I Can See it For You Wholesale

So, I finally gave in to the march of progress by buying a 285HV. As you can tell, I’m a bit ambivalent about it. I’ve been reading and re-reading the “Lighting 101″ section in Strobist, and I’ve ordered quite a bit of extra gear (although, as always, cheaping out wherever possible). However, for now I’m just experimenting with the flash itself and whatever modifiers I can cobble together from bits of paper, etc.

For example, this is a plastic bag diffuser:

And this is with the flash working through a couple pieces of curved office paper (you can dimly see the watermark in the reflection):

I’ve also experimented a bit with off-camera fill flash for birding, which is a real pain in the ass without an assistant:

In the spirit of updating stuff, I just brought my wordpress install current and set up the so client on my iPod. Sweet!

I’ve been more than lax about updating this blog and my website for a while now. There’s quite the laundry list of excuses for this, some of them extremely compelling. My personal favorite entry on this list, though, is that I deleted the applications folder on my laptop (not entirely my fault — an uninstaller went rogue on me), and had quite the time reconstructing my operation system. I sort of had things cobbled together for a few weeks, and then I finally thought to call Apple (I tend to forget that about the wonders of Applecare) and get some replacement discs.

So, I’m going to (hopefully) be updating things around the site, posting more regularly, and generally being a better net-citizen.