The Annapurnas, Nepal. 1997

Gear is necessary to some extent in photography. You obviously need a camera. Depending on what kind on photography you do, that may be a simple point and shoot or a DSLR system with a number of lenses or something else entirely. For some photographers though, gear seems to be the goal and it’s not uncommon to see photographers carting around enough gear to cover almost any situation when something much simpler would do. I don’t know how it is in other parts of the world but photographers in Taiwan are often great examples of people with too much gear. Here it’s not restricted to photography rather it’s an essential part of any hobby. Looking the part is sometimes more important. For example. a few years ago, a cycling craze swept the island and people were going out and buying expensive carbon fiber road bikes only to walk them up and down hills and not even bother with proper cycling shoes. A year later, they’d probably moved on to other hobbies and spent similar amounts of money.

As a quick reminder, don’t forget to sign up for the free 5 video series ahead of Clarion Call 2011 a 2-day telesummit for photographers taking place in February. The video series is available now. Sign up here.

Photography is a very easy craft in which to buy too much equipment. There’s always another lens we need or another light. Hours spent reading reviews and studying specs on dpreview instead of shooting with what we’ve got. I’d wager for most people, hobbyist and pro both, you’ve probably already got everything you need to shoot 99% of the photographs you want to shoot. For most, there’s absolutely no need to have 6 different lenses especially when most people are using zoom lenses these days.

My kit consists of a grand total of 2 bodies, 3 lenses and 3 speedlights. 2 bodies is necessary for professional work because you need to have a backup with you on the job. If I’m just out shooting for myself though, I’ll usually only carry one. My lenses cover focal lengths from 17mm to 200mm which is all I really need. My wide angle zoom is a 17-40mm f4L. A lot of people ask, why not the 16-35mm f2.8L? Simply because I don’t need it. Most of the time, I’m shooting wide angle work such as landscapes and general scenes that don’t require f2.8. An extra stop is good for low light but in practice, I very rarely need that, and if I do, raising the ISO and using careful processing covers most situations adequately for my needs. My 70-200mm is also an f4 version. Why? Well, go into a store and pick up the f4 and the f2.8 models and do a weight comparison and you’ll get the answer. For travel photography or cultural photography, I’ll often be out from early morning until night in some hot and humid conditions. My 70-200mm f4 gets a lot more use than a f2.8 would simply because it’s relatively lightweight so I don’t mind carrying it all day. I sometimes shoot with a borrowed f2.8 but still find myself often shooting at apertures that give greater DOF. I don’t really shoot sports or anything else where a shallow DOF is necessary so I don’t really need f2.8 most of the time. If I do, I borrow or rent the lens for the day.

Three speedlights might sounds like overkill until you realize that 2 of them are over 10 years old. Although I have crazy red hair, I’m not Syl Arena and so don’t know the mysteries of Canon’s E-TTL system, so for me, using my lights in manual is all I require. Experience always me to dial in the settings on the light, put it in place and 95% of the time get it right first time. The other 5% may require a minor adjustment or two to the power or the flash-to-subject distance but most of the time, I’ll have the lights ready to go very quickly. For this, my old 10 year old speedlights are fine. I do have a 580EXII which I usually use as my key light but almost always shot in manual. It only goes into ETTL mode for when used as on-camera (or arms-length) fill.

A quick mention that Syl Arena’s book on using Canon Speedlites is set to be released next week, so if you haven’t pre-ordered it, do so now.

The key point is that you don’t need a lot of gear to create photographs, even on a professional level. If I have a need for something I don’t own, I rent it or borrow it for the job. If I find myself using needing the same thing repeatedly, then I’ll buy it but in general, the kit I mention above sees me through all my professional and personal work. I do have one other lens I’m considering buying for a specific purpose but it’s not urgent and probably won’t be bought for a while yet. Spend more on developing your skills, your eye and your creative vision than you do on accumulating gear and your photography will show greater improvements.

That was the 354th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

I photographed the above image last Sunday while doing some location scouting for an upcoming project. After posting it online the other day, I had a couple of people ask me how I achieved it. So I’m going to take a leaf from David du Chemin’s book and walk you through a step by step tutorial in the Develop module in Lightroom. The image above is the final version. Let’s start from the original RAW image and walk through the steps.

