a Carrige Ride in Palma by Paul Holmes

Written by T. Michael Testi

 

The new Ray Flash from ExpoImaging is a unique adapter for your hot-shoe flash unit that is designed to replicate the lighting effect that produced by traditional and much more expensive studio ring flash units. The Ray Flash was built to be lightweight and to be powered by your existing hot-shoe unit, it contains no heavy electronics.

What is a ring flash? First invented in 1952 by Lester A. Dine, it was originally used in dental photography to pinpoint light into a patient's mouth so that a clear picture of patents teeth could be made. In the 1970's, it was found to have other photographic benefits and took off in other genres.

The device itself is a circular photographic flash that fits around the lens of a camera. It is meant to provide even illumination on the subject, and is effective in reducing the number of shadows that can be produced by traditional flashes. In many ways, it works like a soft box in that it spreads the light from many angles and softens the shadows. It is now used in many different areas of photography, especially portrait and fashion photography.

The way the Ray Flash works is through little channels that direct the light from the flash around

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Last year, my wife bought me a Nintendo DS with the hopes of using it as a digital sketch book. It's been sitting in the box since December, but I finally got all the necessary software and got it running last week.

Here are my first feeble attempts to paint on the thing. I have one thing to say...it ain't a Cintiq! The 2" screen, two brush choices (soft-round & hard-round), no undo function, and no selection tools are a long way from Photoshop CS3. But stripping all the bells and whistles away from the digital painting experience is quite humbling and darn good practice.

I'm going on a trip to Italy with my family soon and I'm taking it with me. Hopefully I'll have a few sketches to post when I get back. (And hopefully they'll be better than these!)

Boris Our Family Cat by Larry Davidson

One of the best and easiest to use tools for digital photos is the cropping tools, which cuts a desired section out of an image, trimming off unwanted parts (at the edges).  Using Picasa, cropping is easy. In the editing view, click Crop. There are three default sizes(in cm  10 x 15, 13 x 18, and 20 x 25). The fourth option, Manual, is the one I use most, it allow you to click a point in the shot and the drag the mouse pointer to selection the portion that you want to crop. The rest of the photo will go grey. Click Preview to see the crop. If you like it, click Apply; otherwise click Reset and try again.

Why a cropping tool is so good? It allows you to improve the composition of your photo. Most digital cameras now do a wonderful job of exposure and focus, but none as yet include a magic button to make your image interesting. That is in my opinion now the biggest difference between a mediocre photographer and a great one. There is plenty of advice on the web on the basics of good composition.  Sometimes you do need to use your judgement and not follow the rules blindly, for example I left the horizon in the middle of my final crop, because there were enough shapes and lines to draw the viewers

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Should you buy the Leica M8? That all depends on who you are, what you are trying to shoot, and how much money you have in your pocket. For the person who has $10,000 in Leica lenses at home, doesn't see the price of an M8 as an obstacle, and just wants to have a digital camera to use them on, the M8 is the best of your two choices (the other being to buy a used Epson R-D1) and your only choice if you want a new factory-warranty camera. If you are a less wealthy photographer who is dedicated to digital, but longs to have a digital RF, I would probably suggest the used R-D1 route. If you are the kind of person who cannot imageine spending $5400 on a camera that was not perfect in every way, you should probably keep walking. I'm not sure where you will end up (Canon and Nikon have their own issues even at that price point), but it sure won't be here in M8-land

Since the SLR revolution of the 1970's, the Leica M series has always been about something other than cramming the most gadgets and features in a camera. Buying a Leica M is a lot like buying a car such as a Lotus Elise. The Elise and a Lexus GS both start at around $45,000. With the Lexus, you get a fine performing car with all of the best creature comforts and reliability of a Japanese made...

The Rebel XSi seems to be a combination of the Rebel XTi and the EOS 40D, with a few new features of its own thrown into the mix. It has the basic form of the XTi with the same shutter speed range, the same flash sync speed and the same ISO range. However it also has features of the EOS 40D such as Live View, Highlight Tone Priority, High ISO Noise reduction, Spot metering, a 14-bit A/D converter and viewfinder ISO display.

The performance is perhaps closer to the 40D than to the XTi. Resolution is measurably higher, though the difference in practice is quite small. Noise appears to be a little higher, perhaps because of the smaller pixels.

Overall the XSi is an improvement over the XTi, though more in terms of features than image quality, which is good in both cameras. Upgrading from the XTi to the XSi makes sense if you need things like spot metering, a larger LCD and Live View, but if you're looking for a noticeable leap in image quality, I don't think you'll see it. If you want a significant increase in image quality, you'd probably need to look at a full frame DSLR like the Canon EOS 5D

Bob Atkins

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