I just finished building Maryanne’s new computer.  It has 2 things that Maryanne enjoys…nay, demands in her electronics.  It is little and shiny.

check out the keys on top for scale

I have to hand it to the folks at Shuttle, they make an excellent chassis.  The video card was an extremely tight fit, but managed to fit in.  Now she has a new system that’s much faster than her older system and about 1/4 the size.

I didn’t post the stats of said box (which has been dubbed “Starbuck”) because Maryanne really doesn’t care that it’s an Intel quadcore system with 4GB of RAM and 896MB nVidia GTX260 .

I’ve been trying everything I could do (short of spending $2500 on a new DSLR body) to work around using a flash indoors.  I did learn a lot about experimenting with ISO and exposure as well as some interesting photoshop techniques, but it still wasn’t working out how I wanted. I finally broke down and decided to buy a fairly basic Canon Speedlite.  The difference was instantly noticeable.

Click the picture for more of this series

I was happy with these results since one of my self created rules about learning to be a better photographer was that I would not try to spend my way through it.  So far, so good.