Lighting can be a major pain in the ass and that is especially the case if you're not a technical person, like me. After picking up the camera 7 years ago I am still constantly learning about the many different aspects of lighting.

Controlling the brightness of the background is one of the most fundamental techniques when it comes to artificial lighting. This helpful video will show you how to create a white background even when you're only shooting with one light.

One of the most useful pieces of lighting gear a studio photographer can have doesn't actually have a light in it. Check out how v-flats can help you shape your light in this great video.

One of the best things about window light is that you can find it almost anywhere. As winter approaches and chilly weather threatens to keep photo sessions indoors, photographers will face the choice of how to light their portraits. Strobes and flashes are a great option, but not all photographers own them. Almost everyone has access to a window though, and a window has plenty to offer any photographer who knows how to use it.

I have a lot of respect for photographers who solely focus on beauty imagery. It’s definitely a skillset that I’ve been honing over the past few years, but ultimately one that I’ve come to develop an appreciation for. However, beauty photography does not have to be terribly difficult. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create beautiful beauty lighting with a single studio strobe and a reflector.

Pye Jirsa of Lin & Jersa Photography is back again with another great tip on how to make fantastic images in less than stellar light. Pye explained in his last video how to create golden hour without the sun, and in this new video, he shows how to take an awesome "hero shot" in harsh sunlight using a single strobe (and an elephant, but let's focus on the light here).

You might someday find yourself working within the overall vision of someone else – like an editor, an art director or, in this case, a director of photography – when shooting on assignment for publications as big as Sports Illustrated. Limited time with your subject and being asked for simple lighting against a simple background isn’t uncommon in this industry. So how would you go about getting the type of photographs your employer wants plus creating a dramatically lit and colored set for yourself?

Finland-based commercial photographer Antti Karppinen shares what he thinks are the "7 Most Common Studio Portrait Light Mistakes" and how to fix them. Barring any creative differences, these are pretty good rules of thumb.

As a continuation of his “Laws of Light” video series, Jay P. Morgan of The Slanted Lens describes a variety of ways to light a simple white cube on a white background. This video demonstrates how changing the placement of a single light can effectively emphasize the three-dimensional aspect of the cube and create separation between the cube and the background.

The portable strobe wars are not over yet. Yongnuo is going after its own China based competition with its new pocket strobe, the YN200.

In this informative video from Jay P. Morgan of The Slanted Lens, Jay goes back to the basics to show off the principles of light, and how they affect a sphere. Whenever a light is added to a subject, five things happen, and this video explores what is created, and how to control it, which ultimately will help you to craft your final image in a photo or video.

Beauty photography is something that I have become drawn to over time. Setting a mood, imagining a makeup style, and finding or even creating props to fill the frame with my model’s face is something I came to love more than anything else. In any genre of photography, I feel like it is important to develop a style that is recognizable. May that be retouching, posing, lighting, or something else, if people can tell you took the picture it means you have developed a signature style. For my beauty work I wanted to create a signature lighting setup that would be easy to recreate wherever I would go, no matter the condition or the place the shoot would take place in. Here is how I created it and how you can recreate it as well to make it your own.

When you're first starting out with artificial lighting, it can feel a bit like trying to speak French in Russian. In between the modifiers, the types of light, and their placement, each setup is a puzzle. This helpful video will describe the main types of lights you'll have in a studio setup and how they relate to each other.

It’s always important to stop and smell the photos – but what happens when your stop is at night, in complete darkness without any lights to help you out? You improvise. There are a few things you can do to help you compensate for lack of proper lighting equipment.

In photography, we are always looking for the best lighting for our subject, but when we don’t have the ability to choose the location or need to create interesting and dramatic lighting on the go, we need to be able to use the light we bring with us. This involves starting at the fundamentals and learning how to balance your flash and the ambient outdoor lighting.

When starting out in photography, almost everyone makes mistakes. Here are 10 mistakes when it comes to using strobes and continuous lights.

ND filters are fantastic pieces of kit for a number of applications, but there is a powerful use for them that sometimes gets overlooked through misconceptions. In this video, see visual examples of exactly what an ND filter can do for you.

Last week we released our portable light modifier The Fstoppers Flashdisc to the general public through Amazon. While the success of our first ever physical product has been huge, a lot of people have been asking for example images shot with this useful small softbox. Today I am going to break down a simple beauty shot you might see in a magazine that was shot entirely with 4 speedlights and 3 Flashdisc light modifiers.

Benjamin Von Wong has always been known for his elaborate, fantasy-like photo shoots. However, recreating the fairy tales that he had grown up watching took time, patience, luck, and most of all, a lot of help. These jaw-dropping photographs are bound to generate the customary "Is this Photoshopped?" question. Yet as usual, Von Wong's incredible scenes are all created in-camera, and he goes on to tell us how he pulled off a photo shoot 20 years in the making.

When I first started out using speedlights for flash photography, there weren’t many options aside from Canon and Nikon. As a result, I’ve amassed a large collection of Speedlights (and Speedlites), but now that I also shoot mirrorless bodies, are my SB-700s and 600EX-RTs any good?

Recently announced at the head of WPPI a couple weeks ago, was the Profoto B2 strobe system. The unit, small in comparison of its competitors, was arguably the most exciting product announcement this year at the popular photography convention. However, the burning question everyone has been asking is… is 250Ws enough for on location work like Profoto suggests?

Though we normally think of Photoshop as the place for complex edits, in recent iterations, Lightroom has become a tremendously capable and surprisingly intricate program. As such, there are some features and capabilities you might not be aware of. This excellent video tutorial will show you seven such features and tips and how to use them to make your landscape photo edits more efficient and improve your overall image quality.

You can improve your photography dramatically by merely practicing a little product photography. And no, you don’t have to be a product photographer to benefit from this practice. Portrait, architecture, macro, and even landscape photographers can all benefit from a little product photography practice.

If you are new to the world of artificial lighting, it can sometimes feel like trying to learn a foreign language. It is really worth taking the time to learn it, though, as it will open up creative opportunities that simply are not possible otherwise and make you a far more versatile photographer. This excellent video tutorial will show you essential off-camera flash gear and some helpful basic tips to get you off and running.

Matt over at DIY Perks, a Youtube channel dedicated to electronic based DIY projects, made a tutorial on how to build a 1000w equivalent liquid cooled LED light. The best part is it's daylight balanced at 5600k so perfect for simulating a sunny day or Window light when the sun just won't cooperate.

Swimwear Photography with Joey Wright Behind The Scenes continues today with Episode 2. In last weeks episode you were able to see our journey from the US down to Curacao. In this episode we finally begin filming lessons with Joey for this swimwear photography tutorial.