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Sometimes you need a little extra power when there is nary a monobloc in sight. For one quick solution, follow the bouncing ball bungee as Paul Morton and Darren Stevenson show you how to mount three SB-800’s into a softbox.

This is 3x better than the cheater, which will mount suspend a single SB in a speedring with the CLS window showing, a la the Strobies XS setup.

But remember, three strobes only buys you a stop and a half more power. The first additional flash doubles your power, which adds one more stop. The second one goes halfway to doubling it again, adding another half stop. But put them on 24mm zoom for good coverage and lose the internal baffle and you can definitely get up to full sun-balancing levels at close range.

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Steve Carty as in Party but with a C. I had a great talk with Steve about how he uses his Macs and about photography, seeing as he is a photographer. He is well know in Canada and has spent time working other places such as New York. Obviously more detail in the podcast.

Steve is running a Mac with 2 GB of memory and from what he tells me about the applications he uses, he needs to get 4GB in there. Photoshop along with a good few other apps all at once means that he will notice a huge difference when he has the 4GB.

Sponsor for the Show is Go To Meeting

Using the social media networks such as Twitter, Flickr and the video network of Qik to get the word out there about his photographic work Steve is branding himself and his business, which is a vital thing to do if you are aiming for world domination of your industry. He will let his followers know when he is going to do a shoot through Twitter and then film some of the process and broadcast it directly through Quick. Steve also gets videos up on YouTube of course.

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Steve recommends looking at the work of Jalani Morgan photographer, and Javier Lovera.

Also, Buy the book “POSITIVES” 140 page full colour coffee table book. produced using FSC certified ethically produced paper. printed in Canada. Download the pdf
getpositives@stevecarty.com for details.

CS3 is the preferred software for the photography and he says he may upgrade to CS4 at some point. I was surprised that he doesn’t use either Aperture or Lightroom for sorting out his images, preferring to use Bridge which comes with CS3.

I talk with Steve about the photography business and how it is changing, the effects of events such as the World Trade Center event and the effects of the Micro Stock photography model on traditional photographers. He tells me about the Speck model of selling photos to magazines. I kind of wonder how it is all going to turn out with the down turn in the advertising due to the Worldwide financial crisis. Surely anyone that can keep a business going in these trying times deserves to be successful.

Steve Carty will be amongst the winners as evidenced by his ebullience and go get ‘em attitude to making his photography business work. Personally I really enjoyed my conversation with him and I know you will too. Enjoy the podcast.

Please leave me a comment in the comment section of the post. I am really looking forward to hearing from you. I want to know what you have to say about Photography and the Mac.

Make faces merge into a tree – Here is a tutorial which show you how.

In this podcast I look at the idea of selling illustrations online through micro stock photography sites. One of the things that you really have to look out for is closed path and open paths.

With open paths in an image submitted to sell it will without a doubt be rejected in all of the microstock sites. When I was a CorelDraw user there was a setting with the pencil and with the brush too that actually automatically joined an open path if you took the end of the line close enough to the start of the line. Don’t think it is possible to do that with Adobe Illustrator.

There are times when you want to concentrate on the drawing and not have to think about the technical aspect of joining the ends of a closed shape. So what you do is to just draw away and when you are ready use a couple of plug ins to join all of the open paths in one foul swoop. I tried a few different ways of achieving this but one I found this set of plug ins I haver not looked back. One plug in to find all of the open paths and one to close them all, although that part of the job is done with a script. Just another plug in really with a different  name.

Here is Podcast number 5 and we are featuring Lee Torrens of the Blog Microstock Diaries. Lee is very knowledgeable about the industry although modest of his achievements. Have a listen and you will find some gems of information in there that will help you with working as a microstock contributor.

In it he mentions  Andres Rodriguez who is among the world’s top microstock contributors and has been a full-time microstocker since May 2006. His portfolio contains over 6,000 images, specializing in business, fashion, lifestyle, outdoors, 3D renders and sport.

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I posted here the previous video and it was learning how to shoot and direct a model and the latest video is the part two. How to get the right smiles from the model and  getting the model to freeze the action and eliminate the possibility of blur. Using a second shooter on expensive shoots to get more capital from the shoot. More pictures, with the second shooter getting in and taking shots when you are having some down time with the camera, checking shots or changing lenses or whatever.

Here is the video.

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I always like it when I have one of my illustrations sell, especially when it sells as a vector file. Today I sold and image of some barbed wire. The barbed wire is rusty and gungy looking and maybe I will do a shiny version of the wire at a later date.