I had the opportunity to photograph the newest dormitory on the Florida International University campus a couple of nights ago and I thought I would share a little insight on the process of lighting such a large structure.
Want to see some beautiful street photographs that make use of light and shadows? Look no further than the project "Man on Earth" by London-based photographer Rupert Vandervell. Each image in the series shows a single person's figure framed by the shadows and features of a big city.
You can spot-meter and bounce strobes all you want, but on-location portrait photography can still be a pain the butt. Unless you take your studio lighting rig with you.
I was on little road trip recently, when the need for BBQ became so overwhelming that I had to stop at the first restaurant I could find. It happens sometimes. I'm not proud of it, but when Pork speaks, I listen. Luckily, there was an adorable little BBQ place in the next town. A tiny little mom-and-pop joint, which in my opinion, are always the best.
David Hobby over at Strobist uncovered an intriguing new type of parabolic umbrella by B2Pro Lighting last week that has some people intrigued, even as many others are calling BS. The umbrella sports a patent pending pattern of RGB photo sites that, according to B2Pro, will "bring lighting for digital photography and motion picture into the 21st century."
Want to plan out and test your studio lighting setups before setting up equipment and bringing subjects into the picture? German software development company Elixxier has been developing a software program designed to help you do just that. It's called set.a.light 3D STUDIO, and is, according to Elixxier, the world's first software dedicated to photo studio simulation.
Mark Vargo is a big time cinematographer who has worked on too many well-known movies to list. He's credited as a second unit director of photography on everything from Deep Impact and The Green Mile to Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Ted. In other words, knows what he's doing, and now he's chosen to share some of that knowledge with his fellow photographers and videographers.
Want to see how much of an effect the direction and color of your lighting has on your portrait subject's face? Check out this trippy video by Nacho Guzman, who used a moving light and changing colors to cause a woman's face to look like it's constantly morphing.
Westcott's lightsaber-style Ice Light is popular among photographers, but the $500 price tag is a bit prohibitory to some. Fortunately for those who either don't want or can't afford to spend the money on the real thing, photographer Simon Ellingworth has come up with a cheap DIY version that'll only run you about $30.
Faced with another birthday party at Chuck E Cheese, a place my daughter loves but low ISOs do not, I decided to get creative. I shot a collection of photos with a set of three Yongnuo YN-560 and YN-560 II flashes with a diffuser cap/"omni bounce" inside of small lampshades placed along the table.
The Online Lighting Diagram Creator is a web app for easily creating and sharing lighting diagrams. It was created back in 2009 by Sydney-based photographer and web developer Quoc Huy Nguyen Dinh. It's an extremely simple tool through which you can create detailed diagrams by simply clicking and dragging.
Photographer Nick Fancher tells us that he recently came up with an interesting way of customizing the catch light in subjects' eyes. If, in your portraiture, you place white or black foam boards to control the amount and direction of bounce light, you can also use white and black gaffers tape to control what goes on in your subjects' eyeballs!
"There's the kind of lighting you do because you want it to look like ambient light. And there's the kind of lighting you do just because you think it looks cool. This was [the latter]." That's how Greg Heisler describes this photograph he took of now-retired NBA star Alonzo Mourning for ESPN magazine.
Lumio is an innovative new LED light idea that has been making quite a splash over on Kickstarter. Conceived by San Francisco-based industrial designer Max Gunawan, the lamp has raised nearly half a million dollars from nearly 5,000 backers over on Kickstarter -- after an initial goal of just $60,000. It's a lamp that's inspired by the design of a book: open the cover and the light turns on, close it and it shuts off.
It has been a long time since I have asked for something photo related for my birthday. I usually don’t ask, just because I’m very particular about what equipment I use, and my friends and family know it. But this year, it was different. I thought about dabbling in some old school photography, so I asked for a Polaroid 600 camera. My fiancée stepped up to the plate and delivered, gifting me an awesome 1983 Polaroid Sun 600 LMS. I had some fun with my first pack of film, but then it was …
Want to illuminate an entire football field for a photo shoot, but can't find enough friends who will let you borrow their external flashes? Have deep pockets? Here's a "lighting accessory" you might want to add to your camera bag: the light truck.
Here's a fun photo idea you might want to try out this Halloween: shoot epic portraits showing beams of light streaming in from the background. All you need are a perforated hardboard, a couple of flashes, and a fog/smoke machine (or some method of generating smoke).
