This one bag pretty much does it all: The Kata 3N1-33 ($145 street) could be the single bag that fits all your needs if you're unsure what bag you want -- laptop, camera, video camera - and if you're torn between a backpack or sling bag configuration. Pull out the inserts and you've got a roomy padded bag for schoolbooks or for a day trip. The bright orange interior makes it easy to find things and it's a handsome bag as far as black backpacks go. As a sling it works equally well for right- and left-handed users. Drawbacks are minor: It needs bigger zipper pulls and some thick pro lenses don't comfortably.

Tonight, as you may have heard, is the largest and brightest full moon of the year . This is thanks to the fact that the moon is near perigee, the closest point in its elliptical orbit to Earth. Tonight's moon will be about 14 percent wider and 30 percent brighter than lesser full moons, according to Space.com. And you can't miss the brilliant, reddish "star" near the Moon: It's actually the planet Mars, which made its closest approach to Earth (60 million miles) in more than 2 years on Wednesday; it won't be closer until 2014. Tonight it's "at opposition," opposite the sun in the sky and visible all night.

Taking a picture of the Moon can be a challenge. It's difficult to get a good photo of even a normal full moon because its intense glare tends to wash out detail, especially in brighter areas of its surface. (At a full moon, the Earth is located between the sun and moon, and sunlight is reflected straight back at us, with no shadows to provide contrast.) How to counteract this depends on the type of camera you're using.

Flash photos produce distinct, harsh shadows. The ExpoImaging Ray Flash ($200 direct) solves that by turning your Canon or Nikon flash into a ring flash, providing a circle of light around the lens. This geeky looking contraption works like a downward-facing periscope: Baffles, prisms and mirrors channel the light down from your clip-on flash to a ring around your camera lens. I found it produced better color balance (left photo above showing dried flowers in a vase) than direct flash.

Light loss is about 1 f/stop, meaning half the light gets through. It's automatically compensated by the camera's exposure sensor. In comparison, a dedicated ring flash from Canon is $495 and targets close-up (macro) photography, particularly medical photography. The Ray Flash can be used for general purpose photography, anything from shooting fashion models to product close-ups for eBay listings. In a close-up of a model, if you see a circular highlight reflection in the eye, that's a ring flash. The shadow behind the model often has a halo-like effect. When you use a ring flash with another flash off camera, or the ring flash alone outdoors, it softens shadows on a person's face, such as between the subject's neck and her long hair.

Ortery Technologies has launched its Photosimile 5000, a self-contained, light-box-style photo studio with which businesses or individuals can easily create 3D animations and still images. This product, which was shown at CES 2010, is now available for sale.

The Photosimile 5000 consists of a 28- by 28- by 28-inch box in which one can place an object and have it photographed, using an included Canon DSLR camera positioned on a track, in 2D or as a 3D animation in spherical, hemispherical, and 360-degree formats. The object being shot is set on a turntable, which can be rotated. For illumination, the light box uses 6500K (daylight-simulating) light bulbs.

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Carbon fiber makes for the ultimate tripod: light weight, good at damping vibrations. But some cost $500-plus. The Manfrotto 732CY is an exception: It's just $200 street, $230 with a ball head (a variant sold by Best Buy). It's small (17 inches closed) and light (2.1 pounds). It works well so long as you don't ask it to hold rock-steady in extreme conditions a heavy camera and lens. It's best for a consumer or prosumer digital SLR and a normal lens or moderate telephoto lens, or a good point-and-shoot. The most important thing: The Manfrotto 732CY is so light, I found myself carrying it far more often than my family heirloom Leitz Tiltall that weighs in at six pounds.

In this age of device convergence, why should your digital camera case be just a case? The DC Protective Hard Case with screw stand ($12 or $15, depending on size) from the never-boring Brando WorkShop keeps your point-and-shoot from harm and also doubles as a stand. The Web site doesn't have a lot of word-type information, but from pictures, it looks like the 1/4-inch screw lets you tilt your camera forward and back.

The case comes in three different colors--silver, carbon, and black (above)--and two sizes, either 11 by 7.5 by 3.5 or 12.3 by 9 by 4.7 centimeters.

