What's better than a Photo Basics StrobeLite? A StrobeLite Plus of course! With more and more companies trying to attract the beginner to semi-pro market Westcott is pushing hard with the Photo Basics line to get good quality components into the marketplace. The difference with the Photo Basics line is that they are complete educational packages complete with floor mats to help with placement and instructional DVD's. Read More

If there is one piece of equipment that is the most taken for granted and is often the last big investments a new photographer makes, it's a good tripod and head. When looking at your wish list, you usually see lenses, bodies, flashes, or a myriad of other things on the list well before you see a tripod, let alone a set of legs and a separate head for it. Since I shoot mostly weddings, I don't have the need for a ... Read More

As excited as we are that major lighting companies are bringing out lines of affordable lighting systems, we are really impressed that some of these systems go beyond just being a light and are complete educational packages. Wescott's line products that fall under the Photo Basics brand are a perfect example of this new product positioning. The first Photo Basics kit was the constant light kit that we reviewed last year. This year Wescott has added to the Photo Basics line with ... Read More

For photographers that shoot in RAW one of the biggest problems is not being able to see thumbnails of the images in Windows Explorer or do quick checks of RAW images without having to open them in Lightroom or Photoshop. I have been using dpMagic for over three years now and had thought that the project had completely stalled out. To my surprise they were just getting ready to launch a new version and it's finally been released. Since dpMagic has been ... Read More

All of us here at The Dojo are HUGE fans of products from Think Tank Photo. David and I both wear Modulus Speed Belts with different accessories. My old eBay-special backpack was really beginning to fall apart and has become quite heavy with gear. When you use a backpack and get to a point that you don't trust the straps to stay on, it's well past time for a new bag. After looking around at different options I had decided that I ... Read More

We have talked white balance in the past and have reviewed different products that help you get a good white balance setting. A new product has hit the streets that does the same thing, and since the Dojo is all about helping you to improve your images and doing so at a decent price, we needed to take a look at the new Colorright disc. So let's take a quick look at why we need white balance and if the Colorright disc ... Read More

For almost everything in photography there is usually a simple way to figure out what it is you are trying to accomplish, whether it is figuring out how to light something, what shutter speed to use to stop motion or to create a sense of movement. The hardest thing to do is to figure out how much depth of field will be in your images. While you can sometimes get a preview or you can always do the shoot-chimp-repeat dance until you ... Read More

I am a big fan of doing interesting lighting techniques and have been playing around with using gels to create colored background effects. While using small gels can work pretty good, I have been looking for something that works better, isn't as fragile, and basically was designed for the purpose. What I found was the Lumiquest FX kit. The FX is a complete colored filter system designed specifically to create colored lighting effects. Read More

For the most part I come home from a shoot and dump the images from the CF cards onto the computer and then do my backups. Once in a while I am gone for a weekend without the benefit of a laptop and I want to make sure I have my CF cards backed up every night. For this reason I picked up a Wolverine Flashpac several years ago and have been using it ever since. Since you should always make backups ... Read More

For a lot of people, getting into photography is all about creativity and imagination while trying to find unique ways to express yourself. However, take a look through Flickr and most pictures are boring and bland. One of digital's greatest strengths is that it's simple, fast, easy, automatic, and doesn't require much thought or effort to take a picture with a modern DSLR. While those are digital's greatest strengths, it is also its biggest weakness. When something is too easy to do, ... Read More