Home for the Holidays

I am very thankful to not be traveling this Christmas season. And as in years past, I won't be posting between now and the new year, either. What I do hope to be doing is spending as much time as possible with family and friends.In the meantime, hit the jump for our annual attempt at a Year in Review. And this year we have a little twist… Read more...

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Rosco Plusgreen: The Magic Sunset Filter

Druids may get all festive around Winter Solstice, but you can bet your typical cubicle worker is equally pissed off. That's because most of them arrive at work barely after sunrise, and don't leave until after dark. For that same reason, it is also when architectural photographers are most willing to go out and freeze their nu brave the cold weather...

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Drew Gardner's Brown Bag Video Series

Long-time readers of this site are already familiar with London-based commercial and advertising photographer Drew Gardner. Many of you will be happy to know that he has just released a commercial series of walk-thru videos of over a dozen of his more notable shoots, broken into McDonald's lunch-priced segments. I have always enjoyed Drew's lighting, but even more so his creativity and imagination when approaching a shoot. And frequently, that ability to source a location or bootstrap say, an elephant or water buffalo as a prop for a shoot is more...

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First Grope: Nikon SB-700

When Nikon first announced their new SB-700 speedlight three months ago, I went down the feature list and immediately took notice of one thing: The lack of a PC jack. But I recently had a chance to talk to some folks from Nikon. And they're all like, Dave, you're putting the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble. It's an evolution of the SB-600, not the...

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A Pop in Page Views

Congrats to Strobist reader Edward Horsford for making the front page of the internet. Yahoo chose his photo of a water balloon (without the balloon part) as a lede image for their curated gallery of high-speed captures.Cool tidbit: More than a third of the images in the collection were by Strobist readers. It was the first time I have seen Yahoo leveraging...

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Profoto: The Light Shaping Retina Searing Company

Remember the guy who zapped words into German tourists' photos with his DIY flash projector gun?Suffice to say when you swap out the speedlight for 4800 watt-seconds worth of Profoto Pro-7B, things can get a little more interesting.(Tip via Joel)-...

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On Assignment: Brian England

I shot a job last month for a story on the downstream impact of the new Jobs Bill (as in small business, not Steve.) Local auto shop owner Brian England, above, was one of the voices in the story.It's your basic talking head. And just about anything would suffice for this kind of story in the local biz publication. So I always see these kinds of job...

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Greetings, Newbs

Are you just stumbling in after learning about us in the New York Times gift guide for photographers? If so, thanks for dropping by. You'll probably want to start here.-...

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In Which a Commenter Gets His Soapbox

Today, a peek inside the sausage factory that is this blog.Every blogger has to deal with this question at some point: What do you do with commenters who attempt to use your site as a large platform on which to go after a third party?To my view, it is the equivalent of a guest who has had too much to drink standing up in your living room and uncorking...

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Hangin' Eight, with Dave Black

Editor's note: You're gonna wanna watch this one in 720p, full-screen. So do yourself a favor and res-up now, to let it start loading in while you read.__________What do you get when you slap together 8 SB-900's, an SU-800, one RadioPopper transmitter, two receivers, two FourSquares and two sets of Michael Bass fiber optic bundles?Well, you get $5,000.00 lighter in the wallet, for one thing. But you also get a (32) AA-battery-powered monoblock with a 2-second recycle that can reach out and touch someone -- in TTL and/or via high-speed sync -- at...

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It's DIY Thursday

Fancy yourself a bit of a … modder?Well, we gots not one but two DIY tips today, courtesy intrepid readers. Hit the jump to learn both how to add a nipple (not my term, mind you) to your SB-800 and how to make a very cool speedlight-to-AlienBees adapter. Read more...

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Matthew Jordan Smith Gives Tyra a Ring

We normally think of ring flash as having that signature, wrap-around shadow on the background. Or, increasingly, as a fill light. But it takes on a completely different look if you use it as a key and take everything else away -- background and any reflected light.(Oh, and it helps if your subject is Tyra Banks, too.)Matthew Jordan Smith explains in the first of an upcoming BTS series for Profoto. And not to just bang the Profoto drum here, either. We are always looking for the other educational BTS vids that the other flash manufacturers should...

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