Many new photographers hold a lot of excitement and fear inside of them waiting to be unleashed the moment they receive a call to do their first big photoshoot or ad campaign. For talented automotive photographer John Zhang, this was no different when he received a call from one of Land Rover USA's ad agencies recently. He has been nice enough to share his entire experience from the first client call to executing the shoot itself. There is a lot to learn from Zhang and his photoshoot, read on below!

The creation of a successful fashion image is often a team effort. Aside from the model and the photographer, the contributions of a talented creative team can elevate your fashion photography from good to great. In this article, we will review the key members of a creative team, and how you can cultivate a reliable crew.

High-speed sync has been around for quite some time now, and has mostly been limited to speedlights. With Profoto’s recent adoption of the technology into its B1 and B2 Series lighting systems, they are signaling a change that has the potential to bring some much needed relief to the strobist community. This signal hopefully means the beginning of the end of flash sync limitations with DSLR cameras.

PRO.edu has released its newest tutorial, "The Complete Guide to Product Photography and Retouching." This in-depth tutorial features over 20 hours of content on shooting and retouching, taught by Tony Roslund. The tutorial is currently available and being sold with a $25-off early-bird discount, this week only. Use the promo code 25OFF to recieve the discount at checkout. RGG brings us a curriculum based approach to teaching photography with 55 Pre-production, 11 Photo Shoot, and 11 Retouching tutorial videos.

Many of you know about my headshot work, but one of the other major areas of my business is photography for hotels, also known as hospitality photography. Hospitality photography often requires a jack-of-all-trades. I frequently shoot food, cocktails, headshots, mock weddings, and work with models for lifestyle shots. Then add to all that the architectural elements and details of the interior and exterior of the property and you have a shoot that requires quite a bit of different types of gear. When you add it all up, sometimes I’m flying a few hundred pounds worth of gear with me. As I was traveling recently, I thought it was a good time to write up an article about flying and traveling with your gear, and the best way you can minimize the cost of moving it all.

When working with models, photographers often expect someone with perfect skin and a great physique. In reality, this is not always the case. Some models have no idea how to get ready for a shoot, and that can be really annoying -- especially in post production, as it might add a lot of retouching time!

One of those most important parts of any portrait sessions is what happens after the shoot is over. In the last part of this series I want to talk a bit about the end of your photo session, and how you can ensure you have a happy client that will not only come back for more but will tell their friends how awesome the experience was. Almost every day I get a call from someone asking me to advertise on Google. I simply reply “no thank you” as I don’t feel that Google can compete with word of mouth. As I have mentioned in first part of this series, word of mouth is one of the most powerful advertising weapons you have, with the ability to grow your business exponentially. This will be a bit different for everyone, but I think you can take this and apply it to any type of photography session you do.

One of the most intimidating things to learn when it comes to lighting is how to choose the right light modifiers. There are countless umbrellas, softboxes, octaboxes, stripboxes, and beauty dishes offered. All these contraptions help shape the way light spreads in different ways, and the appearance of the people and objects we photograph will be affected by this. The decision can be crippling. Thankfully there is an easy way to choose, and it’s all about understanding the language of light.

As the old adage goes, it’s not the gear, it’s the photographer that takes a good photo. While this is generally true, is there something to be said about $20,000 worth of Broncolor lighting gear? I mean a flash of light is a flash of light, right? Or is it?

Last year at my workshop in the Bahamas, my students challenged me to photograph a hotel room in under five minutes. They then wanted to see how fast I could retouch it, and I've decided to do it again, this time capturing it on camera, to show everyone what is possible with only a few minutes on location, a bit of Photoshop knowledge, and of course a lot of practice in the art of previsualization!

Everything starts from nothing. Thousands dream of being full time photographers, but knowing how to start a business - and how to grow it - are really tricky parts of a complex equation. Emily Soto today celebrates 4 years of full time professional photography. In this exclusive interview, she shares insights on how she has grown her business, as well as the struggles, hardships and rewards she's encountered along the way. If you're curious about what it takes to make it as a successful photographer today, this might just provide the answers you've been looking for.