Before we get into it, I want to remind you about Selina Maitreya’s The View From Here. Selina brings 3 decades of portfolio consultancy experience and wisdom to this MP3 series that’s a must-have for anyone either contemplating becoming a working photographer or professionals looking for a little extra inspiration. Normally $199, it’s available at a 50% discount using the code FOSCFI.

Original image on import at Lightroom default settings.

Above you can see the original image as it looked upon import. This is at Adobe Lightroom’s default settings. It’s important to note that the default setting is not the same thing as the Auto setting in the Basic panel. You can see that straight out of the camera we have good potential to produce a vibrant, colorful seascape.This was shot on a tripod using a remote shutter release with settings of ISO100 f16 and 1/15 second at 24mm focal length. The first step is to go into the lens correction panel that is new in Lightroom 3. I selected a default setting for the particular lens used, as can be seen below.

Lens Correction panel

While out on the beach, the scene I was seeing at the time was reminiscent of the deep, vibrant saturation that Fuji Velvia was known for, so my next step was to use a Velvia preset. I have quite a few, all slightly different, but my favorite by far is the Velvia 100 @ 80 curve preset by X-Equals. To my eye, this preset is the closest one to the look of Velvia. This is just a starting point however and I added some vibrance (+56) to it as well to make the colors a bit richer.

I was pretty happy with the overall look by this point and could actually have stopped here and had a pretty good photograph. Pretty good however was not what I wanted so a few more steps were necessary. First off is to add some general brightening to the rocks in the center and lower half of the image. I should have used some graduated neutral density filters at the time of shooting, however I seem to have lost my set of them so couldn’t put them to use. Instead, I turned to the graduated filter in Lightroom. The screenshots below show what was going on throughout the lower portion of the image.

Graduated filter

Graduated filter settings

That took care of the general brightening, but I want to go in and dodge some specific areas. For this, I turned to the adjustment brush, the settings of which are shown in the screen shot below. There were two main areas I wanted to concentrate on – I’ve left the mask on so you can see the areas I’ve dodged. Both adjustments used the same settings, although I thought at first that they were going to require different settings which is why I’ve edited them with separate brushes.

Adjustment brush settings

The next step is another graduated filter, this time aimed at lightening the foreground some more, with particular emphasis placed on the water. You can see that as well as increasing the brightness of the midtones here, I’ve also added some extra clarity and contrast.

Graduated filter aimed at the foreground water.

Settings for the water grad filter.

Almost done. To finish off, I just want to very slightly decrease the brightness in the lower left corner while at the same time nudging the contrast up a bit. I used a graduated filter again, this time pulled up at a 45 degree angle. You can see the screen shots below for positioning and settings.

Grad filter in the lower left.

Grad filter settings.

And with that, we have our final image. I should point out that there is more than one way to achieve the same result, so don’t think that it must be done following these steps. Below is the final version of this photograph that is ready to be licensed, so if like the look of it, why not order a print of it today?

That was the 259th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Battery Grip From Phottix

A battery grip is an optional accessory that many photographers find to be an indispensable tool. A battery grip gives your camera a more solid feel to it – people with large hands will definitely benefit from the additional size. The grip commonly attaches to the bottom of the camera, with a screw wheel that mates it with the tripod socket on your camera, and some electrical contacts that go into the battery compartment of the camera. You will need to remove the door to the camera’s battery compartment in order for a battery grip to fit.

A battery grip is useful for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they can usually double your camera’s battery capacity as they include the space for a second battery. If you don’t have a second battery, don’t fret, because you can just load one and you’ll be good to go. You just won’t get any extra battery life. When you load two batteries however, you can double the battery life. I can easily shoot all day with two fully charged batteries and still have power to spare at the end of the shoot. In a pinch, you’re also able to use AA batteries in the grip however these don’t carry anywhere near the power or life of a dedicated camera battery and should be kept for emergencies only.

The second key feature of a battery grip is that it provides you with an extra shutter button. Without the grip, if you use your camera in a portrait orientation, you have to contort your hands in order to reach the shutter button on the camera but with a grip, the release falls naturally under your finger. It makes portrait shooting a breeze.

