Joe McNally has to be one of the best Nikon photographers on the planet.

On the Strobist blog, I saw the following video of a shoot Joe ran in the Dubai desert. The Strobist's post is very entertaining -- I think David actually shot the video with a Canon G9 -- so go ahead and read it for details about the shoot itself.

However, it's the video that is truly wild. At one point, Joe has 7 SB-800 flashes firing at once from a single stand. It looks like a giant flash lollipop!

I took some pictures last Friday during a rainy day in New York City. Rather than not shoot, I decided to make the most of the rain and bleak sky and work them into my photographs.

And toward the end of the day, the clouds moved off and the sun broke through.

Importantly, I had just picked up my new Nikon D300 that morning, so I was anxious to test it out. I'll post more about this once I have a chance to put the camera through it's paces, but I'm pretty certain already that the D300 is a significantly better digital body than my old D200, which I sold. Anyway, enjoy the pictures. (If you like, the whole set is here.)

I just got a new lens for my Nikons: a Holga. It's basically the lens of an all-plastic Holga toy camera, fitted onto a Nikon bodycap.

It shoots only at f/8 and if you don't hold onto it when you manually focus, it falls off the camera. However, I'd heard various pros like shooting with Holgas, which are medium-format film cameras, so I thought I'd give it a try with a digital twist (my D200 today). I found the lens at a site called Holgamods, where they're available for Nikon, Canon and other camera bodies.

Anyway, here's my best effort so far. The Holga lens has soft and uneven focus, muted colors and other flaws. Altogether, though, it brings a special quality to the image. Enjoy.