Wow, An Actual, Real-Life Weekend.

You laugh.

I've had two of those in the last year. I am at the end of my first week away from The Sun, and it has a completely new experience.

The workload is still there, because we are planning the Strobist DVD shooting schedule (which starts next week.) But I was actually able to get away with my family for an overnight biking trip in West Virginia, which was a true luxury.

Here is my delimna: To the extent it is possible, I want to keep to a daily posting schedule on the site. But I also want to reserve weekends to spend with the family.

So I have decided to format Saturdays and Sundays by reserving them for speedlinks and flashbacks, respectively.

On Saturdays, I will do my very best to throw you out of the joint - sending you to other places where cool lighting-related stuff has been published. And I will also be stretching the subject matter a little on this day, occasionally pointing you to non-lighting (but highly creative) items.

Sundays will be a different matter. I have about 600 articles, posts and how-to's in the archives. And the vast majority of you have only seen a teensy bit of what the site has to offer. (I know this because I am addicted to my Google Analytics.) So I will be digging back and finding a few interesting things from the attic.

If you have been here since Day One and have read every post, you'll wanna take Sunday off. But the site gets about 40,000 new readers every month, so I know this stuff will be new to many of you. Besides, I am going to try to pull together some interesting themes in the hopes of sparking a little creative thinking.

Long story short, I can put the weekend stuff together during the week. We get something new every day. (Well, not technically on Sunday, but what the hey.) And I get to reserve the weekends for family almost like a normal person.

Let's see how it works out.


Speedlinks, 7/7/07

• You Want Cheap? Reader John Dugan has hacked a couple of disposable point-and-shoot cameras into off-camera flashes. Watch those male AC cords, tho. I'd consider springing for $30 worth of wireless nonlethality with the Gadget Infinity remotes.


• The Online Photographer has an interview with the guy that has supposedly created the CCD sensor chip that will make flashes obsolete.

(Dream on, Mr. Pocket Protector. Your chip will do nothing more than make our lit photos better.)

By the way, congrats to Mike Johnston of T-O-P on his new digs. He has a whole new site, having moved on from Blogger. (For the record, I am quite happy and Googly-eyed with my Blogger hosts.)

• Matt Adcock blogged a way-cool wedding shot over at FlashFlavor which features a couple lit to balance with an airliner fly-by. BTW, if you shoot weddings and are not reading FlashFlavor regularly, you are totally missing out. Matt is just knocking the cover off of the ball.

• OT, but knock-yer-socks-off creative: A fan's creation from a Modest Mouse music video that combines low-tech with high concept. The band is flip-book animated in real time on colored typing paper. The real world flies by, compressed, in the rest of the frame in flip-booked digital stills. I really want to create something with this technique.

The vid is here, but don't miss the rest of the site, Wooster Collective, which chronicles great street art.

(Thanks for the heads-up from PhotoJoJo.)