Snazzy!

As you can see, I got my Nikon SB400 in the mail, and I was jumping around like a little boy. I told my wife that day that I needed a man in shorts to visit me, and she just looked at me like I said something homosexual. Wonder why. Anyway, as you can see, the photos above were taken with the flash bouncing off the ceiling, and every shot looks like a well-lit room, despite the fact the fact that it was dusk and the house was pretty dark. It's so awesome! In addition, I can now use my 18-55 lens indoors, because in the past I just didn't have enough light to make any good shots. I took some more but I'll upload them later. What a great speedlight. I even played with the continuous flash, and boy, I'm a happy little boy.

For those who might have noticed, Alex has bandages all over his face because he's got this obssessive habit of scratching his healing wounds, so they never seem to get better. We tried bandaging his fingers, but so far the band-aids seem to be doing the trick. Of course, they went out today and all the neighbors were telling him what cool bandaids he had, or in parent-speak, "What the hell do you let your kid do to himself?" I actually forgot about his face and took him to the playground - and he got a few looks. But don't worry, it's still the same old boy.

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Finishing up another wedding, doing the compression right now so I have a slight excuse to be goofing around. I've been falling a little behind - just seems like there's never enough time in the day, does it?

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Bundled up a lot of old toys to be sold on ebay. Seems like a waste to just toss them, and donating them is alright, I suppose. The little bit of extra change will help us, with all the phantom medical bills and all. Turns out that I still owe about 700 bucks on my tooth extraction, and this isn't including the 200 plus that I initially paid before the whole thing. I just the insurance company covered 90 percent, but there was a cap on the limit. So it's another chunk of change we don't have. Sigh. And then some of the medical bills that I thought was done with got up there again. We're making our premiums awfully fast this year.

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Well, gotta go say hi to mom. Will post more pics later.

Mmm... Speedlight.

My wife moaned when she heard about this and tried very, very hard not to kill me. I was pretty much over the hardware acquistion project, whereby I buy lots and lots of computers, gadgets and video equipment to fulfill my dream of becoming a living media center - a self-sufficient photography, video, and publishing studio.

Anyway, read up on the Nikon SB400, a smallish easy going speedlight that isn't your full fledged speedlight, but certainly one that meets most of my needs. Because I'm home so much, and so much of my shots of the kids are indoors, and also because I live in a state whereby sunlight is in short demand, a speedlight like that would be so great.

It costs about a hundred, which isn't small change, but it certainly isn't too out of reach. I should be coming into some wedding money soon - maybe if I do my gigolo dance and shake my ass a little, my wife will consider it. It's funny though, reading on all the photography forums, a lot of the photographers always have the wife factor. One of them had the same dilemna, and after some forum help, the guy said, "My wife curseth thee!"

The rollover photos on this review shows what difference using a speedlight can do: I certainly didn't know.