Yes. Today is both my birthday and the day we celebrate the 1700th blog post.

I mini-celebrated my birthday last night at midnight+1 by having a Jack Daniels over ice on a JetBlue flight flying through a wild lightning storm somewhere over Arkansas. And I celebrated the hunting and pecking that created the 1700th blog post of the Visual Science Lab by making a nice cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. And by typing in a more leisurely fashion.

This is an in front of the scenes shot of my model in NYC. Nick and I both got to choose one model. I chose Gloria from a stack of head shots and Nick chose Naomi. I'll show you here image in a later post. Didn't really matter who picked whom as we switched around and took turns photographing each other for all three days.

I am one year older today. No wiser. No richer and no less happy. It was a great trip to frenetic, exciting New York but it was even greater to get back to the laid back quiet and lush and ample personal space that Austin affords.

Please stayed tuned to VSL for loads of opinions on new gear, big changes and a week long analysis of the world of photography. Spoiler? It's changing all the time. And so is the market.

In the next few posts well talk about my hands on evaluation of the new Sony A7 and A7r cameras, the Panasonic G6 camera and the Olympus em1 camera. I'll also talk about an interesting monolight I played with and some direct cheap soft boxes. All fun stuff.