For those of you who haven’t heard about Aaron Dieppa, he is an Orange County photographer who came up with an insane idea to try to do a daily video blog for an entire year. To say that he has taken on quite a challenge is an understatement but he has been doing a great job so far. Be sure and check out The Big Picture at http://www.aarondieppa.com for all the back espisodes. This week however, I am thrilled that Aaron asked me to be a guest on the show and we talked for quite a while about Camera Dojo and the industry, so much so that he needed to break it up into three shows.

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.

Join Scarlett in Vegas for a hot night shoot at WPPI!

From Scarlett:
“I had so much fun last year shooting a sizzlin’ bride and groom session in the glamorous lights of Vegas with Ross of Flosites.com and his bride Leysa, and this year, I want to give you the same opportunity for some rockstar portfolio pieces too!

While it may be the middle of winter for some of you, we are going to launch a new photo contest based on an idea from a recent podcast host, Roberto Valenzuela. This contest is going to be about ‘Converging Lines”. Since an image with converging lines adds a nice dimension to your images, it seems like good practice to go out and shoot some images with this as a theme.

Firmware update Version 1.1.1 incorporates the following fixes and improvements.

1. Fixes a malfunction that in rare occurrence causes a low battery indication to be displayed when using the EF 85mm F1.2L II USM lens. Depending on the battery check timing of the camera, the battery level displayed on the camera’s LCD data panel may shows Battery will be exhausted soon or Battery must be recharged, even though the battery capacity is sufficient.

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.

MELVILLE, N.Y. (Nov. 30, 2008) – Nikon Inc. today announced the D3X, an FX-format digital SLR featuring extreme 24.5-megapixel resolution and superb low-noise capabilities, which provides professional photographers with commercial-quality image performance in a familiar and extraordinarily versatile D-SLR form factor. In conjunction with the groundbreaking Nikon FX-format D3, the D3X tops off a collection of flagship level, rugged, professional caliber digital single lens reflex cameras engineered to excel in all types of professional photographic disciplines from photojournalism and sideline sports, to commercial in-studio applications.

Canon has posted updates to Digital Photo Professional, EOS Utility, WFT Utility and Picture Style Editor for Mac and Windows, bringing new features as well as support for digital SLRs up to and including the EOS 5D Mark II. They’ve also released a new version of Canon RAW Codec for Windows, which also adds support for the EOS 5D Mark II.