If you’re the type of person who would judge a book by its cover then you’d probably never buy a copy of this!

Check out the invisible elbow underneath the Aces…

Back when I was first thinking about buying my 40D, I thought about the first lens I wanted to go with it. I considered the EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM, but decided against it due to the relatively high cost. Then, after a couple of months with the EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM I settled upon, I decided I wanted, no, needed the 17-55mm!

The pull of the f/2.8 was just too strong and so last week I took delivery of the lens (and am now looking to re-home my 17-85mm) and it was just how I expected it to be; the fast aperture and IS resulted in an excellent low light performance and the autofocus is blazingly fast.

A couple of aspects which I’d read about, but weren’t expecting were:
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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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