Melanie and I have been friends with Kelly for a long time, as well as Joey. And I knew that I’d be called upon to do some maternity shots of them once we found out they were expecting. They’re good peoples and I would do anything for them, at the very least get them some nice shots of the belly before baby arrives. These were taken just a few weeks before the due date, back in October. Logan was born just a little later than the due date, in early November. I’m working with Kelly to schedule some baby shots of Logan soon!

Over at NikonRumors.com, they have a snippet from the Nikon D3x page that talks about some new levels in the Active D-Lighting feature on the D3 and D3x. These levels were not part of the last D3 upgrade. See the snippet below… you be the judge.

I first came across this cool ring flash adapter while reading an old article about it on strobist.com. It has been in pre-production for a while now and I’ve been anxious to see what the pricing would be. This morning I got an email from Orbis announcing that the Orbis Ring Flash adapter is now available for pre-order. Coming in at $169 (US), it’s not too bad considering the build quality and results in their sample gallery on their site.

One thing that keeps me from wanting to buy now it is that there is no way to mount it to your camera while shooting. They are in development on the Orbis Arm, that will allow you to fix the ring flash to yoru camera… but, that means there will be more cost.

There is another ring flash adapter out there, the Ray Flash, which sells for $300 (US). This attaches to your flash while the flash is on the shoe mount. Makes me wonder how much cheaper the Orbis will be once the “Arm” is figured into the price… maybe $250, or more even? The Orbis looks more promising as it has a larger surface for the light to dispurse. This would mean that the light would be softer than the Ray Flash.

Well, maybe if I feel ambitious enough, and can find the time (shyeah, right)… I can make a DIY ring flash that I’ve been eye-balling for a while now. It looks fairly simple to do, the final outcome is clean looking, and it has a bracket that mounts to the bottom of the camera body.

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been 2 years since I did this assignment. A friend of ours has a handmade jewelry company and she needed some product shots for her web site: www.wanglidesigns.com. Since I needed some good practice, as well as some portfolio samples for commercial work, I did the work pro-bono.

I do remember that she had about 50-60 pieces, and wanted modeled shots as well as studio. Well, it turns out that she had some model friends, so that worked out for the posed shots of the pieces being worn. And, I set up a small rig in my kitchen which consisted of PCV pipe, a white sheet, and two shop lights. In the end, I’m proud of the outcome.

Today, Nikon has announced a new firmware update for their D300 camera, version 1.10.

Along with a bevy of other fixes/improvements, the ones that caught my eye included:

• Focus acquisition performance in dynamic-area AF mode has been improved.
• Focus acquisition performance with contrast-detect AF has been improved.
• Auto white balance performance has been improved.

For a description of changes to the menus included in the update, download the D300 Firmware Update PDF from Nikon from here.

For a complete list of improvements and instructions on updating your D300, follow these links: Windows | Mac