Want to see how studio lighting equipment is made? David Selby of Lighting Rumors was recently invited to tour the Shenzhen factory of a Chinese lighting company called NiceFoto, which sells gear both under its own brand name and to various international distributors under different marques. He snapped a number of photographs showing various workspaces where equipment is assembled.
What do you get when you combine an accent light with a picture frame? Answer: the Geode. It's a new product by San Francisco-based home furnishing shop Ghost Nest that lets you light up a space while showing off your favorite photographs.
Photographer Kirsty Wiseman didn't want to shell out money for a real beauty dish -- she doesn't really need one -- so she built this funny-looking DIY beauty dish for a few pennies using a couple of Styrofoam bowls, a couple of cocktail sticks, and a piece of aluminum foil. After playing around with it, Wiseman was delightfully surprised to find that her gear hack actually produced decent results.
London-based photographer Tony Ellwood has a project called In No Time that deals with our perception and awareness of our passage of time. All the photographs are of the same pier on a beach that Ellwood visited over a period of six months. His technique, which took him 18 months to develop and perfect, involves visiting the location multiple times for each photo -- sometimes up to three times a day for multiple days. Using a 4x5 large format camera, Ellwood creates each exposure across …
What if there existed a lightbulb that you could completely control using your phone? And by "completely control", I don't mean simply switching on and off. I mean being able to precisely control the brightness of the light emitted, and even the exact color of the light.
Earlier this week, we shared a funky piece of camera equipment called the Bounce-Wall, which features a large card that serves as a surface to bounce your flash off when you're out and about. While the pricing wasn't available at the time, David Hobby of Strobist has since revealed that it'll carry a $99 when it's released later this month.
Need to bounce your flash but don't have a suitable wall nearby? Bounce-Wall is a new lighting accessory that puts a large card to the side of your camera, providing a bounce surface wherever you need it. David Hobby over at Strobist got to play around with one, and writes, …
Want to light your nighttime photographs with something that can be mistaken for a portable sun? Check out this monstrous homemade flashlight composed of 513 separate LED lights. Created back in 2008 by Ledcreations, the device offers a whopping 3500-4000 lumens of light -- way more than the hundreds of lumens offered by other powerful flashlights on the market.
Some people who find themselves on hard times try to have themselves arrested so that they can eat for free in prison. It turns out that people in Southern California can do the same thing for a free studio-style headshot. Cat Cora, a chef on the Food Network show Iron Chef, recently got booked for a DUI after drinking three beers and getting behind the wheel. Her mugshot wasn't taken until 11 days after her arrest, so Cora had time to have her hair and makeup done in order to pose for a …
Photography instructor Mike Browne of PhotographyCourses.Biz has a clever way of teaching the basic principles of flash photography. He uses water from an ordinary garden hose as an analogy for light, showing different ways you can go about soaking your portrait subject.
If you're interested in the subject of lighting, check out Guess The Lighting. It's a website by professional portrait photographer Ted Sabarese through which he shares photos he finds -- including iconic images, advertisements, magazine covers -- along with his guesses and sketches regarding how the images were lit.
Who said that hi-end lighting equipment has to be expensive? And who says the only way to shoot with fluorescent light is to use the flicker-free Kino Flo lights that can cost you thousands of dollars? …
Okay -- maybe it's trying to reinvent the wheel, er, ring flash, but this could be an interesting gadget: Chinese company CononMark has unveiled a flash system that looks like a cross between a ring flash, speedlights, bracket flash and modeling lights.
This idea came to me after I had shot this photo in the daytime. I had been seeing a lot of celestial-type shots on the Internet, but most were just landscapes with no action. My main focus is action sports, and I love a challenge. I figured I would give it a try.
Here's a behind-the-scenes video in which photographer Mike Butler walks through how he went about planning and photographing the 35-storey Hotel Intercontinental in Downtown Miami using 8 1000W DP lights by light painting portions of the scene and stitching them all together in post.
The stated goal on "the Kick" is that they're trying to "help you take better pictures, make better videos and have fun doing it." But what they've really done is re-imagine, and maybe even revolutionize, portable lighting. That's because the Kick, in particular the Kick Plus, can do so much: use it as a strobe, as a continuous light source, or to generate different colors or effects.
A while back I was too cheap (lazy?) to get around to purchasing some speedlights and in typical DIY fashion for me, I figured I could replicate most results using nothing more than a flashlight. So one evening with my friend Sean and his wife, we decided to try out some long exposure light painting ideas.
