The Guardian captures the spirit of adventure with an interesting photo gallery in its travel section called Portraits of adventure.

This Is Spinal Tap

Actually, this one goes to 200. And we’re not talking decibels here, we’re talking millimeters. Zoom throw. The SB900 goes to 200 millimeters. You know, on the back of the SB800, you push the selector button for the little trees to the big trees, and you zoom to 105? Well, the big trees just got bigger.

Now to some folks this may matter as much as a single, silly, fictitious, click on the old amp. (You know, all those other blokes are at 10, and where can you go from there? We can go to eleven!) In other words, it might not matter at all. But for the rest of us who mess around with small strobe units, it matters a lot. The ability to control and shape the output of a small hot shoe flash unit is a big deal. It means you get a longer throw, more concentration of light, and perhaps a bit more of a defined edge between highlights and shadows. I told the folks at Nikon that now that you can zoom a 900 all the way to 200, they should do something jazzy to announce it, like program the unit to go off like a Vegas slot machine every time you hit 200. I don’t think they’re gonna do it.

I’ve also been experimenting a bit with the feature that controls the spread of light right at the source. You can input standard, center weighted and even. I’ve opted for even in the early going, hoping that edge to edge spread of even illumination might be handy for a portrait. To play with this feature, I hired a well known, demanding NY super model…….

Brad! Cut it out!

Actually, my friend Vanessa who is one of the more beautiful ballerinas I have ever worked with, came and helped us out. She is not only a lovely dancer, but she has a face that is right out of 1940’s Hollywood glamour. She is posing here at the Red Hat bistro in Irvington, NY, which is a truly beautiful eatery right on the Hudson River and serves food to match the setting.

We did this really simply. There is a 900 on a boomed, shoot through umbrella (Lastolite all-in-one) camera right, just out of frame. And the background is lit with one 900, gelled with a full CTO, again camera right, flying into the area behind Vanessa and giving it some warm glow. That light is zoomed to 200, and has no diffusion. Another thing I am liking is the filter holder that comes with the unit. It is designed to hold the filters that are embedded with chips that communicate color temp information to the camera. (Example: With the camera in auto white balance, you can take the CTO gel and slip it into this filter holder and slap it on the 900. It will communicate to the camera that the light has been shifted to a tungsten balance and the camera will shift accordingly. Camera must be in auto, and it appears to me the light must be on the hot shoe for this to occur. More on this in the future.)

But the fancy filter holder also functions straight up and simple as, well, a filter holder. Cool! Means my flash units don’t have to all gummed up at that end with scotch tape residue and bits of gaffer anymore.

Here’s our basic set.

(Note: The gold reflector material on the bar is from a 3×3 Lastolite kit has a SB200 close up strobe, again with a full CTO, sitting on it. I experimented briefly with putting a little bar glow off to the side of Vanessa but then decided the room had a daylight feel to it and killed it. It was also creating shadows I ran out of time to wrangle. In the grand tradition of all photographers who are outta quarters and whose location meter is about to expire, I just shut it down. (Uh! Light cause problem. Mongo kill light.)

To make sure the far light saw my SU800 signal I ran the SC29 cord off to the right and we clamped it to a stand.

Then, quickly, to take advantage of Vanessa’s amazing red hair (she basically has never had it cut) framing her face, we moved in a hand held SB800 Brad hand held low, camera right, coming through a Lastolite tri-grip diffuser. Instant beauty light combo.

Funny, even with nice light like this, I don’t think Brad would look as good. WAG on my part.

Shot these with my 200 at f2. The background 900 fills the restaurant with glow, which translates to her hair. Limited depth of field emphasizes that. (I mean, Vanessa would look great even if I was using flash powder.) Both up front lights are dialed down a touch, running around minus one EV, and the background 900, again at 200 mm and throwing light a good distance, is dialed up just a tic. Minimal set up, which was great cause the restaurant was starting to jump and we hadda get going quickly.

After that, we hit my favorite desolate corner in Manhattan with a D700 and an SB900.

We ran against type here, shooting wide but zooming the flash to 200. It hits Vanessa’s face with a street quality of light, and then sharply gradates down her body.

