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.

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.

We have all seen green screens used in special effects for films or by high-end professionals to composite images together. One of the problems with doing green screen work has always been the cost of a good green screen backdrop and affordable lighting kits. As we have seen in the past, PhotoBasics has brought the power of green screen production to the masses with an affordable new green screen kit.

Once in a while a product comes along that is so clever, so right, it is just a “must have” product. While at PMA, I stumbled on such a product. The SpyderCUBE by Datacolor is one of those products. Nothing it does is really new, but it does everything right, in a small package, with more features than most any competitive product on the market.

Mac versus PC, RAW versus JPEG, Coke versus Pepsi, all solid battles in their own right but Adobe RGB versus sRGB is still one that confuses more people than anything else. One of the problems is that there is big name experts on both sides of this argument arguring why their side is right and the other is totally off-base. What we will try to do is to show how both affect images so that you can choose the right one for your situation.

Kerry talks to Jim Divitale about using speciality lenses like the Lensbaby Composer in commercial shoots. Jim talks about how to tell clients about the effects, how to prepare for a shoot, and the comparision between the effect of of a Lensbaby versus a Tlt-Shift and 4×5 View camera.

Studio strobes are expensive and when you need lots of light but when you want to use them on location somewhere you have to find electrical outlets and possibly use long unwieldy extensions cords. But what happens when there is no power available at all? Using a generator is not recommended unless you can find one with a true sine wave inverter and even then, the peak times of the strobes when recycling can put an excessive strain on the generator. Innovatronix has a solution with their Explorer XT portable power source.

During a wedding shoot one day I noticed that my flash was only firing occasionally. After the initial panic, I quickly figured out that if I held the flash with a little counter-clockwise tension, then the flash worked fine. At the first break, I tried my backup camera and it was doing the same thing. When I got home, I checked it against my daughter’s 20D and it worked fine, and it also seemed that the hot shoe on my cameras was loose compared to hers.Another symptom of this is that the flash will switch from E-TTL mode into TTL mode and the exposure will usually be very overexposed.

I have always been a proponent of keeping my cameras looking brand new. A big piece of keeping your camera new is protecting the screens. This has been an age-old issue that affects all modern, digital cameras from point and shoots to professional SLRs. With typical protectors seeming overprices at $10 to $15 for a piece of plastic film smaller than the palm of your hand, why would you spend quite a bit more than that for the Giottos Camera Screen Protectors? We needed to try these out and see if they were worth the extra cost.

I have mentioned David Ziser’s upcoming seminar series several times and I will continue to until it is over as it is going to be the one big not-to-miss seminar this year. David is an expert on lighting and technique and presents these topics in very easy to understand ways so that you can go back and start implementing them immediately.