Although this Video is created by Canon, this video shows also the manufacturing process at nikon, pentax, etc.

Always wanted to write this post and now I have the time.

Everyone can read about our tools of the trade (cameras, flashes…..) from our website, but there are other tools, which are equally important and I made a small list:

• Good Shoes A lot of you might wonder at this point if you read right. You did, the first and most important thing are good shoes!! The answer is quite simple. If you are working outside and you run around on location the whole day, your feed will begin to hurt,in bad shoes. At that point you rather think about sitting down, than about the lighting and the pose….Another aspect is,that you will run around on location (which may be something like an abandoned building) and you have to think about a lot of things. You think about the camera settings,the lighting, the pose, the location, is the model okay. Often times you have your camera in your hand while doing it. It can happen,that you step on a stone and sprain your ankle in bad shoes. I myself use some pretty hardcore hiking boots (Meindl Vakuum GTX). This gives me the security that I don’t have to think about my feet.They don’t hurt at the end of a 5 hour shoot….
• A Heat It keep the hair out of your face, is ...

A few days ago I bought a new flash, and wrote about it here.

That thing has a flash duration with is slow. It’s okay if you only shoot portraits, or if you’re into animal action photography and by that I mean snails. Anything above that and you will get motion blur, which is a pain.

There are some ways to avoid motion blur even with a battery powered studio flash:

• Buy an Paul C Buff Einstein and a Vagabond Battery Pack, which has a nice flash duration
• Buy a Profoto Pro B-4 which has an even better flash duration. For the money you can also buy a backup camera and a 24-70 2.8 and a 70-200 2.8 (and would probably ´still have some money left)……In other words, if you buy that unit with the heads you will be poor, but happy.

Or you buy any battery powered studio flash you can get your hands on. The more power, the better, but consider that if you want to use it inside, you still have to control that power somehow. If you try to shoot a  flash with the lowest power setting of 100 Watt inside a small studio you are at f16 and may still get problems.

There is something called Supersync or Pocketwizard calls it Hypersync...

I thought about getting a “big” strobe for quite a while now. I use two small flashes (an SB-900 and an Yongnuo YN 560 II) and I will use them in the future. They have their uses, but sometimes you need a bit more power. I always tried to work at 1/4 of the power of the SB-900. Anything more and you risk overheating that thing, which can be a pain, especially in the middle of a session (occurred more than once). If you have to stop the whole shooting for a few minutes till the flash is cooled down, it isn’t very professional. Another big thing is, if you wan to use big as light modifiers, you can do it, look at Joe McNally, just use Sb-800/900/910 and you are golden (price around 900-1200€ and you have the additional costs of a tri-flash bracket and you need special light modifiers that allow the use for that bracket). You get the drift, you can use small strobe, it just isn’t practically at a certain level, unless you shoot TTL, in which case you have to buy the small flashes because there is no strobe that is capable of TTL. It will get expensive pretty fast...

OK yesterday Adobe released the first Beta version of Lightroom 5. You can download it via the Adobe Labs Pages (you’ll find the Link below this article). I need to mention this is a beta and may not be used in a productive enviroment. There is always the danger of losing data. Be careful although Adobe is famous for releasing good products even in a beta. You also should notice, that there is a possibility that Adobe may remove or add features during the beta.

What’s better in LR5 than in LR 4.4. Some of the new keyfeatures you can find here, I am still testing and looking what’s changing for me, or if I stay with LR 4.4.Was macht das neue Lightroom denn nun besser als 4.4. Nun einige wichtige Funktionen möchte ich hier kurz aufzeigen, ich bin selber noch am testen schauen was sich für mich verändert.

1. Fullscreen pictures – yeah many pictureviewers and raw-editors already have this function. Press “F” and you’ll get a look on a fullscreenversion of your picture.
2. Advanced Healing Brush – you may already work with the Spotremovaltool, until now you were able to remove dots in diferent sizes, Adobe enhanced this feature with a brush, you can now paint over the area you want to hea...