Then I just let the camera drive the train on this, auto white balance under street lamps and the result was really clean. Jeez, I just remember being out there with some sort of funky Ektachrome and a stack up of wratten filters of so many different increments and colors I felt like Dumbledore.

And then of course….the ongoing mystery man. Kman. What is he doing out there? Nefarious things about to occur. No doubt….

This is two SB900 units…on the floor stands that come in the kit. No gels. On the street, camera right, aimed up. White light, tungsten balance in the camera. Find two busted up wood pallets and stand them in front of the lights and let fly……more tk…

Note and news: The 700 and the 900 are hot items right now….got this from Jeff Snyder (jsnyder@adorama.com) the other day…

Good morning-
If you are an NPS Member and have not placed your order for the new
D700 and/or SB900 Speedlight, now is the time. Deliveries will begin
within the next 10 days, and being a member of NPS gets you a priority
delivery.

If you have already placed your order, and have not notified NPS (NPS@nikon.net
), then you should email them, and let them know that you have an
order in with ADORAMA/JEFF SNYDER so that your priority can be entered
into their system.

If you have NOT placed your order yet, there is still time….contact
me as soon as you can.

More and more, prospective clients are searching for imagery on the internet, and, more specifically, Google Images. Yes, the other search engines have image search, but for today, we'll limit this discussion and comparison of capabilities to Google's systems.

How do we compare SEO (that's search engine optimization if you're living in the dark ages) between the industry behemoth Getty (and their ankle-biter brands) with Digital Railroad, PhotoShelter, and, for kicks, our own SEO efforts.

It gets interesting fast.
(Continued after the Jump)
First, let's look at the results from a search for "maryland tobacco farmer":

Notice that Jamd is Getty's consumer media website (About the Image - reported here, 7/11/08). Jamd appears in position #1, #3, and #13.

On that same page, and for the same search, Flickr returns:

Flickr returns images in positions #6, #17, and #20.

This is a remarkable way to leverage the search tool that people are already using. So, how am I doing?

Several years ago, I obtained several URL's for this purpose. One of them is www.Stock-Photography-Research.com. Going there, you can browse though several thousand of my images, but they're not designed for you, the individual, to browse. They're designed in a way to maximize their ability to be returned on the search engines.

Suppose you were working on a travel book on Prague, and were looking for an image of the nightlife there - specifically the Music Park nightclub. A Google Images search would return:

Yes, that would be my image, in position #1.

Of great importance is the contact information that is not only embedded in the metadata of the image, but also added to the bottom of the large version of the image, as seen here:


Of critical importance to any client visibility and marketing service is for online services like PhotoShelter and Digital Railroad to do the same thing. So, how are they doing?

First up, Digital Railroad. Criticised here previously, they're doing well with SEO placement. Maris Berzins, President of Digital Railroad commented "SEO is a key focus area for us. Buyers have told us that they are increasingly using search engines to source photographers and images for licensing. As a result of our efforts and evolving buyer behavior, a growing percentage of traffic to the DRR platform— Member Archives and Marketplace— as well as competitor sites comes from search engines. Here are just a few examples of how DRR is driving buyer traffic to both our member archives and Marketplace." Here's a link showing that over 56,000 images on the DRR system are indexed:


So too, here, is a PhotoShelter 1st place result:


According to Grover Sanschagrin: "Search engine providers have told us that heavily watermarked images provide a 'poor user experience,' and they receive a lower search ranking or are not included in search results at all. They've also told us that larger images receive a higher search ranking.

So, photographers who insist on adding watermarks to their images, and
photographers who are making their images small, and especially
photographers who are doing both, are doing themselves a disservice if their goal is to show up high in search engines."

To that end, you can see how PhotoShelter (above, on the "man fixing his bicycle" search) and Digital Railroad (left) are unobtrusively watermarking their images with information.

DRR's watermark appears with a center- aligned one, while PhotoShelter has the photographer's copyright information, and PhotoShelter ID# in opposite corners.

