Tea Leaves

This week I found the first photographic web site to pique my interest in a long time. For a while now I had been ignoring most of the photographic web because there just wasn’t any content at an appropriate level of maturity. What I mean by that is that most sites are either just a big shopping catalog or a collection of articles providing shallow tutorials on various subjects like how best to put the $5000 digital camera you just bought on a tripod.

So I am happy to share a link to The Strobist, a site that does not suffer from either of these problems. Yes, there is technical dorkitude. Yes, there is advice about things to buy. But by and large the site is dominated by photographic content and content about photography that is actually interesting to read because they cover an area of photographic work that is generally mysterious to we who only dabble. The site is about lighting.
(more…)

I have a drawer in my house. I call it my “photo junk” drawer. Eight or nine years ago, it started out as an empty hanging file drawer where I started to file away the PrintFile slide storage pages that I had been collecting since buying my first real camera. There are a few folders of slides in the drawer, but it is now mostly overrun with small piles of print envelopes and small accessories that I had no use for. So I decided to clean the drawer up.

(more…)

Tonight a lesson in dork shopping. I bought a new Nikon D200 digital SLR last month. We are taking our first vacation in a while, and it seemed like a good excuse to upgrade the picture taking machine since you always take a lot of pictures on trips. After a lot of angst over whether the more expensive body was worth it (the D80 is not much of a downgrade feature-wise) I finally decided to spring for it.
(more…)