Andy's Idea Factory

A big part of Photography 201 is adding accessories and beefing up your photography inventory... here's the shortlist of what's inside my pack and on my Holiday wish list this year... I currently own a little Canon Rebel Xsi that is lightweight for skiing and hiking with, and have two lenses, 18-55mm and 75-300mm. The first accessories I purchase for a new body are extra memory cards, and then get lens filters, cap keepers , and hoods (I prefer the flexible ones over the rigid version for price and damage control) for all my lenses.  Swapping out one set of each accessory between two or three lenses just gets old, really quick, so stock up.  Lenses also don't always come with lens bags, so finding padded bags or a divided camera bag/backpack is also a must-have.  The next addition to my current setup was an angling external flash/speedlight with a white reflector. The on-camera flashes for any body, DSLR or point-and-shoot, are weak, too close to the lens, and not...

I watched a movie last year called "Who Killed the Electric Car," and have carried around a pit in my stomach about it since then. Perhaps electric isn't the way to go, but why would someone eliminate possibilities?  Two weeks ago I watched "Fuel," which was far more educational and enlightening than "Who Killed...", but it still offered up some conspiracies about Henry Ford and his Ethanol cars during the prohibition era that shocked me. My head flooded with other theories about all those who have suffered death or torture in contradicting the oil industry over the last 100 years. And as a green enthusiast since the early 90s when I turned of voting age, I have spent the last two decades wondering, when, if ever, will things change? Then I saw Nissan's latest commercial. A polar bear is lounging on a last chunk of ice in the glacier melt.  He jumps off and swims south, then walks further south, past what is obviously the Alaskan-Canadian-Pacific...