A while back, photoblogopunditographer Thom Hogan asked a sensible question: It’s easy to shoot a photo and email it with a $299 smartphone, so why is it so hard with an $8,000 Nikon D3x? Hogan argues that the camera needs to be redefined to achieve photo/communication convergence. He thinks that’s coming soon. Guess what? I know [...]

With its Pro X2 card, Eye-Fi finally makes good (mostly) on its concept’s Jetsonesque promise: wireless, seamless, and fussless transmission of your pictures from your camera to your computer, as you shoot. The idea’s sheer coolness factor has been landing Eye-Fi cards on geek want lists and garnering rave reviews from techie blogs since the [...]

I can’t believe it took this long for me to notice this: the Image Capture application that comes with Apple’s Macintosh computers got a huge but completely unheralded upgrade in Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard.” Among the feature-bumps: Image Capture’s tethered shooting capabilities are now much more comprehensive. In fact, they’re so beefy that [...]

I’ve finally gotten a chance to use my Orbis flash bagel (previously discussed in parts I, II and III) for some real photography, and guess what? It actually seems to work! As you might recall from parts I, II and III of this series, the Orbiz is a gizmo that attaches to a conventional DC-powered [...]

So in Part I, we learned why I thought the Orbis flash bagel was for Klowns, and in Part II we learned how I de-klowned it. Still unanswered: Why would I, an impecunious and not-very-gear-oriented photographer, want to spend $250 on a fairly specialized lighting gizmo that I myself had to finish? The short answer: [...]

If you’ve read Part I, you’ll recall that I bought an Orbis ring-flash bagel thingie and didn’t think much of it because it jiggled, wobbled, rattled, fell off, and generally made me look and feel like Kliko the Foto Klown. But then I realized I was making a mistake: treating the Orbis as a finished [...]