When photographer Ian Spanier was assigned to shoot 4-time Mr. Olympia Jay Cutler at his home in Vegas, the budget wouldn't allow him to hire an assistant. Still, this was an important shoot, the editor of Muscular Development had stuck his neck out to get him this gig, and he wanted to do as good a job as possible. So instead of depending on natural light, or shooting with a standard top mount flash, he decided to hack together something better.
Admittedly, lighting tutorials are pretty common these days; but when it comes to a subject as vast as proper lighting in the studio, more info can't hurt. This 10 minute tutorial from The Slanted Lens by Jay P. Morgan runs you through the differences between octaboxes/octadomes and the traditional softbox, when it might be beneficial to use one over the other, and how to choose the proper octabox lighting setup to fit your needs. All pretty useful info if you ask us.
In this first episode of LitUp -- a series by [F]Network that is attempting to de-mystify the world of studio lighting -- photographer Joel Grimes takes you through his journey as he discovered how to properly manipulate and use light in his photography. The short video covers many areas: from drawing from different sources of inspiration (his came from Rembrandt), to how one should choose modifiers, to using continuous light sources for HDR photography and more.
You may remember photographer Benjamin Von Wong from last week's behind-the-scenes video of his photo shoot with the band The Agonist. In that video he showed you how he put together a very creative, cinematic composite shot that really stood out from other band photos. In this video, Benjamin runs you through the lighting challenges unique to black and white photography, and how he chose to overcome them.
Flash diffusers come in all shapes and sizes, from DIY Home Depot versions to more expensive professional grade equipment. None of these solutions seemed adequate for 30 year photography veteran Les Tirmenstein, however, and that's why he designed the FlashPipe.
A typical snoot is used to control the direction and radius of of the light you're casting onto your subject, and they're great for getting certain effects. But photographer Peter Miesch's take on the snoot is a bit different; used right, his will give your photos a film-noire effect like you see in the example above.
When working with rim lights, or shooting into a significant backlight, glare becomes a serious issue. The typical solution to this problem is setting up flags on either side of your subject, but who needs flags when you have a spare piece of Coroplast sitting around your studio?
Virtual Lighting Studio is an awesome new free studio lighting simulator that doesn't require any installation -- you use it directly in your browser. It offers a large number of options for customizing your setup (e.g. number of lights, light type, gel, positioning) and the result is updated in real-time on the virtual model's head.
In 9th grade, photographer Joe Edelman was given the assignment of creating 5 separate photos of an egg without moving it. That task became a defining moment in his journey as a photographer, teaching him the importance of learning to "see" light over learning "how" to light.
How would you go about photographing a $380,000 Lamborghini Aventador? Here's an interesting behind the scenes video in which photographer Blair Bunting presents a step-by-step walkthrough of how went about doing it.
Here's a tutorial by photographer Joe Edelman that teaches how you can build a studio lighting setup with fluorescent lights for under $200. You can find a detailed parts list over in the description of the video on YouTube.
Photoshop guru Scott Kelby has released a free iPad app that teaches the lighting techniques he used for various photographs in his portfolio.
Not too long ago I finally got around to picking up a decent manual flash for exploring lighting and speedlight techniques. I picked up a Yongnuo YN-560 Speedlight Flash for Canon and Nikon, and my friend Sean was kind enough to send me his old radio triggers to play with. I was mostly all set to start exploring the world of off-camera lighting...
Photographer Allen Mowery has a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a useful DIY flash mounting accessory using a ratcheting hand clamp and standard 1/4-inch threaded screw. It's a cheap DIY version of the Super Clamp or Nasty Clamp, and can help you place your flash in places that are inaccessible to light stands or traditional equipment.
Photography enthusiast Kris Robinson used to handhold a flash above his subjects for macro photographs, but then he got tired of doing that and ran out of hands. He then came up with the brilliant idea of making a do-it-yourself contraption that attaches to his flash when it's mounted to the hotshoe. The light travels down a tube lined with reflective aluminum tape, and is bounced downward onto the subject through a diffused lightbox. For a couple sample shots, see here and here.
Fashion photographer and filmmaker Jacob Sutton recently had the idea of capturing "a lone character made of light surfing through darkness". He had designer John Spatcher create an LED enveloped suit, and then had pro snowboarder William Hughes wear it while zipping down the slopes of the Rhône-Alpes region in south-east France.
