Best Features of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Simple Yet Effective On-Location Portrait Lighting Setup

I often get asked to do portrait shots during local charity events and getting a simple lighting setup is the key to having a successful event. If you just use on-camera flash you will get …

Mastering Your Flash 101 – Learning to Love eTTL/iTTL

For many people the thought of taking their flash off of eTTL/iTTL mode is as intimidating as BASE jumping off a bridge, this is because they haven’t even fully mastered these automatic settings yet. …

Building your own snoot

What is a snoot? Simply put, a snoot is a tubular structure that is used to limit the throw of a light source to create a narrow beam of light. While commercial snoots are actually pretty affordable, from $14 to about $20, so why would we want to make our own? Because we know what we want and because for $20 we can make a dozen or more experimental ones and end up with a handful that we could use in different situations. So guys. go break into the wife’s scrapbooking supplies and get ready to make your own customized flash snoot.

Lighting Basics – Using a single light source

Along with dissecting different photo shoots like we have done in the past, we are now beginning a new “Lighting Basics” series that will start with a single light source and work up through multiple …

Getting Flash Exposure Fast

In this episode of our Friday Photo Tips I answer a common question about how to get flash exposure dialed in quickly when using manual strobes. This will work whether you are using manual speedlights …

Using a reflector

In this episode, Kerry Garrison (http://kerrygarrison.com) shows how to use a reflector to bounce sunlight onto a subject to help improve your natural light portraits

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Classic Portrait Lighting Styles Part I

As we continue our series on portrait lighting we now need to look at the different types of classic portrait lighting and see the effect it has on someone so we can decided when to use each type. By choosing the proper lighting for a particular person, we can help them to look their best by making them appear to be thinner or wider or to accent or minimize certain facial features.

Three Things to Know When Buying Your Lighting Essentials

Lighting can affect a shot, too much or less of it is a matter of delivering the perfect shot. Every photographer would stop relying on its camera’s built – in flash and start discovering and …

Color Correction with Gels

This week I show you how to match flash color with ambient color using colored gels on your flash. Kerry goes on to show you how to use the same technique to trick a scene into …

Directional Lighting with On-Camera Flash

Buuuut Kerrrry..If you use your flash ON your camera (not your pop-up flash) you can’t get directional lighting, its going to look horrible. Well, yeah, and that’s why so many people don’t like to …

Lighting ratios for portraits

Shooting portraits using classic styles of lighting ratios is a dying art. Many new photographers are completely unfamiliar with how to do portrait lighting and so they don’t even try leaving the current trend of …

Understanding Light Stops

One thing that seems to baffle a lot of new photographers is understanding the term “stop” as it pertains to a measurement of light. We see this word used over and over with regards to shutter speed, aperture, film speed, filters, lighting, and other ways that light is used. You may hear a phrase like “you should expose one side of face 1-2 stops under the lit side of the face and expose the background 1 stop under the main subject”. For many people that’s about like asking them to solve a complex calculus problem.

Getting Manual Flash Exposure Quickly

I always love hearing from people to find out what things people are struggling with and one of the most common things is how to get your exposure dialed in quickly when using manual flash. …

Simple One-Light Directional Portrait Lighting

Lighting can often be one of the most intimidating things to learn but it doesn’t need to be that way. I think the problem is that many people get intimidated thinking they need tons …

Mastering Your Flash 101 – High Speed Sync

One of my favorite features of speedlites is High Speed Sync. This feature allows you to work with speedlites way past your camera’s normal sync speed (1/160 – 1/250 depending on camera). By shooting …

5 Tips for Shooting Off-Camera Flash, Part 5

This week Jason Anderson from Canon Blogger continues his five part series on learning how to use off-camera flash.
The final installment of the off-camera flash series is here!  For the past five weeks, I’ve been posting various tips …

Top 10 Photography Books of 2012

Photography education should always be an on-going thing and there are some excellent books available to help you learn more about photography technique as well as post processing. I have compiled a list of my …

Rim Lighting To Add Wow To Your Images

I really love using multiple light sources because it enables you to do things that most photographers can’t do. With a little extra light somewhere you can take a regular image and really do something …