I am Honored Beyond Words.

To understand how way cool it is to have been immortalized in one of UK shooter Mike Stimpson's Lego photos, you have to appreciate some of his other work. Mike is the guy who did all of those classic photos in Legos.Bonus points for the setup shots he includes with most of his iconic reproductions, too. Make sure you click through the photo above...

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2009 Save-the-Dates: Dubai, Paso Robles and Santa Fe Workshops

In late March / early April, I'll be teaching three classes at a new, expanded Gulf Photo Plus 2K9 in Dubai. More on that full line-up (and an amazing video) after the jump. Also coming soon is a week-long intensive lighting workshop in California in late April, details of which will be posted shortly. And looking further out, I also will be teaching...

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Lighting 101 PDF Released in Three More Languages

I am happy to announce that, thanks to the generous efforts of a dedicated group of multilingual readers, the Lighting 101 course has now been released into French, Hebrew and Spanish.Hit the jump for links to the uploaded files, instructions on how to get L101 in other languages -- or maybe even translate it into a new one...__________Leading Off -- FrenchThanks to the team effort on the French translation project, the L101 French version will thankfully not be a jumble of misconjugated verbs and insulting idioms. My French, she is not so good,...

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John Keatley: Lighting Strikes Twice

On Monday I pointed to the blog at Redux Pictures as a great stream of visual stimulation that you can have delivered to your RSS reader almost daily.Today, we chat with Seattle-based Redux photographer John Keatley, who photographed for two different magazines a hacker named Dan Kaminsky. You may remember the name -- Kaminsky was the guy who recently...

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My Daily Ritual: A Nice Steaming Cup of Redux

A lot of people start the day with a cup of hot coffee. I prefer to get my caffeine from Diet Mountain Dew, but you can't really hit that before lunch or you look like an addict. (I can quit any time -- I quit seven times last year alone.)So, my morning pick-me-up is to cruise over to the Redux blog. It's run by Myles Ashby, and in it he offers a steady...

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Idea: SB-III Barn Door Mod

I have played around with the LumiQuest Soft Box III enough now that it is one of the few light mods I always pack if I am gonna be shooting people. You don't use it like a normal soft box -- you want it in real close, so it gets softer and is powerful enough to overpower the sun.But I also noticed that one of the things I love about it is that fast...

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Nifty Three-way Flash Bracket at WPPI

Cool little triple flash bracket from Lastolite, the "Triflash," is being shown on the floor of WPPI this week. Being a Bogen Imaging product, I can only think McNally had something to do with this. Not available yet, so we'll have to wait a bit.Looks very useful (and small) for spreading a decent amount of speedlight juice into an umbrella. You can...

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PocketWizard FlexTT5 and MiniTT1: Full Review

PocketWizard had been noticeably quiet recently while the flash remote landscape continued to evolve with new technology. But today they re-set the bar in announcing their new flagship models, the Flex and Mini. And while they do work perfectly well as garden-variety remotes, they bring some ultra-cool capabilities that go well beyond manually synching...

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Pass the Kool-Aid, Please...

Just saw the Feb. 2009 issue of Practical Photography for the first time. It is produced in the UK but has just made it to my local Border's. They did a cover and 14 pages (!) on off-camera speedlight shooting. The mag featured lots of shots with diagrams, gear choices, photos by Strobist readers, a few by yours truly and some way cool BMX mountain...

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Breaking: PocketWizard Begins the Strip Tease

It ain't much, but I am sure it'll be enough to get the speculation started around these parts. More coming Monday, of course. -...

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Winter Treat: Frozen Hummingbirds

(No, not for eating. By the time you pluck and de-bone 'em, there's not that much left, anyway...)__________Okay, so maybe you can't light up Grand Central Station with a few speedlights. But if your subject is two inches long and flaps its wings 50X a second, speedlights rock.For one, you can keep dialing a speedlight down to get insanely fast flash...

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Hanging Loose with Bil Zelman

Around here we sometimes get bogged down in the technical aspects of light. That's okay. This is a niche site and we are not trying to be all things to all people. But balance is important in photography, even in the technical stuff itself. So today, we are going full-bore non-technical by visiting with San Diego-based photographer Bil Zelman. His...

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MVI: Q 'n A

UPDATE: Not meaning to confuse, and judging from the comments, I certainly did: Not really talking about the absolute number of comments, but rather the relative number on different types of posts.__________Without any true metric to understand how posts on Strobist are received, I sometimes revert to judging by the number of comments received on a...

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Controlling Reflections: How They Roll in China

From the comments of the glasses tutorial video, reader Rob Mulligan shares a quick tip from the Orient...__________Says Rob:"When I was in China getting married in 2000 we had a full day (you Chinese readers know what I'm talking about) studio wedding shoot. My father in law had those awful big square "old guy" glasses. The hip young woman photographer rolled out a batch of cool looking frames with no lenses for his family to pick out the best looking ones for him to wear.He looked excellent, and NO reflections!Indeed. And to think I have been...

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Saddled With Extra Work

Sometimes you don't have to go looking for a shoot. Sometimes you get volunteered to do it by your wife. While on vacation. Which is what happened to me while we were in the cloud forest community of Santa Elena a couple of weeks ago.More on this after the jump. But if your name is John Harrington, do not click on the "more" tag. (Click here instead...)__________In...

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Follow the Bouncing Ball for Advice on Lighting Glasses

Quick video today from The Flash Centre on how little movements in your subject can get rid of lighting reflections in glasses. And I totally agree with Chris for "Plan A" as being, "Do you always wear your glasses?"(Hey, it never hurts to ask...)Of course, you can get totally around most reflections by just using broad lighting. But Chris shows very clearly how just having the subject move her head around a little can make a big difference no matter what your lighting direction.Once you start to visualize how the light hits the glasses and how...

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