The only thing worse than watching paint dry is watching flat batteries charging especially since the likely reason why you’re watching them is because you need them charged… Like now.

Gone are the days when rechargeable batteries need to be left replenishing overnight. No longer do you need to wake up in the morning and groan as you realised you forgot to set your batteries on charge.

This is 2008. Our food is fast so why shouldn’t our batteries recharge just as quickly? Well, consumer batteries aren’t quite to the pace of your local burger joint, but they’re certainly catching up.

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This week, I’ve taken delivery of a new Canon Speedlite 430EX flash gun and a Sto-Fen Omni-Bounce flash diffuser. The purpose of the Omni-Bounce is to provide a bare bulb effect. This means that light will be scattered in almost every direction with some reaching your subject after having been reflected off another surface. This ought to provide similar results as bouncing a bare flash, but throwing light directly onto your subject can help to distinguish it from the background as well as provide a catch-light.

Today, I set about testing different flash photo set-ups with my helpful test monkey.

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Recent technological advances seem to be driving towards making consumer-based photography more of a photographer-less, automated affair. I’m not talking about the likes of autofocus or scene-based metering (although I’m sure they both have their naysayers) that still leave the decision of what to have in focus and what remains in the frame up to the photographer.

The two technologies I’m writing about today are supposed to help the photographer by making some of the decisions for him or her by choosing what to focus on and when to capture the scene. These two technologies are face detection and smile detection.

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For years, I’ve been holding off buying a graphics tablet and making do with a mouse to carry out my graphics work. You’ve probably tried editing an image using a mouse at least once in your life and can appreciate it’s not the most natural way to ‘draw’. Since my reintroduction into the world of photography, I’ve found I’m doing lots of post-processing work and only having a mouse at hand was becoming a bit of a chore.

I decided to take the, not so great, leap and purchased a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet (the black, serious, business-like model )

Editing images in Photoshop has never been easier! Granted, I’m still getting used to working with a pen instead of a mouse, but I’m reaping the benefits already. A hands-on tutorial is provided as part of the software bundle

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Today, the air was calm and the early evening sun was offering some great lighting for some more testing of my new 100mm macro lens. Our garden isn’t currently looking particularly exciting at first glance, but on a macro level it’s a completely different situation. With a few flowers coming into bloom, it was an ideal opportunity to get my tripod out and get down low with the vegetation…

When done well, I’ve seen macro photography offering some fantastic perspectives of the world around us, but making little things big wasn’t quite as easy as it seemed. What could be easier than to get up close to something and pressing the shutter release? Well, actually, a lot!

Of the different types of photographs I’ve taken, my first real stint into macro photography was probably the most involving so far for a couple of reasons:

First of all, as well as making subjects appear closer than they really are, a telephoto lens also magnifies any movement of the lens or the subject so good camera support and a reasonably fast shutter speed are essential. Faster shutter speeds usually mean choosing a faster (larger) aperture or increasing the ISO sensitivity at the cost of increased visual noise.

Secondly, faster apertures combined with a telephoto focal length and a subject that’s only a short distance away from the lens result in shallow depth of field. Whilst this can make a photograph appear more dramatic, it means there’s less of your subject in focus. So in order to get more depth of field, a smaller, slower aperture is needed.

So on one hand, more light and faster shutter speeds are required and on the other a smaller aperture is desired for increased depth of field. I think half of the fun of macro photography is in trying to find a balance between the two sets of requirements. If you have it, technology can help help; image stabilisation to reduce camera shake, image sensors with improved light sensitivity to give less noise at higher ISO settings, and ring flash units to ‘freeze’ moving subjects for example.

That said, technology isn’t always better than using what nature provided us with especially when it comes to focussing macro shots. I found that the 100mm Canon lens would sometimes hunt and so I had to position an autofocus point on a subject, focus and then compose the shot. That might have worked well for landscapes, but even the slightest movement can throw focus out and that includes the repositioning after auto-focussing. It didn’t take long for me to switch the autofocus off and I’m glad to report that the Canon lens had a very smooth focussing ring making it much easier to get what I wanted sharp.

Many of the most interesting subjects in our garden are to be found close to ground level so that means getting down and dirty quite literally. Fortunately, my tripod has legs that splay, allowing the camera to get close to the low-level action and the LCD live view feature of the EOS 40D made manual focussing a cleaner affair as I didn’t need to lie down to do it.

The 40D’s mirror lock-up feature helped to reduce the risk of camera shake further by making sure the camera mirror was already flipped up and any movement caused by my finger pressing down on the shutter release button was eliminated by using the short self-timer.

All in all, I had a fun-filled hour and managed to get some shots I was happy with. For such ’small’ photography, it really does make you think a lot!