Peter Hurley's New Tutorial Illuminating The Face Is Now Available

It's been 3 years since Lee and I flew up to NYC and filmed The Art Behind The Headshot with Peter Hurley. Today we are so excited to announce our latest collaboration with arguably the best headshot photographer in the world. Our new tutorial has been named Illuminating The Face and it's finally available to the public. We're also offering an incredible discount

 

The Art Behind The Headshot was all about coaching your model to produce the best expression, and therefor image, possible. Peter is a master at turning the average Joe into a celebrity in front of his camera. Although this tutorial touched on lighting, it was not the focus.

 

Illuminating The Face leaves coaching behind and spends 4.5 hours going over every detail of lighting the human face. These 2 tutorials compliment each other perfectly and for this weekend only we are offering both for just $400 (a $200 savings).

 

To learn more about this new tutorial and purchase 1 or both head over to the Fstoppers Store.

Patrick Hall's picture

Patrick Hall is a founder of Fstoppers.com and a photographer based out of Charleston, South Carolina.

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47 Comments

Fstoppers Editor here - I started watching pieces of this last night...and I can honestly say that in a non biased statement that this video series is exceptional.

Very nice...

What if your a first time purchase, is there a discount for this?

The discount is a reward for those who have supported us in the past. This tutorial will be released on the 1st to the general public.

I wish I had supported you in the recent past if the flash disc had been still available and could be sold abroad.

Fear not, the next batch of 5000 is currently being made and should be on sale before the end of summer if not sooner. Instead of us dealing with all the packaging and shipping, we will now be able to take orders all over the world.

Great news Patrick !
Looking forward to ordering it.

Those catchlights give Patrick's eyes a distracting alien look.

Haha, snake eyes...

Crazy lizard eyes lol. Just proves the point of the video I guess, lighting is important.

Holly smokes you're right! Sort of like that horrible movie my wife made me watch few months ago... The Host? Anyway, loved the last PH video, looking forward to this one.

We film with two cameras and this was edited with just the telephoto angle which really accentuates those catch lights. Notice Lee's wider shots don't look so crazy ha

where is the link - for the tutorial?

It goes on sale Thursday.

What's the price?

$300 just like all the other products we have made so far.

Sneak PEEK.

Thanks for continuing the series. I know that you can apply some of the lessons to a wide range of subjects but it would be nice to see some samples with everyday people instead of models. I think it would be great to compare and contrast the two. It's much more difficult to photograph an older overweight male in a flattering way than it is a young chiseled model. Just a thought.

Yeah I totally agree. This was mainly marketed towards commercial photography which obviously requires the most attractive people that fit your specific genre. We do cover beauty lighting and how to create soft clean light that looks flattering on older people and most women. And if I'm not mistaken....our young chiseled model was actually closer to 40 years old :)

There are a lot of editorial and corporate photographers out there that don't get to choose their subjects :) I do plan on purchasing the video and have enjoyed the other two. Wish I could make it to Atlantis.

At the end of the day, light is light. If you find a lighting technique that produces beautiful light on your subject it shouldn't matter if they are young or old, hot or not, black or white....once you have great lighting hopefully Peter's tips from the first DVD will allow you to produce the best possible image of that person. No bit of lighting or coaching can ultimately change the way a person looks 100%....although Peter does come close.

I am definitly buying this!! Pure epicness!!!!!

With Creative Live setting a new standard of $99 for three 8 hour days of lighting classes.. I would hope that it would be in that ballpark.. I fear that it'll be another $250 - $300 tutorial.. I hope I'm wrong.. it looks awesome :-)

It is going to be $300. The way I look at it is CL gives you hours and hours of essentially unedited content that takes a very long time to digest. I absolutely love Chase and everyone at CL but their model is more like the Budweiser of content and what we hope to produce is something more home grown, concise, intimate, and well....in the vein of Fstoppers. Neither one is perfect for everyone but at the end of the day both types of education will pay off dividends if the photographers embrace the teachings and apply them to their own businesses.

Agree about Patrick Hall's value proposition of FStoppers vs CreativeLive. I'm a VIP CL member having watched tens of classes there, and even though I love the diversity of classes on CL, sometimes I dread having to filter through the excessive footage to get what I want out of it because they are mostly unedited knowledge dumps. I value a carefully edited video tutorial not just for the quality of training but for the time it saves me to watch the condensed, to-the-point class.

I think, it is a great video! But by just naming the 4 parts Chapter 1 through Chapter 4, it would take me a while, to find something specific, down the road. Maybe for the price, you guys could include a table of contents?

As for unedited CL: It is a different format: CL has viewer interaction, but they also break down the videos into shorter, well titled and easy to find segments.

