7 PHOTO FRAME

Professor Kobre's Lightscoop, Warm Version Bounce Flash Device, Universal model, fits over the Pop-up Flash of most SLR Cameras (American Photo Editor's Choice 2008)

Professor Kobre's Lightscoop, a bounce device for the pop-up flash on most 35mm DSLRs with interchangable lenses, slips over your camera's pop-up flash and allows you to bounce the flash like professionals bounce an expensive external flash. The Lightscoop is the inexpensive answer to natural-looking bounce flash and digital photography lighting. (Even professionals like it for casual shooting!) No more harsh shadows, bleached faces, red-eye, or cave effect from direct pop-up flash! Reviewers tell the story: "Bounce pop-up flash by snapping a Lightscoop over it, a little piece of plastic genius," Popular Photography, March 2008 "...just as if you had used one of those reflector umbrellas that the pros use," David Pogue, New York Times, "Circuits." -- "It slips into your camera's hot shoe, fits right over the pop up flash, and redirects the camera's flash to a ceiling or wall. That's bounce, baby, bounce... as essential as a lens cap," DingbatMag, the monthly review of Cool Tools "Your pop-up flash doesn't have to suck... I was stunned by the difference," Terry White's Tech Blog The Warming Lightscoop has a gold-tinted mirror. Professionals often use a filter over the flash to achieve a warm effect when shooting portraits. Since filtering a pop-up flash reduces its power, the gold-tinted mirror warms yet still properly exposes pictures. Compatible cameras Canon 5D, 7D, 10D, 20D, 30D, 40D, 50D,60D, Rebel

It was a dark and stormy night (actually evening) and here in the Niagara area of Southern Ontario we were still getting rain from the western limits of the storm system that was originally a hurricane sweeping the North American Eastern Seaboard. Purely as an exercise in GIMP, the Linux origin image editor, I decided to do a photo montage, just to get a feel for it, not as an artistic exercise. I took three images: one of a blue-hour shot of the QEW (highway) here in Grimsby, one of an antique car from a car show held in St Catharines a few months ago, and one of a friend and photo colleague (lalique7 on flickr) shooting a flower. I used the QEW blue hour as the background, and then cut out the appropriate sections of the other images and added them as layers to the QEW image and also added a shadow layer for underneath the car. Each layer's tonal range was adjusted to be more plausible relative to th e background image. Once I was happy, I flattened the layers, sharpened, added a border and scaled to 1024 wide for posting.

The end result is a complete con-job and one I had fun doing as I gained some experience I hope to be valuable for some images I want to make over the winter. - JW


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The concept of the app is to allow you to organize and tag your photos. When you're like me and have thousands of raw photo images, Similiflow will let you quickly view them, tag them and group them.

This demo shows directories being browsed with the filmstrip gadget on the bottom and photos from multiple directories being added to the current working group. The next step is to add the database backend for saving groups, tagging and searching.

The ultimate plan is to have options to edit the photos using Gimp, LightZone or whatever editor you choose.