Most battery grips also feature an additional dial that functions in the same manner as the one on the top of the camera. This makes changing settings in portrait orientation much easier. There’s also a separate on/off switch that must be turned on. If you leave it off the grip’s buttons and dials won’t work, although the camera is still able to draw power and the camera itself will work (assuming the camera is switched on that is). Finally, a tripod socket and a strap attachment are to be found on the bottom.

I usually always recommend photographers stick with the manufacturers accessories wherever possible however this is one area where third party makers do a great job. Companies such as Phottix produce battery grips just as good as the big guys but at half the price. As battery grips aren’t cheap, these are worth looking at for the budget conscious.

That was the 254th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Is this a color correct photograph? How do you know?

Some recent hardware and software upgrades to my computer system has meant that I’ve had a buy new monitor calibration tools. I made mention of this on Facebook and it inspired a small discussion. It became apparent to me that there is still a lot of ignorance and misunderstanding about monitor calibration. Some people have told me that as long as the monitor is set at its factory defaults the colors will be okay. Others have said as long as the RGB colorspace of the photograph remains constant from camera to monitor to print, everything will be fine. I previously introduced monitor calibration so let’s revisit some of that and expand upon it a bit.

Monitor calibration is an essential first step in color management. It doesn’t matter what you do later in terms of print profiles and color spaces, without a properly calibrated monitor your photos won’t be color accurate. If you have any plans at all to print your work, or to license it in any way, monitor calibration is a step that you must take. Colors can be described as device dependent, in that what you see as blue (for example) on one monitor might appear as a different shade of blue on another. Calibrating the monitor ensures that the blue will display the same across all calibrated devices.

Each and every monitor is different. Go to a computer store, buy two monitors of the exact same make and model, bring them home, plug them in and they’ll be different. Have a properly calibrated monitor today, and in a few days or weeks, the color will have shifted slightly and it won’t be the same. Despite what some may believe, or wish, the only way you can ensure accurate colors is to routinely calibrate your monitor.

Calibrating a monitor with X-Rite's iOne Display 2

To calibrate your monitor, there are a few things you need to do. First of all, I should emphasize that you cannot accurately calibrate the screen by looking at it. That means you will need to buy some calibration hardware. The two most commonly available options are the Eye One from X-Rite and the Spyder 3 from Datacolor. Once you’ve got that, you’re halfway there. You’ll want to set your white point to 6500K (D65) and gamma to 2.2 and then let the calibration tool do its thing. There’ll be a series of onscreen instructions to follow and the whole process shouldn’t take more than 5-10 minutes. Before you start the process, it’s a good idea to let the screen warm up for a half hour or so. Upon finishing, you can set a reminder period in the software so that you don’t forget to recalibrate. It’s a good idea to get into the habit of regularly recalibrating as colors do shift over time. To get a very rough idea of how accurate your monitor currently is, you should see 20 different shades in the following graphic.

If you can't see all 20 bars you definitely need to calibrate your screen.

That was the 230th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Fuxinggang, Taiwan. A photograph with absolutely no relevance to the post below.

It goes without saying that software plays a big part in photography today and there are a number of different packages you can use to assist you in creating final images that work the way you want them to. Adobe Photoshop is probably the most widely known amongst the general public but there are a lot of other choices you can use as well, whether as alternatives for what you can do in Photoshop, or to further enhance your images and create a particular look and feel. Let’s take a look at a few. Some of the choices below can fit into more than one category depending on your needs.

Before we get into it, I want to remind you about Selina Maitreya’s The View From Here. Selina brings 3 decades of portfolio consultancy experience and wisdom to this MP3 series that’s a must-have for anyone either contemplating becoming a working photographer or professionals looking for a little extra inspiration. Normally $199, it’s available at a 50% discount using the code FOSCFI.

General Image Editing

• Adobe Photoshop CS5 – industry standard photography and design software that does it all.
• Adobe Photoshop Elements – consumer version of Photoshop aimed at hobbyist users.
• Corel Paint Shop Photo Pro X3 – Windows only editing software for the budget conscious.
• iphoto – Mac only photo software.

