Fstoppers.com has featured some great behind the scenes videos over the years and showcased amazingly talented professional photographers in our Fstoppers Originals series. Recently Patrick and I were invited to Scottsdale, Arizona to expose the secrets of commercial photographer Blair Bunting. When Blair invited us down to Loft 19 Studios, his idea was to shoot something big, expensive, and one of a kind. [more]
Today, Pocket Wizard has rolled out the newest in their line of wireless flash triggering devices: the long-awaited update to the industry-standard Pocket Wizard Plus II, the Pocket Wizard Plus III. We at Fstoppers have been playing with them for awhile, and we’re here to give you all the details, including an exclusive video look at the new Pocket Wizard Plus III. Continue to the full post to see it all. [Pre Order The Pocket Wizard Plus III Here]
Have you ever wondered what it takes to take the best sports images in the world? You know, those photos that become posters and magazine covers? Well recently we caught up with four of the photographers from Sports Illustrated during the biggest game in college football and asked them what makes a great sports image. Click the full post to read about our experience and hear from the masters themselves.
After almost a year of work we have finally finished Peter Hurley: The Art Behind The Headshot. We created this to be a double DVD tutorial and we may eventually still make a physical copy but for now we have decided to begin with a digital download. I would like to thank each one of you that supported us by pre-ordering this video and I am so sorry it took so long to produce. Patrick and I filmed and edited this and it was far more complicated than we ever imagined. Creating this video has been the hardest project I have ever worked on but at the same time one of the most rewarding.
During the 5 days of filming this video Peter completely opened my eyes to a new way of shooting people. Peter helped me look past the technical side of the camera and the lighting to see the emotion and feeling that each of his clients were producing in each image. When his clients weren’t producing compelling images, Peter knew exactly how to coach them into creating that perfect “look.” This experience has changed my photography more profoundly than any other experience in my life and I hope that everyone who watches this video will feel the same way.
Fstoppers is full of new and free information every single day including the first video we did with Peter over a year ago. This video was created with the professional photographer in mind and it costs $300 for a digital download of the 4 hour video. We know that many of our readers are photography hobbyists and if you don’t shoot professionally you may not see the value in this download and that is fine. Please realize that this is a tool and a piece of education that will help (some) professionals take their business to the next level. If you don’t see the value in it, please do not buy it and enjoy all of the other free material on our site. If you do decide to buy this video, I would like to thank you so much for supporting this venture and Fstoppers.com. Never in a million years would I have thought we (two wedding photographers from South Carolina) could have created a 4 hour tutorial of this complexity. I know we will never make enough money from DVD sales to make up for the time spent producing it (for some reason we thought it would only take a few weeks to edit) but I hope that this video will impact the photographers who watch it in a huge way.
As many of you know I (Lee Morris) am a professional wedding photographer. I was never a big fan of wedding videos until I saw the work that StillMotion was putting out. Even if you hate weddings you can appreciate what they do simply from an artistic standpoint. Even though I loved their work, I actually found it discouraging because I knew I could never do their style of video as well as they could so I never tried to film a wedding.
I had the idea for over a year of shooting a wedding video similar to how I shoot stills. If I could slow down the video enough I could deal with basically a moving image, something that I felt a lot more comfortable with. It finally worked out that Patrick Hall had a wedding on a day that I was free and 3 days before the wedding I ran the idea by the bride and then called my buddy Mike to see if he wanted to help me film it. Check out the finished product below and the walk-through in the full post.
As a photographer with a new DSLR, you might be trying your hand at video production. Most people completely overlook audio and they shouldn’t. If a video sounds cheap then in most people’s minds, it is cheap. If you don’t have enough money to afford fancy lav mics, don’t worry, you can record clean audio with a number of devices that you may already own. In the video below I will show you how we did it for the first year we filmed videos for Fstoppers with a simple (and free) iPhone app. If you don’t have a smart phone then you can buy one of these for $16.
Well the title pretty much says it all and you only have 3 day left to enter! Fstoppers is excited to announce a new twitter contest where you can win one of the brand new Apple Macbook Air 11.6″ Notebooks. Click Here for details on how you can enter the Fstoppers twitter contest and win this macbook. Also make sure you enter before the end of October 12th since we are announcing the winner the following day.
