The Strobist – three years old

My favorite photography website, the Strobist, is three years old. To be honest I thought that it had been around for much longer.

This is the post that started it for me, a diy tabletop / macro / product photography for $10 box type thing.

That was my introduction to the Strobist website, I needed some some good photographs of small stuff, evenly lit with soft or no shadows. I went one better than the cardboard box though, I found a plastic storage container with translucent sides that diffused the light perfectly but the idea was the same. That, three $40 daylight type desk lamps (which we already had lying around) and a cheap tripod. My only cost? the white card that formed the seamless background.

This from the welcome page sums up the site, at least to me and especially the last line:

The photography world is digital now, which gives you a wonderful little screen on the back of your cameras to learn from both your mistakes and your successes on a real-time basis. And there is no better way to learn than to constantly make interesting mistakes.

And for the record, we dig interesting mistakes more than boring successes.

The Strobist website fosters a very active community of photographers who share both ideas and work, apart from the odd comment, I have not been one of them though I do look forward to each new post and read it and the associated comments, which are usually very informative, several times.

As the name suggests the site is primarilyy concerned with lighting (off camera) the more inventive and budget conscious the better, a close second is assignment photography.

The man behind the Strobist is David Hobby: