Lighting Equipment

For my current assignment I need some better lighting equipment. And I also want to get a makeshift studio setup in my garage for protrait photography. I want to use the TTL wireless capabilities of the SB-600, but shoot into an umbrella. It sounds quite simple, all I need is a silver or white reflective umbrella, an umbrella swivel, and a light stand. And two of everything...as I want at least two sources of light. It's really hard to find reasonable priced umbrellas and swivels in Australia. So far, the best I've found is from an eBay store, but the prices are at least double of what you can get from the US (and the US stores charge a lot of postage for international shipments). Most of the Australian based websites I've looked at only carry very expensive lighting kits, or no lighting gear at all. I still haven't decided which way to go (either from the Aussie eBay store, or from a US website). I need to make a decision soon...

On the Easter weekend we went camping. I got a couple of good photos (one of a butterfly, and a few cool light painting shots near the campfire), but I was quite dissapointed with how many of the shots turned out. The light was very poor for most of the weekend because it was overcase and raining most of the time and I didn't take enough care to correct the exposure. The photos I took in the cave were very bad... definitely need more practise there.

One strange thing I found (which I haven't yet had time to verify), was that the autofocus on the D300 didn't work at all when the AF assist lamp feature is turned off. The light was low, but it was still during daylight hours... it confused me for quite some time and I thought the lens/camera AF was broken! I'd turned off the AF assist lamp the night before because it was annoying people as I photographed them sitting infront of the fire during the dark.