In my recent posts about the techno wizardry of small hot shoe flashes like my SB800 I mused as to whether most of us are really using their capabilities to the full. As is my usual idle wont I pointed you towards Dave Black’s excellent set of tutorials for more information on how to get [...]

This is a follow up to yesterday’s post with links to a couple of extra excellent resources.
I’ve written before about using small softboxes, snoots, grids etc. with small but powerful hot shoe flashes like my SB800 but how many of you knew that these tiny marvels have more than enough oomph to use with much [...]

Are you getting the most out of the technological wonder that is your TTL hot shoe flash unit? If you’re anything like me the answer is probably no. Heck, after paying fairly heftily for my SB800 for most of the time I use it on manual and tethered to the camera with a bog standard [...]

I think I’ve said before that I’m not particularly subject to technolust and any equipment I buy has to earn its keep - in other words enable me to do something that I just couldn’t do without it. With that in mind, here are two bits of gear that I have found myself lusting after [...]

In yesterday’s post I talked about the use of softboxes with your small hot shoe flash for the ultimate in control of soft diffused lighting. So what if you want hard, undiffused light? Well you could use your flash bare and use the zoom control, if you have it, to tighten the beam. Better still [...]

My Chimera Super Pro Plus XXS 12″x16″ softbox is the one piece of lighting gear that I couldn’t live without. With it I have beautiful soft window light that I can take with me anywhere. I use Nikon equipment so my flash of choice is the SB-800 but you could do the same with, say, [...]

Here is my first shot with my new 60mm Micro-Nikkor.

Seed Ball
Most of my close up plant photography has tended to be very “straight” in its treatment with as much depth of focus as possible so this time I’ve decided to use the lens close to wide open with a narrow depth of field. It’s a [...]

In my earlier post Learn How To Light Anything I wrote about how the best way to learn about lighting was by experimenting and documenting your experiments with test shots.
Of course, I realise that you have to understand how to shape light, direction, diffusion etc. To help with this I have collected some useful links [...]

For someone who does mostly still life photography my lighting set up is about as simple as you can get. Most of my work is done with a Nikon SB800, usually on manual, and most usually inside a Chimera Pro Plus 16″x12″ softbox. Besides that I may use various homemade snoots or grids, either with [...]