Recently, Sara and I upgraded to a Digital SLR camera. For those not in the know, this is a digital camera, but it works like an old school film camera. In other words, you can have one of those super-zoom lenses, you can change to different lenses, and you have full control over all those little camera words that don’t mean anything to me, like ISO, and F-stop.

I’ve never owned a nice camera, not even back in the stone age when we actually had them. Even if I did, I would still probably stick to the built-in modes. Sara used to have a nice camera and she is much more adventurous with adjusting the settings. So Sara is the master of the camera, but I’m learning a little bit from her, mostly about more basic stuff like composition.

Now if you have little kids, a Digital SLR is almost a must. All of our previous digital cameras were so slow that we would almost always miss whatever shot we were trying to get. After the camera clicked you’d have to wait 2-3 seconds for the camera to recover. In that time the kids would do all sorts of adorable things and I’d be muttering, “Come on, come on!” until the camera came back.

Of course, the downside of the awesomeness is the cost. The camera itself is pretty pricey, and then you have lenses and other things on top of that to turn out truly professional pictures. However, we recently purchased a piece of equipment for < $30 that made a big difference in the quality of our pictures: a Lightscoop.

Basically, the Lightscoop is a mirror that fits over your flash to bounce the light off the wall or ceiling, rather than going directly on your subject matter.

Why would you want to do such a thing? Well, I’m glad you asked.

For one thing, it gets rid of red eye, but the real advantage is that it provides a more natural, more flattering light than a regular flash. The human eye is not used to seeing things the way the flash works. Our normal light source is diffuse, not directed from one close point.

Here is a picture from their website of an example. Basically, if someone or something is close to the camera and the flash goes off, you can wash out that person with too much light, and everything else will be in shadow.

I have definitely taken a picture or two like that one on the left. You can see more examples here.

Of course the first thing we did was try some of our own before and after pictures, and this thing really makes a difference. It is certainly the cheapest piece of camera equipment you can buy to make this kind of significant difference!