Until you’ve used a light meter in the stu­dio you prob­ably won’t appre­ci­ate it. The Sekonic Flash­mate L-308S Digital Light/Flash Meter appears to be adequate for my cur­rent needs.

For ser­i­ous retouch­ing work you can’t beat using a graph­ics tab­let. I star­ted using a Wacom Graphire 2, but have since upgraded to the Wacom Intuos4 PTK-640 Medium A5 Graph­ics Tab­let. There is a com­plaint about the pen nibs being soft and wear­ing too quickly, but I’ve not needed to buy any replace­ments yet. It has a scroll wheel, but­tons and lots of clever stuff I don’t use (yet).

Get­ting a cor­rectly cal­ib­rated screen is crit­ical — the Color­Munki Photo has the advant­age of cal­ib­rat­ing both screen and printer. It’s expens­ive, but worth it.

The X-Rite Col­orChecker Pass­port appears to be an expens­ive bit of plastic, but the value is in the soft­ware which gen­er­ates cam­era spe­cific pro­files for use in Light­room and Adobe Cam­era Raw. If you’ve ever thought the col­ours in your images aren’t quite true to life, this may be the fix you need. It also includes a con­veni­ent grey card tar­get.

I’m using the older Eye-Fi Pro 4GB Wire­less SDHC Memory Card to wire­lessly trans­fer small JPEGs as I shoot (and auto-importing into Light­room). It’s great to see more than what is show­ing on the back of the cam­era. It has since been super­seded by the newer model (Eye-Fi Pro X2 8GB Wire­less SDHC Memory Card) — double the capa­city and pre­sum­ably faster over Wireless-N (802.11n) (though I’d still hes­it­ate to con­sider using it to trans­fer 21MP raw image files). The cards sup­port raw files, but the lim­ited capa­city when using raw files could be dis­rupt­ive when shoot­ing (unless you plan to buy mul­tiple cards or are happy to stop, upload and wipe mid-shoot).

I primar­ily use Sandisk 16GB CF cards — I have a couple of these new SanDisk 16GB Extreme CF Com­pact Flash Cards 60MBS and four of the older 30MB/s Extreme III cards. I don’t believe there is any per­form­ance dif­fer­ence in-camera (the cards are prob­ably faster than the cam­era can sup­port), but the newer cards might load images to the com­puter a bit faster (assum­ing a fast trans­fer inter­face like Firewire).

Some people like dual screens — I’ve tried it and I don’t — I like a single large high res­ol­u­tion screen. The Dell U2711 Ultrasharp 27 inch Premier col­our Widescreen Mon­itor fits the bill with a res­ol­u­tion of 2560x1440 … and a reas­on­able price. It has a built-in 4 port USB hub and a card reader (though unlike my older 24″ Dell 2408WFP the card reader doesn’t take Com­pact Flash cards).

The Lens­baby Com­poser is easy to oper­ate and can cre­ate some very inter­est­ing images. It’s also easy to miss focus com­pletely so suc­cess can be a bit hit-and-miss with a mov­ing sub­ject.

If you find that the manufacturer’s own cam­era strap uncom­fort­able then one of these OP/TECH straps might be what you’re look­ing for. And if you ever find that your strap gets in the way, it’s pos­sible to detach the shoulder/neck part. I own two styles — the OP/TECH Super Clas­sic Strap and the OP/TECH PRO Loop Strap. The shoulder/neck com­pon­ent is the same, it’s just a mat­ter of how it attaches to the cam­era. I’d sug­gest the clas­sic for Canon bod­ies — it is pos­sible to attach the loop style to a Canon body, it’s just not easy.

I bought a Think Tank Ret­ro­spect­ive 30 Shoulder Bag last year with the thought hav­ing some­thing smal­ler than my usual back-breaking ruck­sack. This is a spa­cious bag with a lot of room for gear … I do carry less, but it’s still heavy when loaded with a body and a couple of lenses.

I prob­ably drink too much cof­fee and the Nespresso CitiZ and Milk by Magi­mix M190 Cof­fee Machine doesn’t help. Good cof­fee and way too easy.