In my experience there are 2 types of photographers. 1, you have a studio but you don’t shoot in it as much as you wish you could or 2, you don’t have a studio but you always wish that you did. I personally am the type 1 photographer. I do have a small studio but it does not get used very often. I have just been turned on to StudioShare.org and this site may be a huge help to everyone. If your studio space sits empty as much as mine, you might be interested in turning it into cash. StudioShare.org allows you to rent both gear and studio space to other professional photographers. If you are a photographer without a studio and don’t have thousands of dollars a day in your budget, StudioShare.org may help you get that studio that you have always wanted at an incredibly low price. You can also list the services you offer and get hired for gigs–everything from makeup artists to assistants.
So anyway, I contacted StudioShare and they agreed to give FS readers a full year for free, just type in “fstoppers-free” when you sign up into the coupon section. You can’t beat that!
As many of you know our forum has been acting a bit unusual lately. We finally figured out that we had a couple of things go wrong. Our server with Godaddy.com actually failed and we lost a full months worth of database info. That means that all posts and accounts created in the last 30 days were lost. Right after that, our forum was infected with a virus (I didn’t even know this was possible) and we had more issues with that. Long story short; we finally have everything fixed but a few of you will need to create accounts all over again.
If you posted a picture for our September contest, that was also lost and you will need to repost that image. As you know, the winner of that contest gets to have a banner advertising their site on the top of Fstoppers.com and to sweeten the pot even more Photoflex has offered to give a LiteDome XS kit away to the winner as well. Please post your “motion” themed images here.
I apologize for all of the issues. Fstoppers.com has been growing at a rapid pace which is a good thing but we are having growing pains.
It has come to our attention that one of the servers that hosts fstoppersforum.com has crashed and part of our database as been temporarily corrupt. We are working hard to resolve this problem and I apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused. If you have signed up for an account or posted to the forum in the last 10 days or so, sit tight and hopefully we can restore the database so everyone shows up again. All registrations and posts since Sept 22nd may not be showing up. We will let you know when everything has been resolved.
I’m not usually too big on photography seminars but this one is just too good to pass up. On October 2nd and 3rd Natalia Taffarel the famous retoucher is sharing her secrets for only $400. I will be flying up to NYC just to learn from her and it would be cool to see some other Fstoppers readers there as well. Check out the details here.
Remember Travis Harris? He called me out of the blue a few months back and actually flew to Charleston to assist me at a couple of weddings. Since then Travis has had one goal in mind: to do whatever it takes to quit his day job and work as a full time professional photographer. A few weeks ago Travis took the plunge and quit his job and now he is working his ass off to pick up as many photo jobs as humanly possible. Travis was kind enough to shoot a BTSV at his last gig and give us a few of his lighting schematics.
It’s really exciting to be able to watch Travis go from amateur to professional right before our eyes. Please leave him some encouraging words below.
A few weeks ago we decided to try to get FS readers in the NYC area to meet up one night. We made a simple post with a time and address and it turned out to be a great event. Over 20 photographers showed up included a few big names in the industry. At the end of the night Peter Hurley actually invited everyone up to his studio for a tour and actually gave us all some quick headshots.
I had such a great time with our last event, I want to do it again. Tomorrow (Thursday August 12th) we will be meeting at D.B.A (41 First Ave. New York, NY 10003) at 7pm.
Honestly, this get together has little to do with Fstoppers. It is really about meeting others within your industry. No matter how established you are, we would love to see you tomorrow night. At the last event we had a couple of the top photographers in the industry and we had those who were just getting started and wanted to start assisting. This event will be great for networking and an all around good time.
If you plan to come please leave a comment below so we can have some what of a heads up.
Update: I have just been given confirmation that David Bergman will be there. You may have seen one of his 8 SI covers.