Here are several #1 results from PhotoShelter:

• eggs on counter (beats Corbis)
• Skateboarder doing wallride (beats Flickr)
• Plane approaching landing strip
• scene from a motel
• man fixing his bicycle
• somewhat crowded beach
• commercial shrimp fishing trawler
• Alghowaizi Tower (returns 9 of the 12 on the 1st page!)

Digital Railroad has respectable results as well - check this link for "beijing Cheering practice" which returns this result, for example:


So, how deep does Google go into them? "well before the end of Q3 our total number of images indexed by Google is expected to well exceed 2.8 million images," said Tom Tinervin Sr. Director of Platform Sales and Support for Digital Railroad, and Sanschagrin reports that "Right at this moment, 41% of all the pages on PhotoShelter's site map are indexed by Google."

Sanschagrin went on to say: "We take search engine optimization very seriously. Over 25% of our traffic on the PhotoShelter Collection originates from search engines, and we monitor the efficacy of our SEO efforts on a daily basis."We've taken several step in order to allow the pages and images for the PhotoShelter Collection to be indexed by automated web spiders. Most importantly, all images on the site can be reached from pages without the use of Javascript or Flash via our photographer and term directories. Many sites that use AJAX to power their sites do not include the information in a manner accessible by search engines.

We also provide summaries of a page in the meta-description header and, when available, include keywords about the image. Our photographer and term index pages include links to RSS and Atom feeds that provide another mechanism for finding images. We provide sitemaps to the major search engines. The sitemaps are updated on an hourly basis to provide pages as quickly as possible to search engines, and by registering our domains with the major search engines we can monitor our site for any problems that may prevent indexing.

In addition, we are working with search engine vendors to prepare other forms of sitemaps that provide more information about our images."Whew, that's a lot of information, but really shows how committed to SEO PhotoShelter is, and DRR's CEO's comments before echo the importance of getting their images to appear in the of Google Images.

So, if you're wondering just what you're shelling out your percentages of each of your sales for, SEO optimization of your images into the Google Images organic search results, and the ongoing efforts of both PhotoShelter and Digital Railroad, are a clear indication that this effort to reach the eyeballs of photo buyers continues.
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Elisabeth Biondi, visuals editor of the New Yorker magazine on photographer Pieter Hugo’s “The Hyena Men of Nigeria:”

‘Some people have said to me that Pieter’s subject is so dramatic that it would be hard to take a bad picture,’ says Biondi, ‘but, you know, a photographer chooses his subjects, and that, too, is an important part of having a great eye. Photographers go where their instinct leads them and then try and work out their fascination for the subject through the photographs they take. That’s what Pieter’s doing but in a kind of extreme way.’ She pauses for a moment. ‘He has a vision and he pursues it relentlessly. He has what it takes.’

Read it (here), Via, Subjectify.

One of the more underrated skills of great photographers.

A new book published in the UK and out here in September:
“The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art” (Palgrave Macmillan, 272 pages, $24.95)
“Willem de Kooning once said of the famed art dealer Leo Castelli: “You could give him two beer cans and he could sell them.”

Read more (here). Via, Gallery Hopper.

Kanye West has joined forces with MTV for the documentary "Choose or Lose & Kanye West Present: Homecoming," the next installment of the "Choose or Lose" campaign which tells the stories of war veterans and the difficulties they face once they return home.

There's an odd co-production credit on Nils Lofgren's new album, "The Loner -- Nils Sings Neil" -- for David Briggs, the famed Neil Young cohort who passed away 1995.

One rapper replaces another atop The Billboard 200 this week, as Nas' untitled Def Jam album dethrones Lil Wayne's Cash Money/Universal set "Tha Carter III." Nas' album sold 187,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, becoming the rapper's fifth No. 1 here.

Pop star Pink has set an Oct. 28 release for her as-yet-untitled fifth album. The LaFace/Zomba set is led by the single "So What," which will hit radio early next month and digital outlets shortly thereafter.

The EUR25,000 prize was the big award given out at the Recontres d'Arles, which wrapped last week.

Rap star DMX has been indicted in Arizona on charges that he used a false identity to try and avoid paying medical expenses incurred during a hospital visit.

