Just a heads up for anyone looking to buy a Canon 40D. I purchased a 40D last week, took it home, slapped on a lens and couldn’t get it to focus. It didn’t matter if I used autofocus or did it manually - something wasn’t calibrated correctly (I think). Even though the image looked sharp through the lens, the photos themselves were uniformly blurry.

I called Canon for assistance and they told me to send the camera in for repairs, complete with a letter documenting the problem and printed samples that illustrated the focusing error. I just got an e-mail saying the 40D would be repaired and that I could expect to receive it in 5-7 business days.

A quick search of some other websites showed that a couple of other people are having this problem, too. If you’re in the market for a 40D, be sure to put it through its paces carefully and look for any potential problems. It’s a bit frustrating that Canon launches have been so buggy recently…

Sorry about the lack of an update yesterday - my schedule has gotten crazy in the past few weeks, and I’m trying to find time to write. Daily updates should continue as usual soon as things calm down again.

Something astounded me today: I didn’t realize there are people who aren’t using digital camera card readers.

I had a new photographer for the paper come in and drop photos off for the first time, complete with her Rebel XTi and USB cord.

“You know you can do that without the camera, right?” I asked.

“What, really? How do you do that?”

After a minute-long introduction to the handy-dandy USB card reader, I had a new convert to the cause. The fact is, there is little or no reason to be using your digital camera as a card reader. An external card reader has a ton of benefits and costs next to nothing. Find out more after the jump.

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Sites like Strobist - as well as some of the examples I’ve shared on Cheapshooter - require off-camera flash. While this can be accomplished with cheap cords, things can become complicated pretty quickly. Wireless is certainly a better option, but high-end flashes can deplete even the hardiest budget pretty quickly. Professional options like Pocketwizards are even more expensive. What’s a budget shooter to do?

Enter the Gadget Infinity Radio Triggers. With a transmitter and two receivers costing just under $50, you can get started with off-camera flash pretty easily. But just how well do they work?

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Online photo editors are making fine-tuning photos possible without any software at all.

Adobe Photoshop isn’t the only option for every photographer in every situation. With licenses running hundreds of dollars, Photoshop is an expensive investment for nearly any photographer, and sometimes all a photo needs is a few tweaks.

Enter the online photo editors. Over the past year, a number of different tools have popped up online, offering convenience and a surprisingly rich feature set without costing a dime. With online photo editors, uploading, editing and saving are all handled through a browser, eliminating the need for any downloads. Can these online photo editors match the power of Photoshop? No, and they don’t try. But they do what they are meant to do - offer photographers the means to perform a few common tweaks to a batch of photos from any computer anywhere in the world. And some have convinient options that the Photoshop jockey can only dream of.

Here are the top three online photo editors that I’ve used in the past.

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The Vivitar 285HV flash has been around for nearly thirty years. Introduced all the way back in 1972, the Vivitar 285HV has seen use for a long time as a reliable strobe flash with a fair amount of power. While Vivitar stopped producing the unit for a while, a strong secondhand market developed on eBay.

Fast-forward to 2007. Prices for the Vivitar 285HV remained high on eBay, SLR prices were falling, and blogs like Strobist helped to spur interest in flash photography. The folks at Vivitar decided to break out the old workhorse again and started cranking out the 285HVs for a new generation.

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