WOW! It's a sad sad day... A couple of days ago, Lucky Oliver announced that they will be closing their doors come the middle of May.

Back in February, Polaroid revealed that they were going to cease production and withdraw from instant film products completely by early 2009. This is a sad thing, as Polaroid is an really cool medium, and really interesting things can be done with it.

Also, I'll never forget the magic of watching an image appear slowly on the little plastic card that made up the print. Everyone always had their own method for getting the image to appear quicker. Some would shake the pic around, others would hold it over a lightbulb trying to speed up the chemical reaction by warming up the substrate, others would rub around on it thinking they were spreading out everything better and that would somehow help things move faster. 

What can you do you ask?

Well, go over to: http://www.savepolaroid.com/  

and follow the links and do what you can do help with the five things you can do.

 They have started a fliker group, and have downloadable postcards to send to Polariod and several other film and paper manufacturers to try to convince Polariod to license their technology to other companies so that they could keep Polaroid type cameras shooting long into the future.

Come on everyone and help preserve this amazing technology for future generations! 

Well, I've had a chance to put my new ring flash (Emoblitz DRF-14) through its paces, and I have to say that I am very happy with the results. It is absolutely great for closeup work. Also, for a ring flash, this unit was very inexpensive, I bought it for $139 over at adorama.com, one of the few online stores I trust for purchasing camera gear and accessories.