So far, pocket camcorders don't seem quite as ubiquitous as they were last year, but they've certainly been popping up from some major manufacturers. Check out the latest from Kodak--a two-time Editors' Choice winner in the space, thanks to the Zi6 and Zi8. The Playsport is a rugged, waterproof pocket camcorder that can shoot in 1080p HD video.

The camera has a 2.0 inch LCD and captures 5MP stills. There's no built-in memory--like its predecessors, the camera takes SD and SDHC cards. The Playsport has an HDMI port and ships with an HDMI cable.

It will be available in black, blue, and purple for $149 in April.

Today at CES, Sanyo showed of the Xacti, VPC-CS1, a snazzy little dual camcorder that it claims is "smallest, thinnest, and lightest." The snazzy little camera is 1.06 inches thick and weighs roughly five ounces. It shoots video in full 1080p HD and takes stills.

That old digital photo frame not doing it for you, anymore? Casio's got a new device that promises to "turn your pictures into works of art." The Digital Art Frame is a fairly standard picture frame--with a bit of a twist. The device features built in technology that transforms still images into painting-like pictures that, frankly, look like they've been run through a Photoshop filter.

There are eight different filters, including watercolor, pointalism, pastel, airbrush, and oil painting. The frame also lets users create video, with Casio's high burst image capture. Animation can be overlayed onto the images. There's also Adobe Flash Lite built-in, so users can view Flash animated calendars and clocks.

So, is the device as revolutionary as Casio seems to think? Naw, but it'll likely cost you less than a Rembrandt.

The SD Association was on hand tonight at CES Unveiled, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its existence. The association, a joint venture of Panasonic, SanDisk, and Toshiba, didn't actually showcase any new products, but it did give a rough estimate for the debut of the latest generation of SD cards--the SDXC.
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First outlined at last year's show, the new cards are the same size as standard SD cards and will be able to hold a whopping 64GB to 2TB. The low end of the spectrum is double the maximum capacity of today's biggest SDHC cards.

A spokesperson for the association said that she expected the cards to begin appearing early this year. The first models will be in the lower capacities but are still 8,000 times the capacity of the first cards introduced a decade ago.

By now you've seen the YouTube video of two very observant retail store workers, Desi and Wanda, that "proved" that HP webcams cannot process facial recognition of African-American skin in low-lighting and without optimizing settings for each skin tone. The Webosphere is gleefully hurling accusations of racism at Hewlett-Packard that show a woeful lack of knowledge from those accusers about how imaging technology works.

As an African-American with a darker skin hue, I can attest to many casually taken smartphone pics of me and groups of friends (usually in some dimly lighted drinking establishment), in which my brown skin shows up in images as an inky blur, blending into the background. In contrast, pictures of Caucasian friends often result in glaring milk-white skin, accentuated by the flash.

Same thing with webcams. More light reflects from light objects than from darker objects. There is no conspiracy, no racism on the part of Hewlett-Packard: It's Science 101. In fact, you can easily find lots of articles from professional photographers about taking digital images of African American skin. Here's one from the New York Institute of Photography's site:

No one has a clearer explanation than our good friend and master portrait photographer Monte Zucker. As NYI students learn in Monte's portraiture videotape that is included in Unit Six of the Complete Course in Professional Photography, it's simple.

"If I am lighting a black person, I'm not going to change the light, I'm not going to bring it in any closer. I'm not going to open up an extra f-stop.

"The only thing I'm going to do is use the light coming from the side and around the subject. What we need to do when we're photographing a black person is to bring an extra light in from a 90-degree angle."

Accusations of racism in this case are as nonsensical as saying it's discriminatory that blue eyes turn up in flash photos as red much more frequently than darker eyes. Imaging technology is about precision, pixels, resolution, and lighting; not race judgment, thank goodness. Judging still remains a uniquely human trait.

According to a report filed Monday by DailyTech, 2010 laptops from Dell, HP, and others will include card readers that support the SDXC card standard. Don't be confused by the nomenclatures; think of the SDXC card format as the 2-terabyte format of the SD cards you normally use for digital cameras and portable storage.

The articles goes on to say that that the new card readers will need to be connected to a dedicated PCI Express connector, rather than a USB 2.0 bus, because of the higher bandwidths they require. This all has the ring of truth about it, but we've reached out to several PC OEMs for comment, and we'll report back if they have any.