Once in a while a product comes along that is so clever, so right, it is just a “must have” product. While at PMA, I stumbled on such a product. The SpyderCUBE by Datacolor is one of those products. Nothing it does is really new, but it does everything right, in a small package, with more features than most any competitive product on the market.

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.

Lightroom 2.3 and Camera Raw 5.3 have graduated from Adobe Labs and are now available as final releases on Adobe.com. These updates include camera support for the following models:(Previously provided in the release candidates of these updates)

Based on comments and emails I have received there are still some people that are confused about how the three elements of exposure play together to determine how dark or bright an image is. Today I want you to think of the three elements of exposure as the three points of a triangle each having an equal effect on the final exposure of the image.

Camera Raw 5.3 and Lightroom 2.3 Release Candidates are now available on Adobe Labs.(Camera Raw 5.3, Lightroom 2.3) The release includes new camera support for the following models:

* Nikon D3X
* Olympus E-30

There are several bug fixes in this update

Yes, RAW vs. JPEG, the seemingly endless debate, almost as bad as Mac vs. PC or Film vs. Digital and people have been asking me to write up an article on this based on my opinion and experience and I have really put this article off for a long time as I wanted to be as unbiased in how I write this given that this is a very biased topic.

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.

Lightroom 2.2 is now available on Adobe.com. (Mac, Win) The release includes new camera support for the following models:

* Canon EOS 5D Mark II
* Canon PowerShot G10
* Panasonic DMC-G1**
* Panasonic DMC-FX150**
* Panasonic DMC-FZ28**
* Panasonic DMC-LX3**
* Leica D-LUX 4**

As part of our Photography Basics series we talked about Exposure already and this time we are going to cover the mystery of aperture. Aperture is probably the least understood setting of everything on your camera. While shutter settings are very easy to understand, to long of a shutter speed and you will get blurring, pretty simple stuff. Same with ISO, too high of ISO and you introduce digital noise. But learning how to use aperture properly can kill brain cells faster than a frat house kegger party.