The human expression is, for me, the most powerful form of communication we have. We all remember the looks our moms and dads gave us when we did something wrong, or the look on the face of the person we love when we proposed. These looks are just a few of the powerful ways we can communicate with no words, and it’s this that is the holy grail in portrait photography, whether it be stills or video.

This week I wanted to share a few of the tools we commercial photographers use to create our tabletop images. Particularly the items used in photographing beverages. There's a lot of trial and error when it comes to this sort of photography, often times we find ourselves using things in ways far from their originally intended purpose. Having said that, there's a lot of things that have become kind-of standard practice in food/beverage photography, some of those items I'll share with you today.

We’ve studied how direction and angle can drastically change the quality of light produced from your umbrella. We have also seen examples about how distance can change the umbrella light falling on your subject.

Now it’s time to look at the big picture. Let’s take a peek at how our umbrella is actually producing light across the whole image, not just the subject that you chose. In Umbrellas 103, we’re going to study fall off, and compare the type of light produced by four different shoot thru and reflective umbrellas.

If you’ve ever wondered why you might use a giant umbrella instead of a small, collapsible model, this article is for you!

As a commercial photographer, I specialize in product, food, and architecture. One of the products we've been shooting a lot of lately is jewelry, specifically jewelry for catalog use. In my opinion, jewelry is one of the hardest things to photograph, and many photographers don't know where to start. Whenever we're tasked with photographing shiny, reflective, spherical objects, our studio sounds like a group of sailors on leave with all the profanity flying around (often times strung together to make complete sentences).

So it goes without saying that there are a ton of different ways to match skin tones across your subject or between images in Photoshop so it's often just a matter of picking the option that is most convenient or intuitive. Despite the wide array of choices, I seldom see people use the selective color adjustment layer for this task. The beauty of selective color is that it allows us to go off the numbers rather than intuition and achieve an accurate result in little time.

One of the most overlooked, yet most used items in a photographer's arsenal, is the grip kit. A grip kit isn't something most photographers set out to buy, build, or assemble, it's generally born from necessity. Over the years we find ourselves on jobs needing certain things that we don't have readily available and we end up improvising to get the job done. Usually we make a mental note of how we can be more prepared in the future, which often times leads to adding small "grip" items to our pack list. When we collect enough of these items, they typically make their way into some sort of crate, bag, or box also known as a grip kit.

Our DSLRs have confused us. We obssess over the wrong things. Sharpness at 400%; bokeh characteristics of lenses produced from what-must-surely-be prancing magical unicorns; high speed burst frame rates that make cameras sound like gatling guns; 4k resolution to shoot better cat videos; 100 auto focus points that still won’t focus on what we need them to; and noise performance at 400,000 ISO. Absolutely none of these will make your photographs better. Shooting film will though, here's why.

During our 2014 Fstoppers Workshops in the Bahamas students had the privilege of watching 10 successful photographers share their top photographic techniques. Commercial and celebrity portrait photographer Michael Grecco taught classes on environmental portraiture and sexy swimwear photography, so of course we thought it would be awesome to tag along as Michael explained some of the tips that make his portraits so unique.

Today I stumbled upon the incredible body painting work of Emma Hack and I started surfing the web for body painting projects. I ended up finding 13 totally unique body painting projects that I believe are worth sharing.

In photography - and in anything else, really - it seems as though when we first discover something new, whether it be a new camera, a new technique, and/or a new system of doing things, it’s fairly natural I think to want to use it all the time. When I first “discovered” photography, I immediately gravitated toward those photographers like Emily Soto, Zach Arias, Joey L, and Syl Arena.

In every business, and every industry, a decision has to be made as to what value a certain product or service holds and what the consumer should be charged. As Wedding photographers, we are often blasted with the stigma of over charging for what “seems” to be an easy and enjoyable job that takes only one day to complete. Obviously we know how false that is, but how do we logically and honestly figure out how to price ourselves?

In an instant, one can feel as though they are in another world. As a landscape photographer you have the power to transport someone in the blink of an eye and send them on a journey into your photography to see the incredible world we live in. Creating amazing landscapes goes far beyond just snapping photos using the HDR setting on an iPhone. Landscape photography can seem daunting, but after reading these secrets to landscape photography, there will be no excuse to why you can’t take mesmerizing landscapes yourself!