RAW Converting

• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – Photography-specific software than works as both a RAW converter and a cataloging database.
• Apple Aperture – Mac only Raw editing and management software similar in function to Lightroom
• Capture One – RAW workflow software from Phase One

There are also camera-specific titles such as Canon’s Digital Photo Pro and Nikon’s Capture NX. These only work with cameras from the relevant manufacturer.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

• Extensis Portfolio – cataloging and asset management software
• Expression Media – This DAM software has just been sold by Microsoft to Phase One.

Another from Fuxinggang, Taiwan.

High Dynamic Range – HDR

• Photomatix Pro – If there’s an industry standard for this relatively new area of photography, it’s probably Photomatix Pro.
• Dynamic Photo HDR – A useful alternative to Photomatix that often gives a slightly different look which many prefer.

Noise Reduction

One of the curses of digital photography, particularly at high ISO is digital noise. The following titles all offer different alternatives for the photographer looking to deal with unwanted noise.

• Nik Dfine
• Neat Image
• Imagenonic Noiseware
• Noise Ninja

Plugins

• Imagenomic – portrait, noise and grain plugins

.

• Nik – color effects, black and white conversions, noise, sharpening and more. A comprehensive range of different plugins.
• Topaz – image adjustment, sharpening, masking and more.
• On One – framing, masking, resizing, color correcting and more.

Pricing and Studio Management

• fotoQuote Pro 6 – Industry standard pricing guide for stock and assignment photography. Photoshelter users have this integrated in their accounts.
• Hindsight – An alternative that offers a number of different features.
• ShootQ – Cloud based software designed to automate your studio business.

Slideshow

• Sounslides Plus – easy to use slideshow software created for journalists on a deadline.
• Slideshow Pro – photo and video slideshow media player.

Video

• Final Cut Pro – industry standard video editing suite.
• Adobe Premiere Pro – Adobe’s video editing suite.
• Sony Vegas Pro
  
• Corel Video Studio Pro X3

What have I left out? Got any favorites that should be included? Drop me a note in the comments below.

That was the 222nd Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Looking towards Yangminshan National Park. Two blended exposures.

High dynamic range or HDR photography has been very popular the past few years, with photographers such as Trey Ratcliff and David Nightingale leading the way. I use it from time to time but often find a simple exposure fusion of two differently exposed images works wonders and produces better results than the full HDR / tone mapping procedure. Today, I’m going to run through the steps involved in creating the above photograph. For this I used Lightroom and Photomatix. There are other programs that can be used as well, and I’ll look at them in a future post.

The first step is in the shooting. You need to take two exposures with different settings in order to be able to blend the exposures. The easiest way to do this is simply set your camera’s auto exposure bracketing function, and shoot away. Use of a tripod is highly recommended, however it’s sometimes possible to get acceptable results shooting handheld.

In Lightroom, I select my two images that I want to blend. I have HDRSoft’s Photomatix plugin installed in Lightroom, so I select it in the Export dialog and it will send the two images straight into Photomatix.

Exporting from Lightroom to Photomatix

A small dialog window opens giving me the option of generating an HDR image, blending exposure or opening the files only. I choose the blend exposure option. It includes a note letting you know that a default behavior can be set via the preferences. This would be useful if you always take the same action. The next step asks you to choose the files. Opening from Lightroom will have automatically selected them for you. You have the option to align them in a couple of different ways.

Source files

Options

After you hit OK, the following windows opens. You have five options for processing the final image, including Average and four different Highlights and Shadows Settings – Auto, Adjust (allows manual refinements), 2 Images and Intensive. Choose the one you feel looks best and click Process. The preview here is often a little darker than the final processed version.

Process Window

Once that’s done, you’re pretty much done. The only thing left is to save the image. You may want to re-import it into Lightroom – it doesn’t do so automatically – or Photoshop for some additional touch ups as you normally would. I added a tone curve in Lightroom to get my final photograph.

Looking towards Yangminshan National Park. Two blended exposures.