We are currently in the middle of a contest where we are giving away a Canon 7D or Nikon D300s to the creator of the best behind the scenes video. So far we have not had very many submissions but I keep talking to people who tell me that they are still editing their video but it will be in by the deadline (August 1). How many people are waiting until the last minute? You now have exactly 2 weeks to finish. If you are planning to submit a contest entry please leave a comment below with a little info about the type of video you are creating.
Most photographers get sick to their stomach when they hear the term “wedding photography” but I actually perk up when I hear someone speaking about it. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a iPhone fashion photographer, I am actually a full time wedding photographer. In fact, Patrick Hall (the other founder of Fstoppers) is as well. Of course we both shoot commercial work too, but our true expertise is weddings.
To get Fstoppers.com rolling we knew that we would have to create a lot of the videos ourselves but we didn’t want to start off with weddings because we figured that most photographers wouldn’t be very interested. Now that Fstoppers has grown considerably it is time for me to ask; Do you want to see behind the scenes wedding videos? We will definitely make these videos eventually but we want Fstoppers.com to have a solid community of wedding photographers first. If you are a wedding photographer please post your website/work in this forum post so that we can all learn from each other.
Warning, this is probably the poorest shot BTS video we have ever posted but I think the concept is pretty interesting. I always find the type of images you see in muscle magazine and men’s magazines pretty interesting mainly because they usually contain a lot of motion and action. Check out Brandon Myles White as he takes fall after fall while trying to capture a Last Action Hero style leap. Too bad this wasn’t shot a bit better with some insight from the photographer.
If you hate reading as much as I do then you probably don’t want to read my previous post; it is really really long. Luckily there is another option for all of us lazy people.
A couple days ago I did a phone interview with “Your Mac Life” the most listened to Mac broadcast. The interview is about 30 minutes long but you don’t have to read a single word! Click here to hear things from my point of view.
Wow, the iPhone fashion video has really blown up over the past few days. The video has been viewed by almost 300,000 people as I write this. My 3 websites have been completely crippled for the past 2 days. So crippled in fact that we couldn’t even login to create/edit posts.
As with anything controversial brought into the lime light there will be people on both sides. I have received countless comments and emails thanking me for this video but this video may have gotten even more negative comments. At first I tried to respond to everyone individually but that quickly became impossible. Last night I read a very well written post on macgasm.net named “Why the 3Gs fashion shoot is misleading” by Joshua Schnell.
In this post I will comment on every point I have read brought up about my video.
On Wednesday Patrick and I are flying to NY to shoot our next Fstoppers original BTS video. This video is going to be huge… so huge that I don’t want to talk about it because I still fear it may not happen. While we are up there I wanted to grab drinks with Peter Hurley but then I thought: “why don’t we instead grab drinks with a bunch of photographers!” So we are going to open this up to any and everyone. This Thursday at 7:30 we are going to meet up at “The Ainsworth” bar at 122 West 26th Street NYC. I will be there with Patrick Hall, Jerrit Pruyn, and the talented but unstable Peter Hurley.
As many of you know I am a talented artist and so I created a illustration of what the night might be like.
Anyway, if you are in the area and interested in hanging out then please add me to facebook and warn me that you are coming. We hope that everyone will come and hang out; as you can see by the picture it’s going to be a good time.
A few weeks ago we created a post that showed a few shots from what I believe will be our most popular Fstoppers video yet. I am currently editing the video and I hope to have it finished some time next week. Until then I thought it would be fun for you guys to critique my favorite shot from the shoot and then when the video launches we can see if your opinions change. Please visit the new critique section of our forum here and let the bashing begin.
Recently I have been meeting random people who are Fstoppers readers. Sometimes they are professional photographers, sometimes they don’t own anything more than a point and shoot camera. It got me wondering… who is our average reader (or in our case, watcher)? Click on one of the options below and let’s find out!
One of our forum members “sajamil” created a cool thread on the Fstoppers forum. He asked us to critique the person in the post above you and then give a link to a website where the next poster will critique you. We would love for you to be a part of this FS community and join in on this fun photo critique by clicking here.
