Gisle Hannemyr has reviewed all three volumes and 720 pages of Scott Kelby's best-selling series on digital photography, and found them to be disorganised, poorly researched, and confusing. This sentence says it all: This is not a boxed set to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

Click on the link below to read the full length review.

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What is better than a flip-out screen that you get with the new Canon EOS 60D? Well, a detachable screen. And that is what the clever people of the YongNuo Photographic Equipment Company Ltd. has come up with. The unit costs around USD 95, including shipping.

(Search eBay for the YN-LV.)

In addition to real time view on a 2.5 inch colour screen, it can be used as remote shutter release for the following shooting modes: real-time, bulb, continous shooting, and 2 second delay.

It attaches to the body through a pair of cables that are about 1.95 meter long. One cable goes to the camera's remote shutter release (make sure the unit you buy has a plug that is compatible with your camera), the other to the camera's video jack.

Dimensions: 115 mm x 63 mm x 15 mm. Weight: 308 gram.
Resolution: not listed.
Power source source is a rechargeble BL-5C 3.7 volt li-ion battery. The unit is suuplied with an AC charger adapter. Input: 100-240 volt, 50/60 Hz, 0.2 A, output: 5 volt, 1 A.

The gadget is available for the following camera models:

• Canon: 1DIII 1DSII 1DSIII 5DII 40D 50D 60D 450D 500D 550D 1000D G10 G11
• Nikon: D3 D3x D300 D300S D700 D90 D5000 D3000 D3100
• Olympus: E420 E410 E510 E520
• Sony： A300 A330 A350 A700 A900

On the Finnish webshop digitarvike.fi, an angle finder is listed as compatible with Nikon D400 and Nikon D5000s.

(“Sopii mm. Nikonin malleihin” means “Fits Nikon models”.)

If the D400 and D5000s is the models Nikon plan to release at Photokina (the D3100 has already been released), it looks like there will be no upgrade of the D90 this year.

I should add that I have no other source for this. These model names are listed on this Finnish website – that is all. It may be a typo, it may be wishful thinking, it may be some ploy to draw traffic, or it may be a real leak. We blog, time will tell. Watch this space for updates.

Joe McNally is reporting in his blog that he is beta testing PocketWizard TTL for Nikon.

Maybe we shall see it om the shelves before the end of the year?

Nikon today announced that a new version of its free NEF (RAW) conversion software is available for download. Below is a brief summary of the what is new.

Three separate workspaces:

• Browser (sorting, selecting, rating and tagging).
• GeoTag (place photographs on a map and embed geotagging metadata).
• Edit (edit the photograph).

New image editing functions:

• Crop (save only the desired portion of a photo).
• Auto red-Eye (correct the “red-eye” effect that often occurs in photos of people taken with a flash.)
• Straighten (straighten perspective – keystoning).
• Auto-correct chromatic aberrations (correct colour shift caused by chromatic aberration and reduce lateral chromatic aberration).

New movie editing functions:

• Trim (extract only the desired portion of a movie file).
• Save (saves a specified movie frame as a JPEG image with the same pixel count as the original movie frame).

Improved print functions:

• Background color (Select one of four background color options for printing).
• Header/Footer (input text to be used as headers and/or footers with printing).
• Date/time shot (print the date images were captured over or below the images).
• Metadata (select the shooting information to be printed with images from a detailed set of options).

User reports, however, say that the stability problems that many experienced with ViewNX 1.5.2 remains.

I visit a number of photographer's forums and there are some questions that appear much more frequent than others. Will there be a camera that replaces model XYZ? Will that replacement be worth the wait? Is my lens really sharp? Most of those questions do not have a sensible answer - at least not in a chat-forum on the Internet. So below I've collected some of the non-sense answers I'd like to give to these questions:

1. Yes, at one point there will be a new camera announced that will replace the one you are thinking about buying.
2. Yes, you should replace the camera you currently own with the new model. It is a well know fact that a camera stops producing good results as soon as its replacement model is announced.
3. Yes, the quality and creativity of your photography will improve a great deal if you replace some equipment you already own with some other equipment.
4. To check if a lens is sharp, run your finger along its edge. If your finger bleeds, then the lens is really sharp.
5. If your prints are too soft, try printing them on cardboard.
6. Yes, you should only buy Canon lenses for best results on your Canon DSLR. If you want good result with Tamron lenses, you must use a Tamron DSLR.
7. To check your DSLR for noise, take a picture at high ISO. Then download it to your MP3-player and listen carefully.
8. To get a 8x10" view camera turned on, you must talk dirty to it.
9. The "circle of confusion" is a group of photographers, sitting around a table discussing depth of field.

Any more questions requiring answers?

… read comments.

This morning I got a tip from user italy that Nissin had posted a firmware update on their web. I've downloaded the update and installed it on one of my units. However, no bugs seem to be fixed. Click the heading to read the full story.

… read more.

I received a new version of the Nissin Di866 flash today, and have updated my review to reflect the changes from the original version.

… read more.