That was the 204th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

My Photpshelter public homepage

Last month, Photoshelter undertook an upgrade to their system and the services they offered photographers. They simplified the URL structures to put more attention on the photographer’s name, made integration with WordPress and Graph Paper Press themes easier, lowered transaction fees for photographer’s using the built in e-commerce features, enabled automatic submission of sitemaps and allowed photographer’s with free and basic accounts access to customization. They also added two blank custom pages for you to use as you want. For a lot of photographers, these are the most noticeable changes and possibly the most powerful. I’ve chosen to add a page showcasing some of the multimedia work that I’ve recently started creating and a page with a newsletter signup form. Others have used these pages for tearsheets, calendars, video, resumes, pricing and more.

Custom multimedia page

Custom newsletter page

Before we continue, allow me to remind you that professional photographers as well as those who aspire to be shouldn’t miss out on portfolio consultant Selina Maitreya and her audio series The View From Here. It’s available at a 50% discount using the code FOSCFI.

Setting up the custom pages is pretty easy. You don’t really need to know how to write code, but you do need to know where to embed it. As long as you put it in the correct place, it will work nicely for you. I’m going to show you, mostly via screenshots, how to do it. This is at it applies to my Photoshelter site which is integrated with Graph Paper Press and WordPress.

Go to your Photographer Area part of Photoshelter and select Customize from the pull down My Website menu. Choose the Website Pages option as shown below. The area inside the red box is what you are looking for. In this example, it says Active in the Status. The first time you do this it won’t say this.

Customize Pages

Here you can enter a page title and meta description. This is recommended for SEO purposes – anywhere on Photoshelter where you see the green SEO box, it’s a good idea to fill in the field. The Template section below is where you put whatever code you want to appear. As in the following screenshot, it’ll be relatively empty when you first go to make the edit. It’ll probably won’t say exactly what the screenshot below shows, but it will be close. It was only a few days after I created my custom pages that I thought to go back and make this tutorial, and I didn’t want to lose all my changes by starting over, so I’ve approximated a bit. Nonetheless, it’ll say something along the lines of Content Goes Here.

Empty Custom Page

Change the text that’s between the h1 tags to give it a title, and insert your content. In the example below, I’ve inserted the code to display my multimedia page. I use Sounslides Plus for my multimedia work and I’m able to generate this code as part of the license. It’s then simply a matter of copy and paste to embed it in the template.

Embedded Code

Users of Graph Paper Press themes on a WordPress blog may want to regenerate their template at this point. I don’t think it’s strictly necessary, but I find that doing so whenever I make changes to either my cultural photography blog or my Photoshelter archive keeps everything nicely in sync.

Graph Paper Press generator

You’ll then need to take the resulting code and insert it into your Public Page Master Template and Customer Page Master Template. For the header and footer respectively, look in the master template for the line that says . Place your code in this section. Now go to the widget section to the right of the screen and look for the custom page widgets.
Add the following code above the search section in the Header HTML. You’ll find the search section near the bottom of the code. Do this for both the public page and customer page.

Code to add to the template

Once you’ve done that, preview it and once you confirm it’s correct, save the template. Double check in the Customization section that your new page is showing the word Active in green under the Status column and you’re done. You can see below how it will appear to viewers who come to your website.

Custom pages in the pull down menu.

That was the 192nd Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

Phottix Strato 4-in-1 Wireless Trigger

I must have done something right with the recent review of the new Phottix Atlas flash trigger because a courier arrived the other day bearing more Phottix goodies. This time it was the soon-to-be-released Phottix Strato 4 in 1 Wireless Trigger, a new trigger that’s sure to be a hit with wedding and event photographers. The Strato was originally announced during the recent PMA show, but some redesign and more testing mean that it’s only just appearing now.

First, some basic specs but before that I just want to announce that this blog has now received close to 2000 comments. To celebrate, whoever leaves the 2000th comment, which should occur any time now, you will win 5 eBooks of your choice from the Craft&Vision collection. Thanks for all the support.

The Phottix Strato is a 4-channel, 2.4GHx, with a range of 100m+ (330 feet) and syncs at 1/250. Not much different to a number of other offerings, except for one key difference – TTL. The unit features a TTL pass-through, meaning you can use your standard TTL flash on-camera and trigger non-TTL lights off-camera. It also works as a remote shutter for your camera.