In his first interview in months, Dr. Dre says his years-in-the-works album "Detox" should be out before the end of the year. "Everybody is going to love it. In a perfect world, I'm shooting for a November or December release," he told USA Today.

A business management and accounting firm sued Courtney Love for nearly $1 million yesterday (July 22), claiming she failed to pay them a share of profits from the sale of Nirvana's publishing catalog.

I got a chance to play with a new Nikon SB-900 speedlight over the last few days and I gotta say, it's a pretty sweet flash. Long story short: Nikon has just extended their lead in the flash department.

The only drawback I can see is the "perfectly good" status of the current SB-800. And that $500 price tag, of course.

Should you get one? Swap out all of your SB-800s? Be on the lookout for cheap, used SB-800s and add more?

Hit the jump for the Full Monty review, and a few things you might want to consider.
_________

First impression: It is much bigger than the SB-800. Didn't really seem any heavier, but definitely takes up more space. This is a consideration for a couple of reasons. One, cubic inches matter when on the road. Not so much on a single flash basis, but if you are packing half a dozen SB-900s, you could probably cram seven SB-800's in the same space.

Also, the head is a totally new design and size. This means that your current light modifiers may or may not fit the SB-900, depending on their size and/or mounting flexibility.


So here's that big ol' honker of a head. First glance, it looks to be pretty much the biggest speedlight head going, save maybe the Vivitar 285 HV. It looks bigger than an old SB-26, and certainly bigger than an SB-24.

If you can get past the size, they have done some really cool things with the extra space. The 200mm zoom rocks. Not because I am gonna direct flash with my 70-200 racked out. But because it will concentrate the beam, of light into a smaller area when used off-camera.

Why would you care? Because it effectively gives you a more powerful flash when large swaths of light are not needed. Like doing a hard-light, multi-flash portrait outdoors, for example. You usually would not want to light their feet anyway.

Rather than eat up that needless beam angle with a snoot or grid, you can zoom it in, and get some extra f-stop with the more concentrated beam. This translates into more control over the ambient light level (you can get a darker working f-stop at 1/250th, for example) for more choices in your ambient tones.

Of course, you can get a Better Beamer to stick on just about any flash to do this, but it is not built-in.

The Big Head Advantages do not stop there. It's the most sophisticated refractor/reflector system I have ever seen on a flash. They actually modulate the tube with respect to both the front fresnel and the polished, rear reflector. This gives you the ability to shape the internal qualities of the beam, too.

You can choose a normal (slightly concentrated) pattern, an even more concentrated pattern (again, yet more energy to the center for situations described above) or a near-perfectly even light distribution depending on your lighting needs.

That's a real breakthrough in speedlight design, and brings to a (relatively) small package more of the capabilities of an interchangeable-reflector studio strobe. Big props to Nikon for that.


Other advantages that argue for switching are the new CLS interface. You'll get back the time you spend wading through the CLS menus on your master flash. This would not be a reason to swap out, say, four flashes. But it might be good reason to get one to use as a master.

It's basically a manual switch and a wheel dial -- a very fast an intuitive combo for switching setting in very little time. It took a little digging to find the SU-4 mode, which we like because it activates an awesome built-in slave, but I can confirm it is included and does work it's manual-power slaved-flash magic.

I actually used that mode to sync all of the flashes used to make the shots in this post. More on that later.


Big on the advantage list: Recycle time absolutely rocks at 2 seconds with no accessory battery back. Better circuitry uses the same power source -- with much faster recycling. This is a dream with Ni-MH batts, and the fifth-wheel option is no longer needed for fast shooting. For some, this will warrant swapping out their main, on-camera flash.

The accessory SD-9 battery pack walks that already fast recycle time down to about a second at full power. And it can hobble along on just four extra batts if needed, according to the Nikon guys I spoke with.

Interesting point: The power plug on the SD-9 has two extra nubs which means it will not fit other flashes. But the design looks as if the current SD-8-type plug may fit the SB-900. This is important if you are going to be migrating other existing battery packs to the SB-900.


