I’m pretty happy with this shot of my wife with her parents and best friends Jeff and Wendy. To make it, I used my new FourSquare lighting system, held high above my head while I clutched the D3 with the other hand and snapped this about 30 minutes after sunset. The colors in this one make everything else on my site look washed-out. Wow.

Soft Boxes are nothing new in the studio. What makes this one so special is its portability. Equipped with a couple of Nikon SB-600 flash heads purchased on ebay and triggered with an on-camera SB-800, I can throw a heck of a lot of high quality light into a scene. Setup takes about 5 minutes, and the results speak for themselves.

If there’s anything not to like about these shots is that they look like they’re faked. Sort of like a cheesy Sears portrait against a photo backdrop. I can assure you — these are real.

This image also marks the first time I used a new GPS device form BlueSLR. This small device connects to my Camera and adds GPS info to my photos in a very clever way. Instead of incorporating its own GPS chip, the BlueSLR gets this geolocation information via a Bluetooth connection to my iPhone! This results in much faster and more accurate GPS location info than other GPS devices for digital SLR’s, and presumably consumes less of the camera’s precious power. The BlueSLR iPhone/iTouch/iPad app also allows me to make several camera adjustments and trigger the shutter from up to 300 feet away. Very cool!

Later, we went up to Skyline Ranch to visit with Kelly and Bandit.

The food and family stuff was fun and the cabin turned out to be a nice roomy house, but the icing on the cake came in the form of a foot of powdery snow. Beautiful!!

More fabulous photos here.

Accompanied by their official photographer, Kelly and Bandit took a short ride on this sunny, 70 degree day. Looks like Bandit and Kelly are getting along splendidly.

Many thanks to the great folks at Xenophon Therapeutic Riding for all of the support. Without your help, this would not have been possible. Also, I’d like give a HUGE thanks to our friends Hannah and Pooh, who have been amazingly helpful.

I’ve had the lens for just a few hours, and I’m already very impressed by the bokeh. To me, it looks as good as that from lenses costing five times as much. Interestingly, it seems that that the smooth bokeh makes the in-focus parts of the image appear even sharper than they actually are. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not suggesting that this lens isn’t sharp – it is! It already seems like the best lens bargain I’ve ever found.

A few more pictures here.