Do I regret buying Peters video For $ 300.00; Absolutely not.
It is excellent, and if I had to do all these tests by myself, I might well spend one week just to do that.

I think CL is probably not a great comparison, but say compared to Kelby Training, which I can get month of training (including videos taught by Peter) and other equally talented instructors what value does this bring that makes it 12x better than Kelby One?

For someone starting getting into portraiture and whatnot, which video is recommended? This one? Or one of the other ones from this series?

It's really hard to say. Nothing has changed the way I photograph people more than Peter's first tutorial. Watching him change the way people's actual faces looked based on positioning and expression was mind blowing when we filmed that first tutorial. I use those techniques every single day.

This new tutorial is more about how to get interesting light on your subject's face. If you want a new bag of tricks or a new lighting style this is the tutorial to get. If you already have a lighting style you love for headshots then the Art Behind the Headshot is probably going to serve you better. Overall they are just two completely different skill sets; one is all about seeing and crafting light and the other is about making your subjects look confident and attractive using your directing skills.

Well that's not the answer I was looking for. Now I'm going to have to buy both. ;)

Thank you for taking the time to reply!

Ouch! I paid full price for the Art Behind The Headshot(and the Wedding DVD and the Architecture one). If I had only waited, I could have gotten the ABTH and the update to it(Lighting) for $400. Too bad this one isn't available to people who bought ABTH for $100 more...this encourages me to not buy and wait until it goes bargain basement later on :(

If you bought the first Hurley DVD recently well be happy to hook you up.

Hey, thanks for the offer, Lee! Appreciate the fast reply and offer, but unfortunately I purchased this one and all the others right when they came out. I appreciate the reply, though!

Hey, so are you saying that if I buy the ABTH today I'll get Lighting for $100?

Yep, that's the deal for the next few days :)

What's a sneak peak? :P

Dat hat....

I just finished watching the whole thing. Amazing work! It was great to see Peter hit the technical side REALLY hard. Lee and Patrick, wonderful camera work and editing as usual!

Now where do I get that air conditioning modifier! ;-)

Thanks Leif, if you don't mind, head over the main product page and leave us an unbiased review of what you thought of the tutorial.

Done!

I'd love to be able to afford this

Looks compelling, but as with anytime one of these tutorials come out at an outrageous price I just can't understand how the content is SOOOO much better than say a month of Kelby training that it is worth TWELVE times the price. Especially when Kelby Training features courses taught by the EXACT same teacher.

As with many of these hyper expensive tutorials you have priced the vast majority of your potential customers out of buying it.

I understand your last statement Ryan. At some stage I hope our older tutorials will reach a price that they become accessible to everyone (we have huge holiday sales on these btw).

As for the same teachers, Peter has appeared on Kelby several times but he has never taught the same material he does in his live Intensive Workshop or the Art Behind the Headshot. I know he has never taught anything like Illuminating the Face. Value is what you place on something yourself and luckily there are a ton of awesome educational avenues to explore if you are needing answers. For me, I would have EASILY bought my own wedding tutorial back when I was getting started. I wasted so much money trying to experiment and figure things out for myself. I know those who have purchased our tutorials have gotten a lot out of them but we realize they are not for everyone.

Yes, and I'm not saying the content is the same, in fact I imagine this content is AMAZING, but as a business person I have to look at value for return. On Kelby training as the example I would get wider breadth of knowledge taught by a wider breadth of teachers. (most of whom are equally amazing as Peter) for a fraction of the price.

OR

I could invest 12x more to get a more limited amount of knowledge taught by only a single teacher.

If I bought every $250+ video tutorial that looked compelling I'd go bankrupt. Most photographers face the same problem. There is a reason Kelby's prices are so much lower. It is because they know a crap ton more sales of a lower priced, high value, product can ultimately be more profitable and that has allowed them to become the dominant photo teaching resource in the industry.

I'm not saying Peter's teaching isn't valuable but in a way I feel you are devaluing profit by overpricing it.

Main reason why i got this tutorial is the style of coaching Peter implemented, not just in this tutorial, but in his previous ones as well. He has the kind of teaching charisma that most photographers out there doesn't have

And then you realize that Zack Arias gives you all of this information for $75

I know Zack personally and his teaching style is really great. That being said, his whole teaching style is based on One Light. That's it; super simple. This goes through 1 - 6 lights that are way more complicated than what is in Zack's material. I have no idea what his production costs were but we spend a lot of time and money on our tutorials and everyone involved needs to get paid back for that hard work. Obviously that can make up a huge difference too.

It just comes down to a marketing and price point issue. There are no name people selling DVDs in the BH store for $19.99 that cover studio lighting and there are tutorials that are over $500 a copy by some of the most successful photographers in the business. It is very similar as buying a Kia vs buying a Lexus....both are reliable cars but they cater towards a different market.