They were getting ready to go out...

...and she looked so dang cute in her little hat, I made Matt sit down while I got out my camera.

This is uh, the D2H with 35 f/2 at f/3.5, holding a Vivitar flash in my left hand and aiming it at the ceiling. Could use a little fill in his eyes, but they were in a hurry and I had to just do something fast. So I went with the quick and easy "hand holding the speed light" route.


I moved in for a few closeups and just barely missed the focus. You have to look closely I guess, but my focus here is on the sleeve instead of her eyes. Sometimes the autofocus gets fooled like that (I’ve learned AF is still better than MF when shooting babies and small animals).

Using a portable DVD player tethered to your DSLR

Just a quick video featuring photographer David Tejada doing an on location portrait shoot for commercial clients. I thought this one was interesting because of the use of a nice cheap portable DVD player tethered to his camera for a larger display.

Erika on Location

Aalst, BELGIUM - Professional photographer Bert Stephani (www.bertstephani.com) shows in this video how to flow from one lighting setup into the next. Watch him create a number of different pictures of model Erika.

For more info and to see the pictures in better quality, please visit www.squeezethelime.com

The Hand Held Strobist

I was feeling guilty for going a few days without taking pictures of anything, so I decided to try a little experiment in using off camera flash in a very portable manner (holding the speedlight in my free hand while shooting). I also wanted to try and get some shots with bokeh, so I used my Nikkor 85mm f/1.8, and set the aperture to wide open (small number end of the aperture scale, f/1.8).

Now, this created a little conflict with using flash, since although it allowed me the narrow DOF (depth of field, or depth of focus), it also made for some over exposed images without judicious manual setting of the flash power. Thankfully this old used Nikon SB-26 speedlight has manual adjustments that you can fine tune down to a third of a stop.

So I put a radio trigger receiver directly to the hot shoe of the speedlight, the radio trigger transceiver on the hot shoe of my camera, and went through the house yesterday evening snapping pictures, holding the speedlight in my left hand, bouncing the flash off the nearest wall (or ceiling).

Model airplane built my late father, hanging in our garage (I was standing on a ladder bouncing the flash off the opposite wall)


Our "squinting Corgi", Zoe, in the kitchen, licking her chops.


My son Matthew, giving me the evil eye while playing Starcraft on his laptop in the living room.


Some colorful clutter on the kitchen countertop.

Getto Macro!

I was browsing some website somewhere reading about reversing rings for using normal lenses to do macro photography. A reversing ring is an adapter that has threads on one end to fit with the filter threads on your lens, and a lens mount on the other end to attach to the body of your camera. Well, I don't have one of those.

So what I did was, I just held my Nikkor 28mm f/2.8 lens backward, tight against my Nikon DSLR (D2h), focusing on a very small broach that once belonged to my mom. The focus ring of the lens doesn't do anything in this situation, btw. You focus by moving the camera back and forth looking through the viewfinder. And the depth of focus is so narrow that very tiny movements make a big difference.

Joe McNally: Da Grip

My son, a new paintball gun, and off camera flash

Strobist info: Single Vivitar 285hv through an umbrella at full power to camera left with bright afternoon sun from camera right in back. Nikon D2H and 35mm f/2D.