Beauty Dish - DIY / Lightroom

I followed the instructions of David Tejada (click on his name for the link to his blog) to create my own beauty dish fired by my SB800. The instructions are pretty simple and once one visits Home Depot for the parts, the pictures make more sense. I would not recommend painting the gray gutter part as it makes it harder to glue velco to it. The mirror I left out and used a CD instead. The impact of the mirror cannot be that great and David mentions that as well. For the velco I used some of our broken Hit-A-Way straps (we burn through one a season). Those are probably a little over kill. The first test shots were of my wife which she made me delete and deservedly so. My garden is always willing to model and never complain, so below is one of our many daylilies. Nikon D300, 70-200 2.8, SB800 through DIY beauty dish fired by Nikon's CLS. There is also a little sharpening and color bump in Adobe's Lightroom.

I received Lightroom for Father's Day and find it is the best thing about digital photography (aside from taking a ton of pictures). Wade Heninger was kind enough to do a free Lightroom for starters last week and it helped me really understand the basis of the software (we spoke techie/geek talk). It was made for photographer and is laid out the way a photographer thinks. Photoshop is not. You will see his name on the third line of developers when you open Lightroom.

He now works for SmugMug (another favorite of mine) and passed out new camera straps and hats (with the SmugMug Pro logo of course).

Newport Beach, California

Our family vacation this year was a trip to see my sister then my whole family (21 in all) spent a week in Newport Beach. One day was just for Disneyland and the rest of the time was completely unscheduled.

At least one night is spent at the Balboa Pier and more importantly at the Fun Zone for the family competition of Skee Ball. I posted a 340 this year as I was in the zone. We skipped the Farris wheel this year as we were heading to Disneyland the next day.

My son has the form of his father, great Skee Ball genes.

This was taken off of Newport Pier after getting some ice cream and Hawaiian ice at the Pipeline. There is public parking by the pier so it is always crowded, but as you move away the beaches are pretty open.

I missed the 2009 Oregon Quailifer due to this vacation, but plan to get out to the New Jersey event.