Thankfully, the PC jack is still there. Big ups to Nikon for including the old-school synching, in addition to the fancy-pants CLS stuff.

One other noteworthy change is that the SB-900 swings both ways -- you can go reverse 180 in either direction. This is especially useful, in that whichever way you mount a remote flash you can have the receiving window facing the master light source.

Before, there were situations in which you had to cheat that angle and lose wireless range as a result. Every flash should have this feature, IMO.


In Sync:

1. It comes with a gel holder, which totally rocks. No more tape and/or velcro. And the dome diffuser fits right over the gel holder, allowing both to be used at once. The bar-coded Nikon gel thing is a little gimmicky -- it sets your camera's WB to the "appropriate" setting. The special Nikon gels could easily be duped with a template and some liquid paper. You will not need to re-up with the official Nikon gels ($$) if you do not want to.

2. Goofy, but cool: At full power, the discharge sounds like a blaster from Star Wars ("pew, pew, pew"). Recycling is almost silent. And oh-so-fast.

3. My seven year-old boy loved the battery compartment: Individual cylindrical battery holes -- like loading a revolver.

4. Thermal shut-down protection -- which can be disabled if you are completely stupid. Cool detail: A "thermometer" in the rear display shows you if you are starting to red-line it.


Out of Sync:

1. Five. Hundred. Dollars.

2. The hot shoe is a new, thicker size that will not fit many current accessory shoes. McNally dropped one out of a Justin Clamp, which is a staple lighting tool. (The Nikon guys mentioned that about 5 times this weekend, Joe. They might be sending the black helicopters after you shortly...)

3. The new AS-21 foot must be used because of the new shoe size. Which would be fine, except for that the metal female 1/4 x 20 insert in the AS-19 has been replaced by mere molded plastic in the AS-21. This will be a problem for people who repeatedly use the AS-21 on an umbrella swivel. That's a design whiff that should not have happened.



Decision Time

So, that to do?

My biggest problem is, I absolutely love the SB-800s. IMO, many of the added features are great. But I do not think I can justify switching everything out wholesale. Buying just one might be a very good idea -- I can see many instances when those extra features would make for a more useful single flash.

My other problem: They may well choose to discontinue the SB-800, which would be a crying shame. It's either that or create a whole new production line for the SB-900. The SB-800 is small, powerful and does everything. Many will continue to prefer it to the SB-900, given price difference and the fact that the core functionality is the same. Seriously, what's so wrong with this current flash?

But of course, that's how my grandmother felt about her rotary-dial ATT phone, too. I am officially old now.

I know one thing -- if they do drop the SB-800, the '900 is gonna sell a crapload of SB-600 flashes. Thats a huge price gap which many amateurs will not be able to rationalize. And the smart move for new CLS'ers might be one '900 and a few '600's. Who knows.

The SB-900s are already pre-selling like crazy. So Nikon is clearly doing something right. My hope: SB-800s go out of vogue with the doctors, dentists, and rich soccer moms and they all wind up in the used dept and on Ebay for $200 a pop.

'Cause if that happened, I'd pimp out my lighting bag like McNally's. (Only, he'd have 72 SB-900s by then...)


Lighting These Photos

For the top photo (shown again here) I set the subject flashes on SU-4 slave mode in manual, at 1/128th power. Since they were only a few inches away from each other this would be my limiting factor, even dialed down to 1/128th. A quick pop-and-chimp, and I was adjusted to the aperture that gave me a good exposure from each other's close-in light.

I shot these with a new Nikon D700, BTW. We were absolutely swimming in new toys this weekend at Shoot! The Day in NYC. Awesome little camera, that '700. D3 guts in a D300 body. Expect iPhone 3G-esque wait times for a while if you want one.

Anyway, once I got the best shooting aperture for the flash-to-flash light from the subject flashes, I manually adjusted the other lights to look good at the chosen aperture, which I believe was f/16. I shot at a 250th, to nuke the ambient away. I put the flashes on a shiny black table and shot low, to maximize the reflection.


Other lights were:


• An SB-800 aimed at the background from under the table, using the frosted diffuser for an even gradient.

