Fine art portraits often evoke a sense of emotion and tell a story through careful composition, lighting, and posing. While achieving this style might seem complex, it can be done with minimal equipment, even in a small home studio. Let's explore how you can create stunning fine art portraits using just a single light, a backdrop, and some basic modifiers.

Shooting product photography can either be a tedious task or it can be a fun and rewarding one. Likewise, looking at product photographs can either be boring or it can enlightening. Using gels to modify the light in your product photographs can be an easy way to add some energy to your images.

Elinchrom has a pretty wide range of lights on offer, but their newest edition fills a gap in their lineup that users will be happy to see.

When it comes to artificial lighting, while technical skills are critical, even more important is learning to light scenes in service of the narrative rather than conspicuous lighting for its own sake. This great video demonstrates that concept and offers five useful steps to put you on the path to success.

Sometimes, whether because of location, logistics, or timing, you'll want to mimic the look of natural light using strobes. This quick and fun video will show you how to recreate the look of a setting sun using nothing more than a single speedlight.

Flash photography can be tricky when you're just starting out, and it’s easy to make a few common mistakes without even realizing it. If you're new to using a flash, there are a few things you need to get right from the beginning to improve your results.

Beauty dishes are a traditional choice for a lot of portraiture work, but parabolic reflectors have seen an uptick in popularity in the last few years. Which is better for your work? This awesome video overview takes a quite in-depth look at a variety of different modifiers and the sort of results you can expect from them to help you decide which is right for your style and work.

There are rare occasions when I need a lightweight lighting setup for on-location portraits. I have several kits pre-packed for this sort of thing—Nikon flashes with radio triggers, Flashpoint portable strobes, and once in a while, LED panels.

It didn't take long for artists to realize they could literally paint with light once photography came around... but light painting was certainly popularized by Picasso. While you might find some painting specific subjects by hand, others have found endless variation in more geometric creations. Spirographs, even if you don't know them by name, are everywhere (but are mostly used as designs on wedding invitations). While people have been light painting them into their images for quite some time now, the process isn't always clear. Thankfully, Jason D. Page gives some great tips on how to set up a spirograph shot through his Light Painting Photography Vimeo channel.

Recently Caleb Pike demonstrated an old trick with new tech, and it’s eye opening how much lighting one can cram into a tiny space these days.

In this week's lighting breakdown, I'll show you the setup I used for this editorial beauty shoot that let me create an angelic mood and make the most of the model's fantastic skin.

When it comes to studio lighting, you might think that you need powerful monolights or pack and head systems, but you can accomplish quite a bit with speedlights. This great video tutorial will show you how to do just that using affordable and easy-to-use speedlights.

Learning flash can feel daunting, but once you get the basics down, you will find that you can tackle a much wider range of creative needs. One of those fundamental skills is balancing flash and natural light, and this excellent video tutorial will show you the ins and out of doing that to create a compelling portrait.

The Westcott SkyLux LED is a studio light that offers lots of power in LED form, meaning no heat. It's a versatile light that can work for both photos and video, and today only, you can get it for half off.

Telling a story doesn’t stop at your subject in photography; everything in an image gives the viewer context clues to build a narrative around. One of my favorite ways to facilitate interest and story in photography is incorporating color effect gels into the scene, but what are the best ways to use them and why?

Beauty lighting is a genre full of a range of nuance and subtlety, and one of the best ways to explore that is through the use of lighting modifiers. This excellent video will show the differences between a reflector, beauty dish, and scrim, along with a wide variety of sample images showing their uses.

Every year Crankworx holds a Mountain bike event in Whistler, Canada that is a combination of downhill, slope-style and enduro competitions. They also host the Deep Summer Photo Challenge, where they put six photographers head to head, with the challenge to build a slide show that showcases mountain bike culture within Whistler. Watch this behind the scenes from Laurence Crossman Emms, as he explains the thought process behind his slide show that later becomes the viewers’ favorite.

It’s one of my favorite photography tools: the simple colored gel. Not only can it improve the color balance of your image, it can dramatically boost your visual impact when used to add touches of color to your shot.

In this short video from Crimson Engine, cinematographer and director Rubidium Wu takes you step by step through how he lights his closeups for video.

San Francisco based commercial and sports photographer, Alexis Cuarezma, has just announced he is launching a YouTube channel with 100 videos on photography. He'll be discussing topics such as lighting, working with models, and taking full advantages of your locations.

There are numerous articles that are discussing the advantages and disadvantages of hot lights and LEDs. Knowing these, I want to share my opinion from a practical standpoint.

Strobe lighting can seem quite daunting for the uninitiated, but once you get past any fear you might have and just dive into it, it really isn't that complicated. This straight-to-the-point introduction to strobe lighting is a great place to start.

Adorama TV is always bringing easy-to-understand tips and tricks to photographers with a plethora of education and tutorials. In the video, Gavin Hoey shows us how to adjust our lighting to where we are shooting our subject.

Kendrick Lamar's newest music video, "ELEMENT," was released this week. The video is directed by Jonas Lindstroem and The Little Homies (aka Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free) and takes Photographer Gordon Parks' iconic imagery and breathes new life via video. I'm not sure how many of our readers listen to Kendrick Lamar, but you should. He's brilliant, in both lyric and music video direction.

Light painting a car can be tricky to get right and difficult to know exactly what steps to take in camera. This video shows you the complete process, from garage space through to finished (and frankly brilliant) image.

Photographer Aaron Anderson has done it again, and this time, it’s with Paralympic gold medalist Noah Elliot. The collaboration was an incredible process, though Anderson admits that it might also possibly be one of the hardest productions they’ve worked on.

When we learn about lighting in portrait photography, we mostly focus on where to add light and how to shape it, but the presence of light is only made impactful by the mutual presence of shadows. Shadows can be a fantastic tool not just for contrast but to create a sense of drama or to tell a story with your images. This fantastic video tutorial will walk you through the process of lighting a portrait image with carefully crafted shadows to show you just how powerful they can be.

How do you position your artificial light sources?