I shot my first real on-location portrait session over the weekend -- senior portraits for a member of Claire's family.

I started out at 4pm setting up a basement studio for use later that night, and then Bridget, Mary, and I proceeded to the nicely shaded Steinman Park in downtown Lancaster. That was followed by a trip to Musser Park, and then a return to the house to finish up with the outdoor and studio work there -- about 4 hours of shooting total.

I've had a new pair of Yong Nuo CTR-301 receivers and a PT-04 transmitter for about a month now, and they've been working very nicely for me.

I purchased these to replace an increasingly failing set of old eBay triggers -- PT-04/RF-04.

Back in the middle of January, the whole family (with my parents) took a vacation to Disney World in Florida. We spent a week there, had a great time, and we ate very well.

Since my birthday on Saturday, I'm now the proud owner of a Nokia E71 smart phone. I had been poking around and reading specs of lots of devices, and this was definitely the forerunner. Along with a bit of research, I had started to prepare Claire for the sticker shock of leaving the subsidized carrier phone world to start buying unlocked, retail phones, and that it would probably happen this year. She apparently believed me, because she went out and bought it.

It's a serious geek phone with a qwerty keyboard and enough configurations to keep me playing and reading the manual for days. Fortunately, I like exploring devices, their manuals, and all the online tips.

I picked up a Asus EeePC 1000HE for Claire, and she needs Linux installed on it. Ubuntu 8.10 looked great on the ThinkPad, so that's what I'm installing on this new netbook.

I have a small pile of gear on its way, and it's taking forever to arrive:

• Flash bracket frame thing (maybe to modify)
• CTR-301 radio/optical slaves (last effort before buying PocketWizards)
• Bamboo Fun Wacom Tablet
• Macro Extension Tubes (the best quality air $10-$60 can buy)

I decided I needed a change of pace last week, so I sat down with Eclipse, the Mobile Tools for Java (MTJ) plugin, and MPowerPlayer on the Mac, and cranked out a little toy game using the Game APIs. My only reference was the Beginning J2ME: From Novice to Professional ebook and previous experience.

I'm starting 2009 out ambitiously with a group of others from the No Fear Photography group, and we're doing a Project 365 -- take one photo a day and upload it to Flickr. Most of the images from everyone can be seen tagged nofear365.

On the 8th day of the project, it's not feeling too difficult yet.

2008 has been an exciting year in photography for me. I started with a Strobist Meetup in February, and upgrading to a D40 in March, and it's taken over 12000 exposures for me already. The D40 opened the door for lots of new lighting, lenses, and other gear.

I've also gotten all social joining the No Fear Photography group, and photo walking with the Lancaster Photographers group.

While I'm sure I delete more images these days, I've still identified more images this year to be my favorites. Claire even picked a few of these to print huge to give me for Christmas.

I'm getting much more comfortable with the strobes, so I've been using them more in everyday situations, like candid photos at Christmas gatherings.

I had the Strobist Christmas Morning setup in mind most of the time, so I usually just laid a strobe or 2 in a high spot in a corner and pointed it at the ceiling. Sometimes they'd all fire, sometimes not, so there was some unintentional variety. In most of the photos, I was again too lazy to color correct the strobe, so I had a bit of white balance work on my hands in post-processing.