• Two SB-800's as rim lights, which edge-lights all of the shiny black surfaces.

• An on-camera flash in a Ray Flash adapter, which gave me the specular highlights on the front surfaces.


You Tell Me

Nikon shooters: Are you gonna get one? Are you gonna swap out your SB-800s? Why? Why not?

I'm on the fence, and looking for feedback...

Special notice for Email/RSS subscribers: The second printing of the Strobist DVD Set is back in stock and shipping. (Announcement will go up on the main site next week.)

Just Posted! Our review of the Canon EOS Rebel XS / EOS 1000D. The latest entry-level DSLR from Canon has a lot to live up to and some fierce competition to face so can the baby Rebel make as big an impact on the market as its forebears. And, more importantly, does it deserve to? Read our in-depth review to find out.

I moderated a panel on stock photography last Sunday and met some very talented young photo editors and learned a few things too. We had Leslie dela Vega the Photo Editor at TIME Magazine, Whitney Lawson, Photo Editor at Travel+Leisure, Michael Wichita, Photo Editor from AARP Bulletin and Ryan Schick the Photo Editor at Conde Nast Portfolio.com.

Here’s what I discovered:

Travel + Leisure, loves film. All their regular contributors shoot film so if you’d like to shoot stories for T+L you’d better go buy a film camera (or fake it somehow). Whitney was careful to point out several times that the deep rich blacks achieved in film are very important to the pictures they run. Additionally what separates a good travel photo from a brochure photo is the amount of information that’s in the frame. A brochure photo will take great pains to show the view and the bed in a hotel room, the flower on the nightstand and all the little details that are all perfect plus it’s lit like the land of a thousand suns, so you can’t tell what time of day it is. That’s four different pictures in a travel story.

Tha AARP Bulletin is different then the magazine, they’re more focussed on the issues and not as lifestyle or a slick as the magazine. Michael said that he never gets enough stories pitched from photographers and they pay good money, so that should be incentive for photographers to send him a pitch or two. He also said finding pictures of seniors with different ethnicities is nearly impossible.

Portfolio.com seems to be headed in the right direction. They have a photo editor, they’re buying stock and assigning stories. Ryan told us about how a photographer who’s work he enjoyed pitched a story on high end bone fishing and was given a 5 day assignment. Also, he showed a few of the recent stock purchases they had made and all felt fresh compared to your usual business metaphors.

Time magazine is an industry icon and heavy user of stock in the front a back of book sections of the magazine. It was interesting to hear Leslie talk about how photos get approved at the magazine. She will meet with her section designer and go over the line-up to see what stories they want to find photography for then she’ll go get a handful of images for each one from which the designer will mock up 4-5 approaches. They then take that to discuss and pick the final selection with the Editor. Also, I asked her about stories that were difficult to find stock for that they always encounter. Major issues facing youths like drugs, pregnancy and drinking we’re always hard to find pictures of because all the underage people depicted and the releases they would need from parents. In fact she recently used craigslist.org to find kids with party photos for an underage drinking story and found the perfect frame where someone was passed out face down and surrounded by beer bottles.

Everyone said they had purchased photos from Flickr or amateur photographers from time to time but they kept their standard usage rates because it was not an issue of finding something cheap just finding an image the stock sites didn’t have. Most are using micro stock for those tiny throwaway shots (worst design trend ever) in the front of the book except Whitney who had no idea what micro stock was. Also, everyone seemed very excited about Photoshelter’s stock offering and I know the feeling because if you’ve searched the big stock houses enough you become very familiar with the limitations of their collections so a new player who’s actively adding imagery and photographers to the system is a very welcome addition.

For the first time, fans will have a say in the nomination process for the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards.

Kid Rock has been sentenced to a year's probation and fined $1,000 for his role in a fight at a suburban Atlanta Waffle House last fall.

Petra Marklund's single "Cry for You" describes a woman scorned, but U.S. audiences are feeling just the opposite about the Swedish dance songstress, aka September.

Nas will join the members of political organizations Color of Change and Move On tomorrow (July 23) in delivering a petition to Fox News' New York office.