I have been writing so that the images look good in the books.

Do you have dreams of shooting a Canon 1Ds Mk III? The new Canon 5D Mk II? The Nikon flagship D3X? Or how about shooting with a $1,600 70-200 IS L 2.8? If you are like me, that’s pretty much all we can do is dream about the day we can afford high end gear like that. Rentals are always a good option either since most places require a deposit equal to the purchase price of the equipment.

Oh Canon 5D Mk II, how doest I love thee, let me count the ways. That could pretty much sum up my impressions of the newest camera from the folks at Canon but it probably doesn’t tell you what you really need to know. I certainly don’t have the testing lab that DPReview or Popular Photography has to tell you all the little specs and test results, but as someone who is shooting all the time, I figured I would get my hands on one and see if it really is all that it is hyped up to be.

We have seen every imaginable type of light diffuser product you can imagine and have even built different ones yourself for specific purposes all in the name of finding just the right combination of bounce and diffusion. Every device we have seen will work great in some specific situations but will not be ideal in every situation. When we saw the VerteX for the first time, while it may have looked more like a gimmick at first glance, I soon realized the potential and just had to try one out.

Focal Point is OneOne Software’s newest Photoshop plug-in that allows you to create images with selective focus and edge vignette effects. Using these techniques you can guide the viewer’s eye to the spot in the image that you want them to look at. Using an easy to use “focus bug” you can control the sweet spot, the amount and kind of blur. These types of effects have only been possible with expensive specialty lenses before. Does Focal Point deliver on the goods? We decided to try it out for ourselves and see what we thought about it.

I have had the hardest time dealing with camera bags over the years, from my first backback that got so heavy I couldn’t lug it around anymore to my uber cool Airport International 2.0 which is great for big jobs but what about when I want to go a little lighter? My old backback is too large, and my Airport International is too big, and my Modulous Speed Belt can’t hold enough nor is appropriate when traveling. So what does that leave?

We knew when we sat down to write this review that many of your would be sitting there thinking that the guys at the Dojo had totally lost it if all they can come up with for a product review is a simple camera strap. In all seriousness, we have appealed to every company we know to come up with a better camera strap. The two main issues we have are comfort for shooting all day long and the security that your camera won’t fall off your shoulder.

I have been a fan of Wolverine products for almost four years now and my trusty Wolverine FlashPac was in need of an upgrade. Not that the FlashPac didn’t do it’s job, its just that it was pretty slow and didn’t have a display that could be used to view the images. Without hesitation I turned back to Wolverine to see what they had available and I found the new ESP Digital Photo Album and Multimedia Player.