When I received the bag a couple of things jumped out at me immediately. This bag looks great. Even my 5 year old daughter loved it and still asks about it (the bag was sadly stolen from my car’s trunk along with lots of equipment in it at an assignment). The orange zippers complement the military green perfectly and the finish of the material is excellent. It also comes with extra wax which according to the manual can weather-seal it again after a few years if needed. The stitching, the quality, the attention to detail are all top-notch.

The second thing I noticed right out the box was the plastic buckles and hooks attaching the shoulder strap to the bag. This was a concern, since I knew this bag could get very heavy. It’s a full sized shoulder bag with pockets for a laptop, a tablet plus all other heavy camera gear. I thought these attachments needed to be metal. But after months of using the bag with very heavy equipment, I have yet to encounter any problems with it. Thich is seriously strong plastic. There is also no shoulder pad on the strap but after using it for a while I find the trap comfortable enough and I didn’t miss having a shoulder pad.

The bag can easily hold a full frame system, a body and few full size lenses plus a flash and other accessories, while the back foamed pocket can hold a 15” laptop or any size tablet. I’ve even used it to carry a full frame body with a couple of lenses, plus a micro four thirds system and a mini tripod all in this bag. Needless to say this setup can get very heavy, but the bag was still very comfortable and unlike some other bags holds its form really well even when it’s full.

The two side pockets are expandable through it’s great looking orange zippers, and when fully expanded they can hold a flash, like a Canon 580EX or any other similar flash. The two main front pockets are also expandable, although they are fixed at the bottom. There is a slide pocket at the back which is great for throwing any documents, magazines etc. and there is a luggage strap which is handy when travelling. There is a zippered front slide pocket which is good for more important documents and small front slide pockets can hold cards.

As for the main compartment, there is a zipper on top of the bag which is great for accessing the gear quickly without opening the bag. There are also flaps on the sides of the main compartment to protect the gear from the elements which is a great detail. The bag is weather resistant and I’ve used in heavy rain and snow conditions and haven’t noticed any leaking.

There are two tall dividers in the bag that divide the interior two three sections. I would have liked to see more options for customizing the inside of the bag especially since this bag is very deep and it’s not exactly comforting to stack two shorter lenses on top of each other without support in between. I ended up loading my lenses and flash units in their pouches before putting in the bag which isn’t ideal. But overall, these are minor issues for an otherwise great bag.

Pros:
-Beautifully designed and crafted.
-Top-notch quality.
-Lots of storage pockets and compartments.
-Expandable pockets.

Cons:
-Plastic buckles for the shoulder strap don’t scream confidence (although they worked for as long as I used it)
-Could use more dividers and customization options for the main compartment.

Bottom line:
The Domke Metro Messenger is the best looking and one of the most well crafted bags I have used.

I have an upcoming show starting this Monday, March 24th that runs through April 27th. Spacing Magazine is presenting A Decade’s Dose of Imagery, and is hosted by Urbanspace Gallery. The exhibition features a small collection of photos from the ddoi archive, plus a big wall of all the photos from the 10 years in small thumbnails. Check it out if you’re in town.

Shooting snowflakes are fun but can be challenging. For these shots I used a Panasonic GH3 and a Lumix 100-300mm lens with an old manual 50mm lens attached to it in reverse (face to face using a macro coupler ring). For light I used a small LED light source. The setup looked like this:

To properly see and photograph snowflakes, they need to be lit from a specific angle. I moved the light source around to get the effect I like while triggering the shutter with a remote.

As shown in this video, a very small change in the angle of light will have a dramatic effect.

If you post images anywhere online you might wonder which one of your images are more popular and which ones are more shared or bookmarked. Two of the most common image sharing/reblogging/pinning/bookmarking sites are Pinterest and Tumblr.

Pinterest has a good way to find public pins from a single source. All you need to do is to add /SOURCE/SOURCE_URL after PINTEREST.COM where SOURCE_URL is the address of your website. Here’s an example that shows public pins that were from my site:
http://pinterest.com/source/wvs.topleftpixel.com/

Tumblr doesn’t have a convenient way for searching reblogs from a single source (or at least I haven’t found one). It allows to search for tags, and only one tag at a time. Here’s the example for finding tumblr posts taken from topleftpixel:
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/topleftpixel

If you know of more tips please share them in the comments.

I will continue posting images on the topleftpixel tumblr site from now on, although not a daily basis. It provides larger photos than ddoi allowed which was one of the things I always wanted to change. Bookmark it here: http://tumblr.topleftpixel.com/

On this site, topleftpixel blog, I will be posting articles including tips and tricks for photography, video and post production. Also there will be posts with tutorials and reviews about tools, gadgets and software related to photography, cinematography, video, post production and animation. And here is where I’ll be posting updates about upcoming ddoi related projects (A book or an exhibition might happen this year). Bookmark it here: http://blog.topleftpixel.com/

You can also see a list of all the places you can see my work at http://samjavanrouh.com

Thank you so much for supporting me over the years. I couldn’t have done it without you.

And here is small collection of images posted on ddoi over the years.

Here’s what my lighting setup looked like:

For my key light I wanted to try the new Adorama Flashpoint DG600 Monolight which I was sent a while back to test. I didn’t have a softbox for it so I used my handy Lastolite Trigrip as a diffuser instead. It’s a 300w/s unit which I set to 80% output. For fill I used a Nikon SB-900 flash unit set to 1/32 power through a Lastolite Ezybox softbox. And finally I used the Canon 550EX flash with a snoot set to 1/16 power to create a small and focused light on the backdrop.

Here’s the backdrop light and key light:

And backdrop and fill light, without the key light:

This setup allowed me to shoot at f5.6 so I could keep Mr. Mansbridge sharp but throwing the background out of focus. Shutter speed was at 1/160s which was the maximum sync speed for the DG600.
Overall I was very impressed with the Flashpoint DG600 performance, considering it costs less than half of each of the other two flash units. The recycle time was very fast which allowed me to shoot many frames in sequence without having to wait. And the LED modelling light which can be adjusted indepently is a nice touch. I wish the sync speed would be higher, but for the price and for shoots like this 1/160s is more than enough.

And here’s another shot from the series.

I hope you find this mini tutorial useful.