It’s the end of the month, and that means it’s time for a quick recap of the most popular articles for August. For a complete listing of articles published this month, check out the August 2007 archive.

• Lighting Ratios? But I Hate Math! – Learn what lighting ratios are and how to easily figure them out.
• Portrait Lighting For Beginners: 45 Degree Lighting – A continuation of the always popular Portrait Lighting For Beginners series.
• HowTo: Start Shooting RAW – Get a quick primer on how to start shooting in RAW mode and how to process you images.
• Portrait Lighting For Beginners: Short And Broad Lighting – Learn one of the most important techniques for making subjects appear thinner.
• How To Protect Your Digital Camera From Being Fried – Find out about dangerous flash voltage levels that could cook your camera.
• Solving Mysterious White Balance Problems With Studio Strobes – Learn how the two types of bulbs in a studio strobe can wreak havoc with your camera’s white balance setting.
• DIY: Make Your Own Light Reflector For $5 – Got some foil and cardboard?
• Photoshop 101: Correcting Skin Tones – There’s an easy way to fix anyone’s off skin tones in Photoshop, especially sunburned people!
• HowTo: Use The Depth-Of-Field Preview On Your Camera – Learn about this often forgotten feature of your DSLR.
• How I Shot Wake Boarding – Find out what lessons I learned about this very difficult shooting situation that can be applied to any photography.
• Background Choices and Setting The Mood – What background you choose can make or break your portrait.
• Look Out For Those Leafy Hot Spots – Find out how easy it is to make this very common mistake when shooting under trees.
• Photoshop 101: Desaturated Color – Learn a new and easy Photoshop technique to add a little drama to your photos.
• 10 Tips To Get Great Photos Of Children
• DIY: Use Off Camera Lighting If You Don’t Own A Flash – This is a great tip for those who haven’t shelled out the cash for a flash yet.
• Photographer To Watch: Joey Lawrence – Check out this awesome rising star.

Photographer Joe McNally knows how to take a portrait. He is a true master of lighting. If you’ve never heard of him, he was LIFE magazine’s staff photographer for four years and is the man behind the acclaimed “Faces of Ground Zero – Portraits of the Heroes of September 11th” series that helped raise over $2 million for September 11th relief efforts.

Lighting gear maker Elinchrom has cranked out a 24 page brochure (available as a PDF) for their equipment that has Joe singing the praises for all their products. The whole things revolves around a photo shoot Joe did of a gorgeous Kazakh model. As long as you take all the marketing hype talk with a bit of a grain of salt, the photography and some of the photos of the lighting setups are pretty dang cool.

I highly recommend you take the ten minutes or so to look through this download if you haven’t already seen it. It’s well worth the read.

My favorite shot in the whole thing? The one where Joe puts the strobe in another section of the “L” shaped room and shoots it through two windows at the model. Makes for a pretty cool shot.

I originally saw this yesterday on Strobist. While I’m not one who likes to simply regurgitate what I read on other sites to you all, this was just a little too good to pass up. I didn’t want anyone left out in the cold on this one. Thanks to David Hobby at Strobist for letting his readers know about this download.

Today’s digital camera’s are wonders of technology, packed with circuits and transistors. With this transition to digital comes a few dangers that you should be aware of, especially if you fall into the following category of photographer: 1) you’re buying some studio strobes and 2) you want them on the cheap.

Almost all digital cameras made today can only handle a voltage level of less than six volts at the PC socket. But many older strobes and even some manufactured today produce voltage levels much higher than six volts, some as many as 400 volts! This can completely fry that shiny expensive SLR you’ve saved up so long to buy, rendering it completely useless.

The Safety Net

The good news is that there are a couple of safeguards you can put in place to protect your camera.

Wein SSMP Safe-Sync for Monoplug

If you’re buying new strobes or some recently made, the easiest safeguard is to simply check with the manufacturer about the voltage level. With this becoming more of an issue these days, many manufacturers are putting the voltage levels in product manuals or in product specifications on their web sites or brochures. Some even advertise that they have a “digital camera” friendly voltage level below X volts.

If you’re buying older strobes, strobes that you know have a high voltage level, or you just don’t know, there are a few adapters available on the market to protect your camera. They work by simply dropping the voltage down to a digital-safe level. Wein makes adapters that will work with several connections, including monoplug, household, PC, and hotshoe. These will run you between $45 and $55, but if you’re getting a serious deal on the strobes, that’s a cost well justified.

So before you hook that strobe up to your expensive DSLR, take just a second to consider this issue. It’s a bigger one than you might realize. I should also mention that just because you haven’t had a problem yet doesn’t mean you’re safe. You might still have a strobe with voltages that are too high, it just hasn’t popped your camera yet.

EDIT: A comment from Christian made me realize I left out a couple of important points in the original article. First off, if you trigger your strobes wirelessly with devices such as the Gadget Infinity or Pocket Wizard triggers, then this is not an issue because the strobes are not directly hooked up to your camera. Second, this issue also applies to smaller shoe mounted flashes. While newer flashes are made for digital cameras, if you’re shopping for a deal on an older flash, be careful of this issue. Here’s a handy page that lists the voltage level of many flashes. Thanks for the links Christian.

Here’s a scenario that some new photographers face, but don’t know why it happens. They get some new studio strobes for the first time and start taking pictures. Everything is going great until they get back to the computer and look at the images and realize that all the pictures came out blue! They try to save the shots in Photoshop but it can only do so much. The batch of photos is lost. They chalk it up to a “learning experience” but don’t really know what they did wrong.

The Problem

The problem lies in the fact that studio strobes have a halogen modeling light bulb in them, and it’s a completely different kind from the tungsten bulb that fires when you press the shutter. They have totally different color temperatures, which means that the white balance of your camera differs depending on which light you shoot under.

So what does this mean to you? If you’re shooting with the modeling lights on, and you have your camera set to auto white balance, it will often times base it’s white balance decision on the modeling bulbs. Then when the strobe fires, that wrong white balance will be applied to the photograph.

Here’s an example of what a picture would look like under these conditions. Not exactly the true to life skin tones you would hope for.

My brother doin’ it up right

This weekend my brother came to visit me from Colorado. He also has a friend who lives here who has a boat. Living in a city with several lakes I often hear the phrase, “You don’t want a boat, you want a friend with a boat.” I couldn’t agree more. Well they invited me out for a little wake boarding, which I had never done. Being the photophile that I am, I naturally brought my camera.

But I very quickly realized that shooting this type of photography presented a handful of challenges that could really hamper a photographer that doesn’t know this stuff up and down. So I thought I would give a walk through on what decisions I made before and during shooting to come away with the best photographs possible.

The Challenges

• Things are moving fast, as in most sports photography. This means a fast shutter speed is needed to freeze the action.
• The ride was bumpy. Thanks to choppy water, the boat did a lot of bouncing around which made it hard to keep the camera steady and to keep the shot well composed. It also meant an even faster shutter speed was necessary to combat extreme camera shake. The bumpy ride also made focusing extremely difficult because I just couldn’t see well through the viewfinder.