Last year I released a video explaining how to wirelessly tether your camera to an iPad by jailbreaking the iPad. Since then Eye-Fi has released a firmware update that makes wireless tethering possible without the need for jailbreaking. Now, not only is the whole process much easier to set up, it is also much cheaper because you no longer have to pay for the more expensive Pro Eye-Fi card, you can make this work with the cheaper Connect X2 card.
If you have seen Peter Lik’s work in person then you understand that it’s impossible to put into words the look and quality of his prints. Peter’s photography (and his post production) is fantastic, but what really makes his work stand out is his printing and presentation. If his images were printed on standard photo paper at a standard size, his work would not have the same “wow” factor.
Right before a trip to Italy I went back into Peter’s studio for a little inspiration. After studying his work and speaking with a sales rep about his printing process I decided to shoot, print, and frame a shot in Italy for the absolute cheapest price without losing the “wow” factor that Peter’s work has. This is how I did it.
Patrick and I were invited to shoot a behind the scenes video with beauty photography Sam Yocum in NYC a few months ago. I’ve always been struck by the lighting and flawless models, makeup, and retouching that can be seen in high end Beauty work and so I couldn’t wait to see a real professional work…Check out the video below to see a little on how Sam works as well as a very detailed tutorial on how he approaches his post production. Click the full post to see a bunch of Sam’s beauty images.
What if you took a set of images that became so popular that they were used hundreds of times all around the world by hundreds of artists, businesses, websites, and publications? As photographers, it’s what we all dream about but what if you were never paid for your work? What if you weren’t even given credit? What if your images were being stolen for years and you never had any idea? If there was ever a video to share, this is it. This is Noam Galai’s story. (Full story)
Hello Fstoppers! My name is Sean Armenta, and this is my little spot on Fstoppers called The Post Production Tutorial. If you enjoy these videos, feel free to subscribe to my new Fstoppers PPT Youtube Channel for the latest updates. This time around, we will talk about how I use the healing brush and patch tool in Photoshop. They are definitely staples of any retouching job and while they are pretty straightforward to use, I would like to share a couple of tweaks I discovered to make them work even better.
Hello Fstoppers! My name is Sean Armenta, and this is my little spot on Fstoppers called The Post Production Tutorial. If you enjoy these videos, feel free to subscribe to my new Fstoppers PPT Youtube Channel for the latest updates. This time around, we will talk about how to use the Photoshop Pen Tool. Granted, it’s not as flashy and exciting as other aspects of retouching, but the Pen Tool is definitely something everyone should learn.
To be honest, the Pen Tool is something I use quite often, especially when a client requests a color change on an object or background, or even when retouching hair. Stay tuned for more videos coming up soon and feel free to leave me any comments below with questions on this video or about suggestions for future videos.
One of my favorite things about Charleston, SC is being close to the ocean. I love being in and around the water, and although I’m not very good at it, I do enjoy wakeboarding. Charleston has become a pretty big hub for sports like kiteboarding and wakeboarding over the last few years, and this city is not short on talented athletes. I took an interest in wakeboard photography a couple years ago, and I always enjoyed shooting images from extreme angles. Although I’ve gotten some cool images, I never felt like I really had much control over my images with just daylight. I’ve tried to bring strobes outside to create something “different” but even those shots have been done a million times. I decided I wanted a way to shoot a rider flying through the air with interesting, studio quality lighting and this is what I came up with….click the full post for the full story.
Fstoppers Original: The Studio Wakeboard Shoot from FStoppers on Vimeo.
My name is Sean Armenta and I am a professional fashion photographer based in Southern California. You may have seen a few of my videos posted on Fstoppers in the past but this will be the first video in a series called Fstoppers PPT (post production tutorials) that I will be producing exclusively for Fstoppers. If you have a Youtube account you may want to subscribe to the new FstoppersPPT channel.
They say the eyes are the windows to the soul, and I believe the eyes are one of the most important parts of a portrait. In this tutorial, I will share with you the techniques I use to retouch eyes and eyelashes.
