I'm cutting it close with this tip's timing, but it worked out so well tonight that I figured I'd post it anyway. We carved our Halloween pumpkins this evening and I wanted to take some pictures of them for posterity.

In the past, this meant turning off the lights in the kitchen, putting a light inside the pumpkin, metering off the light in the pumpkin, and shooting. Without a tripod, I'd usually get a largely black photo with just the white/orange design of the carving visible. This year, I figured I'd use the tripod and do it right with a longer exposure.

On a whim, though, I decided to put the wireless flash INSIDE the pumpkin. I put some folded paper towel at the bottom of the pumpkin and left the OmniBounce attached. The flash head was aimed up toward the top of the pumpkin. I then placed a paper towel sheet inside the pumpkin, just behind the carving -- essentially like a curtain to diffuse the light further and ensure that the flash unit itself wasn't visible in the photo.

I then put the camera in Aperture priority mode, set it to a fairly wide aperture, pointed and clicked. The kitchen lights were still on so the outside of the pumpkin had good exposure and the flash inside the pumpkin made sure the design looked great as well. I was a little surprised that the D70 and the flash were able to communicate so well with the pumpkin and paper towel hanging between them. But the pre-flash/metering was solid and I didn't have to go through any trial and error.

Give it a shot!

Gear:

• Nikon D70
• Nikkor 18-70mm AF-S ED Kit Lens
• Nikon SB-600 Speedlight Flash
• Stofen OmniBounce Diffuser

I just finished upgrading to the latest release of DasBlog and all seems well. The upgrade process itself could hardly be smoother. There were just a few steps involved...

1. Downloaded the Content, SiteConfig, and Logs folders and placed them into the local web directories.
2. Ran the DasBlog Updater utility to cleanup the Content folder.
3. Ran a diff on the new and old config files... moved the stuff I cared about.
4. Pushed the new web directories up to the server.

Done in under a half hour. It went very smooth and my hats off to Scott, Omar, and the rest of the DasBlog team.

So then I went cruising around to check out some of the new stuff Scott mentioned in his release announcement. One of the things I really like is the ability to disable comments on a post older than a specified number of days. I don't get many comments and most of what does come in is comment-spam on older posts. Hopefully that setting improves things.

There are also a few more themes available than in previous versions. One of these, called Project84Grass, was designed by Jacob Hodges. I liked the general style, but opted to darken it up a bit and add my own header image. It was the first time I've gone into the DasBlog template mechanism and it was much easier than I expected. Swapped out a few images, changed up the stylesheet, and modified a manifest -- and DasBlog picked it up on refresh.

Thanks!