Finished my outdoor shoot yesterday, had a blast and learned to adjust to the fast changing sunlight.  I had my entire lighting kit with me during the shoot but ended up using only one light attached either to a beauty dish or unmodified.  This was my favorite shot of the session which is also an unplanned spontaneous shot shot right before dinner.

Beauty dish 3 feet away camera right to create Rembrandt lighting.  Post processed with Lightroom.

This month, I’ll be experimenting with different ways to compose and light products.  The goal ultimately is to make products interesting and appealing to the end user.  Here I played with using a one light vs two light setup.

I finally finished my beauty dish.  I learned quite a bit about how to buy the correct screws and how to size pre-existing screws.  The light output from the beauty dish is pretty good.  Once the paint smell wears off from the dish, I’ll test it on the family.

Walking around the neighborhood looking for interesting colors and shapes.

After the party last night, the Grand Duke was looking for the princess who lost her glass slippers.

In the last 4 months, I have encountered two defective DSLR cameras.  The first was a Nikon D40 that had a defective shutter mechanism straight out of the box.  My very own Canon Rebel T1i was 49 weeks out of the box before it refused to take another picture.  Just before its premature death, it captured some evidence as to what the problem was.  The LCD panel displayed Err 20 and could not be reset after spending 20 minutes on the phone with the Canon tech support.  I was actually quite pleasantly surprised by my interaction with the Canon service center.  First off, they are located in the US and I only had to wait on hold for 8 minutes.  The service tech was very customer oriented and went through a short list of procedures before admitting that he had no idea what err 20 meant and that I should send the camera back to the factory service center.  He even asked me what the internet has been saying about this error.

In looking at the last few images, it looks like something got stuck in front of the CMOS imager.  This could either be the mirror or the focal plane shutter.  The Rebel EOS series of camera has shutters that can withstand up to 100k actuations.  After close to 1 year of ownership, I put on between 30-40k.  Based on the numbers, a typical DSLR camera would have a 2 year life expectancy, which is much less than my 4 year old Sony.  Apparently focal plane shutters are expensive to make and easy to break.  Not sure why with digital sensors, they have not gone away from the SLR and focal plane shutters which are costly, bulky, noisy, and unreliable.  After doing some research Samsung has come out with the NX10 which has no SLR but a LCD attached to the eye piece.  Most of the P&S cameras use an electronic “shutter.”  Obviously the technology is there, don’t know why Nikon or Canon have not made the leap.