In this video Kerry walks through the process of doing a typical product shoot. This tutorial uses the Westcott Spiderlite TD-5 constant lights. Constant lights are great for product shots because you can easily get your lighting setup and see exactly in the viewfinder what you will get when you press the shutter.

With the recent articles we have done on portrait lighting and the use of light meters we have had a bunch of requests to do an actual demonstration of how to use a meter in an actual real-world environment.

In this video Kerry demonstrates using a simple light meter in a product shoot.

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.

One of the dyeing arts is that of portraits using classic styles of lighting ratios. Many new photographers are completely unfamiliar with how to do portrait lighting and so they don’t even try leaving the current trend of wedding photography to be that of photo-journalism instead of being a mix of styles including traditional portraits. In this article we are going to try to teach you the typical lighting ratios that are used in portraiture.

I have heard the phrase “I don’t need no stinking light meter” more times than I can count, your LCD display and histogram are all you need for a perfect exposure right? Would you be surprised if I told you that your camera was lying to you? We first need to know why our LCD and histogram is wrong before we can believe that using a light meter will be of benefit.

Adobe has released a Release Candidate version of the upcomign Camera Raw 5.4. The main feature of the new version is support for a number of new cameras including:

We know you love The Dojo and here is your chance to show it. Camera Dojo is up for a fresh blog award. The downside is its a little weird to vote for. First off you have to go to the right page (linked here) and then click on the thumbnail for Camera Dojo as shown in the next image. From there you are only a click away from casting your vote. We really appreciate your support and maybe even win an award. Thanks for voting!

Heather wrote in with the following question and we thought it deserved more than just a quick email response.

“Hey Guys,

I got a question for ya. Sorry the answer to this might already be on your site somewhere but I’d just thought I would msg you instead. I was wondering if you had any suggestions for photography books either having to do w/ business or the technical side of things.

We have done a number of articles with different flash heads but we have never gone into the detail of how to set them up and make them work, this results in emails that we sit and explain all the details to people. So today I am going to go through how to setup these studio flashes and connect them to your camera to get the results you want.

If you have ever shopped for a flash or read a review, you may have noticed a section of the spec called the guide number or GN. While this value is a measurement of power that the flash has and allows you to compare flash models, is this number useful to you at all? In this article we dig into the guide number and see how we can use this number help us dial in our flash and camera settings using some math instead of just guessing and retrying until you get what you want.