The flash attaches via a hot-shoe on the transmitter and/or receiver. You have the option of attaching the transmitter to your camera and using that alone to trigger other lights, or attaching the transmitter and a e/i-TTLflash to your camera, and triggering remote lights. Previously, to trigger remote lights while a TTL flash was on-camera, you’d need them to be all on the same system (ie all Canon or all Nikon), or you’d be reliant on line-of-sight optic slaves. With the Strato, you get the ability to use non-TTL remote units without the need for line-of-sight.

Here are a couple more sample pictures of the unit. I’ll have a more complete review later in the month.

Phottix Strato 4 In 1 Wireless Trigger

Phottix Strato 4 In 1 Wireless Trigger mounted on camera with 580 exII

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New Gear - What Is It?

It seems that I’m always giving advice to people who are buying cameras. In many cases, it’s someone who’s making the transition from point and shoot digicam to DSLR. I’m quite happy to help people when they are getting prepared to buy their new camera. When I think about it though, my advice is always a variation of a single theme and could be boiled down to a couple of sentences. The conversation could then go something like this.

“What camera should I buy?”

“Decide on a budget. Go to the camera store. Look at all the camera kits in your price range, handle them, play with the controls, cycle through the menus. Then buy whichever one feels easiest for you to use”.

And for most people, that all they need. The truth is, at a similar price point, there’s no real difference between any of the offerings no matter whether it’s Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax or anyone else.

For people who already have a DSLR and a collection of accessories, it’s even easier because you’re more-or-less limited to the same manufacturer as what you’ve already got. You could change to another brand, that’s certainly possible, but unless you only have a single camera and one lens, changing makers gets expensive quickly. Not only do you need to change camera bodies but also lenses, flashes and other accessories. Lenses and flashes in particular usually get upgraded to a much longer frequency than a camera body.

Buying a first DSLR is often an expensive commitment and I’ll continue to happily advise people, but I really can’t see the advice changing a whole lot.

This blog has now received almost 2000 comments. If you are the 2000th, you will win your choice of 5 eBooks from the Craft&Vision collection. Thanks for all the support.

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Betty during a studio test of the Phottix Atlas flash trigger

I recently had the opportunity to do some pre-release testing of the newly released Phottix Atlas Wireless Flash Triggers. Steve Peer, CEO of Phottix, is someone I’d known online for a couple of years, and he approached me about doing some testing for them. My first thought after agreeing was that the testing should be videoed, so I called Michael Geier and Peter du Preez from FirstZoom TV and arranged to both use their studio and have them make the video. We tested it in a studio environment with a single model, Betty, as our subject and assistance from colleague Dilip. Subsequent testing was outside on location just after dawn, and we also used them in a lighting workshop I taught at FirstZoom Studios where 9 photographers put them through their paces on 3 different setups. The video of the first test is after the jump. Incidentally, the video was filmed on a Canon 7D.

Since doing the testing, I’ve had the chance to put them through their paces some more, both in a controlled studio environment and on the job. A former US governor and presidential candidate recently visited Taiwan and I was hired by the organizers to photograph a series of portraits of him with some VIP guests. I chose to use the Phottix Atlas Wireless Flash Triggers instead of Pocket Wizards or my usual choice of Elinchrom Skyports and they performed flawlessly. They were also used last weekend in a studio shoot with Michael of FirstZoom and Carrie of My Several Worlds and again, they performed flawlessly. We had a three light setup going for that one and all units fired correctly each time. The photograph on my previous post What’s New In Lightroom 3 opens with an image from that session.

Here is the final set of photos from the testing session.

First Zoom – Phottix – Images by Craig Ferguson

These Phottix Atlas Wireless Flash Triggers are now available for a little over $100. If you’re looking for an alternative to Pocket Wizards but don’t want to risk using the unreliable e-bay triggers, check them out.

Disclaimer – I received 5 pre-release versions of the Phottix Atlas for testing. The test results and conclusions are based on my experiences using the unit.

Charles Verghese, a photographer in Dubai has also done some testing. Check out Part 1 here.