Complete freedom is the dream of every photographer. We want to go where we want, when we want, with completely portable gear. Cameras have shrunk over the years, from huge Mathew Brady-era view cameras to teeny-tiny pocket digicams. Lighting has gotten portable as well, with in camera and on-camera...
The look of flash photography has been a problem for photographers for decades. As we migrated from huge silver reflectors stuffed with flash bulbs to smaller and more portable electronic flash units, the look of on-camera...
Shooting with powerful studio style flash units has always meant dealing with the dreadful PC sync cord. That horrible little PC sync connection on your camera hasn't changed much in the past 60 years, and it remains the least reliable link in the world of most studio photographers.
When it comes to heavy-duty pro lighting gear, Balcar has long been a name synonymous with high-end studio strobes. This French company has been at the forefront of a number of trends in photography. Started in 1952, Balcar...
Recently I've begun to look at things differently. As a working commercial photographer, much of my work consists of really tack-sharp images. While I've always worked with foreground and background areas that may be out of focus, the...
White Lightning strobes almost single-handedly revolutionized the studio strobe world. With their first coffee-can shaped WL10,000 more than 20 years ago, Paul C. Buff and company brought serious strobe lighting gear to a whole new generation of...
The digital SLR world is a jungle. Just days after Canon announced its earthshaking 11-megapixel, full frame, EOS-1Ds SLR in September of 2002, Kodak blew them out of the water with their 14-megapixel SLR, the DCS 14n. The Kodak digital SLR was not only...
As more and more photographers are going partially or even totally digital, we're all starting to learn the elements that make for a great image. At first we're all wrapped up in pixel count, lens sharpness, zoom range, and battery life. After...
"Digital" is a word that has been thrown about a lot recently. MP3 players have given rise to "digital headphones," drugstore minilabs offer "digital prints," and now we're beginning to see the popularization of "digital lighting." ...
Without a doubt, 1998 was an important year for the digital camera industry. For it was in '98 that the first really good, really usable, really portable digital SLR camera hit the shelves. A joint venture between Japanese camera maker Canon and...