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’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 [...]

The Orbis is a photography accessory that slides onto a standard shoe-mount flash unit and allows it to produce a “ring-light” effect. There, that should placate the search-engine robots — which, I’m told, like to have all a story’s key words crammed into its first paragraph. Now I’ll try again, for humans: The Orbis is [...]

Joe McNally, The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light from Small Flashes. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, an imprint of Peachpit, a division of Pearson Education, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0-321-58014-6. Paperbound, 302 pages including index. Cover price: US$39.99. Barnes & Noble | Amazon Professional photographers generally are great talkers; they have to be, since professional photography is fundamentally [...]