tonight I decided to try to shoot some low key pictures and try some DIY lightning mods. Mostly grids and snoots.

So I put my little setup together to get as much as possible out of my single flash which was on full power. Which means I had several reflectors to soften the hard light from the snooted flash. Basically soft light mens, having a large lightsource close to the onject of interresst, in this case a bottle of wine. Th first reflector was basically a white sheet of paper, the second a 24" reflecto to give the bottle some shape and a gobo to block the bottle from the snoot.

We needed the gobo to avoid the tiny highlight from the flash. As you can see it stll exist, left side and just looks uggly to the nice and large reflections from the reflectors.

To the bottom you see my pattented studio

Cost factor:

black paper: 1$
tape: 2$
holding bottle of wine: 15$
paper reflector: 1$

How could this shoot be improved? No idea, I need to buy stuff to try out what works better. I will try it soon with an umbrella. only 15 days till this month is over.

today I got the possibility to play with a canon 40D and I have to say I'm impressed. It can do 2 things I miss on my Nikon D80

• 6 FPS
• liveview

The 6 FPS is nice to have but not the big deal. The lifeview on the other hand is wounder full and I would love to have it. Its to 95% of my work useless but in case of macros its just wounder full for focusing and so much easier than to use the viewfinder. Specially that you can zoom in and adjust the focus in micro steps.

The reason? With the viewfinder the alignment of your eye counts to 100%, if you shift your eye, it seems that the focus shifts. You don't have the problem with an LCD display, because the angle of view is constant.

Now if you compare the price of the 40D (1200$) to the D80 (900$), if nikon would had such a camera at this time, I would had bought it instead. The newly released D300 has the same features like the 40D, but also cost 1700$ which is way to much.

I also got another rejection of istockphoto, my picture was not in focus...