First Ultra-Telephoto lens that offers a fast aperture of F2.8 at 500mm First ever telephoto lens that has f2.8 at 500mm. It is also very vary big.

A Flash of Inspiration
It’s spring, and that means “Athletes of the Year” photos for many newspaper sports shooters. We get that same assignment every year, and with it the challenge to make the photos look new and different. Naples Daily News shooter Greg Kahn came up with a novel way to capture the movement of his subjects this year by using an inexpensive continuous light source that can be found at any Home Depot — rope lights. Check out his blog post on how he did it, and be sure to click to see to the paper’s sweet-lookin’ final layout.(Thanks to James for the heads-up in the comments!)-30-This is a full RSS feed post from Strobist.com, the off-camera flash blog. This month’s feeds are sponsored by:

Win a free trip to Photokina with Think Tank Photo
This years Photokina is held in Cologne on September 22-27 and if you are a photographer, you are eligible to enter Think Tank Photo’s drawing for free round-trip airfare, hotel, spending money, and exhibition passes to photokina, the world’s largest photo and imaging trade fair. Join over 160,000 visitors from 156 countries in exploring 1,600 exhibitors of cutting edge imaging products from almost 50 countries.

RAID in the Size of a Single 2.5″ Hard Drive - Sans Digital Compact Flash Enclosures
Sans Digital is expanding its Storage Gadget lines by introducing a new concept to the storage market: Compact Flash (CF) enclosures. The CompactSTOR CS1T and CompactRAID CR2T convert the widely popular Compact Flash card to a single 2.5 SATA hard drive storage device. The CS1T houses one Compact Flash card, while the CR2T supports spanning and RAID 1 (mirroring) by housing up to two Compact Flash cards.

And Now, a Few Words From the Tourist Standing Next to You
Off-camera flash as High Art: Julius von Bismark, an artist in Berlin, is playing with snap-happy tourists by injecting words into their photos.He cut a hole in the back of an old film camera and stuck a slaved flash into it. By writing words onto transparent plastic and sliding the sheet into a slot near the film plane, the whole rig now works backwards and becomes a projector. By leaving the shutter open and slaving the rear flash, he can now project those words onto the subject of someone else’s photo when their flash trips his flash.His slave setup is a little clunky (kinda Steam Punk-ish, actually). But a standalone SB-800 also would work great — without the camera-topping project box slave.He’s in it for the social commentary, but I can’t help thinking how much fun this would be for sophomoric jokes, too. You know, if you were that kind of person…(Thanks to everyone who sent this in — www.JuliusvonBismark.com, via Gizmodo.)-30-This is a full RSS feed post from Strobist.com, the off-camera flash blog. This month’s feeds are sponsored by:

Nikon introduces upgraded Capture NX 2 photo editing software
Nikon today introduced the latest generation of its robust image processing and editing software, Capture NX 2, which provides photography enthusiasts with a suite of powerful tools and a simple, visual operation to streamline photo editing. Capture NX 2 utilizes revolutionary U Point technology to give photographers access to powerful Control Points that enhance color, exposure, and other image quality settings quickly and easily.

DINFOS Pt. 2: Flash in the Pan
Peer pressure can a dangerous thing.Normally, I am a manual flash kind of guy. But you hang out long enough with McNally and a bunch of CLS’ing DINFOS shooters, you start to feel the itch to experiment a little…So, here we were earlier this month in the woods learning all this lighting stuff from McNally. All of the DINFOS folks are firing away like Joe with their lights on full CLS auto, and I am sticking with my manual techniques. The time seemed as good as any to experiment, so I grabbed one of the Combat Camera folks who was dressed for he occasion, and asked if I could do a shot while moving through the woods. CLS takes a lot of the head-scratching out of this kind of shot and really makes it pretty easy. All you really need to remember is to choose your shutter speed based on the amount of pan you want while walking through the woods.For this look, I chose 1/15th of a second simply because it looked best on the chimp screen after a few quick test shots. Set at ISO 200, that shutter speed gave me an aperture of f/16 for saturated color in the woods.I set the on-camera flash (an SB-800) to act as a Master, and pointed it towards the remote flash. That flash would be moving along with Robert, my subject, as it was being held by a voice-activated light stand named Matt. The flash’s exposure worked fine on straight TTL, but it would also have been very easy to do on manual. You just choose a flash-to-subject distance, and dial in a power setting that gives you f/16 at ISO 200. As long as you do not vary that distance too much, you’ll be fine.The trick to positioning is to move that flash around a little past a straight profile shot — slightly rim-lit. Looks a lot better that way. I have exaggerated the diagram a bit to make the point.Everything moves together — subject, photographer and light. You just follow along and shoot, with the strobe helping to add both light and a sharp anchor to your pan. I chose this one because a tree trunk was behind his head which made him pop even more. You do not even have to look through the camera with a wide-angle lens. Just zone focus, and aim from the hip. That way, you can keep yourself form running into a tree. Here is a setup shot — basically a one-light studio on wheels:The cool thing this is is just how quick and easy it was to set up. We did just one trip down and one trip back. Just 30 yards or so each way. Soup to nuts, it was about two minutes — and we had several good shots to choose from.Honestly, it’s so much easier than it might look at first that it is almost criminal. This is a technique I have been tumbling around in my mind for quite a while now. As you can see at left, there’s no reason your VAL would have to actually hold a flash, either. This way their concentration could lay elsewhere. Like not running into a tree.You could even work up a two-light setup for road bikers or runners, too. If you were shooting manual, you’d just want to keep those distances relatively constant. Using the added light helps to shape and define your subject in a moving situation. And as you can see, it will also make the critical parts of your pan shot are tack sharp. Just remember your flash balancing basics: Shooting into the brightest part of the ambient helps to avoid ghosting, and gives the most control over your range of ambient-to-flash ratios.This is a full RSS feed post from Strobist.com, the off-camera flash blog. This month’s feeds are sponsored by:

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Digital News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.