Supermodel Coco Rocha and photographer Steven Sebring have teamed up to release an interactive book, The Study Of Pose, chronicling over 1000 poses captured from 100 different angles in an experimental 360 degree rig. It is an ambitious project that has resulted in a massive, and certainly quite heavy, book with over 2000 pages.
A sign at the flea market read "Creative Minds are Seldom Tidy." Do you ever feel this way? Do you ever wish you had a program that would help you organize your thoughts, your to-do's, your contacts, contracts, invoices even bank information? As a creative, often we get so caught up in our work that we forget to run our business like a business. Fortunately a new program recently launched that will help you get everything organized and automated in your business making more time for you to actually do the things you love.
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.
We’ve all been there, stuck with bad light and fresh out of ideas. I may spend up to an hour pre-lighting before a model or subject steps onto set, I work out the kinks and make sure everything is how it should be. But, despite my best efforts to make it right, every now and then I run out of time and have to wing it. We all have our “go to” lighting scenarios, but when you’re standing in unknown territory, keep the following tips in mind and you just might make it through the storm.
In a world filled with videos and tutorials featuring every yahoo with a camera telling us how-to setup, pose, light, and edit, it's hard to know what's just noise and what's worthy of our time. Fortunately, there's experienced instructors like Karl Taylor and Urs Recher who have teamed up to share their techniques in the latest How-To series from Broncolor.
Dirty backgrounds are something that most of us have had to deal with at some point. Sometimes, all we need to do is clean the background. Other times, it's actually better to do a full background replacement. The full replacement can be as subtle as eliminating shadows and sensor dust or something as drastic as changing the background color. In this tutorial, we go over an easy, but precise, way to do this.
Fotodiox just announced some very flat, very compact AC/battery powered LED edge lights for use in video productions. My experience with Fotodiox LEDs has been relatively positive, with strong power and excellent color consistency. The new lights, called FlapJacks look to be an excellent addition to your lighting arsenal.
If you find yourself asking, "what the hell is bullet-time?" You’ve probably never seen the matrix. Bullet-time is also known as adrenaline time or focus time. It’s been used as far back as 1985 in Accept’s Midnight Mover Video. It was taken one step further by the Matrix franchise utilizing CGI, stopping time, and rotating the camera perspective though a complex scene and starting back up again.
Throughout my career so far I have failed over and over again. Although it’s the successes that I'm remembered and known for, it’s the failures that are always the catalyst. At the end of the day, the key to success lies in failure. This improvisational beauty shoot was only a success because I set myself up to fail.
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).
Photographer Liora K and writer/model/activist Jes Baker teamed up to create The Expose Project, which aims to represent women of all shapes and sizes through portraiture. Consisting of three photoshoots featuring more than 150 women in total, the project celebrates the female body without shame, fear or judgment.
In this video, Karl Taylor and Urs Recher experiment with and demonstrate the uses of a Parabolic reflector. Using a model who is wearing white against a white background, they produce a number of portraits demonstrating how to shape the Para light to separate the model from the background. The versatility of this practice is quite astounding as the photographer is able to stand in front of the light and have it still perfectly illuminate the model and is a simple one light set up.
While Canon users have had this for some time, Nikon users have been waiting for a TTL remote to control their Profoto B1 flashes. Finally the Air Remote TTL-N has been announced and is available for pre-order on B&H for $395. Allowing TTL use up to 300 feet away or normal use at up to 1000 feet, these radio remotes also let you control the power output on multiple units at a time, building on the already fabulous Air system and opening it up to Nikon users with the B1.
Ever since I started diving into studio photography the term “V-Flat” has been a big mystery to me. Google and YouTube have been the quintessential resource for photography knowledge and for whatever reason there isn't much detailed information on how to construct a V-Flat or what purpose they actually serve. It took time to sift through the noise of nonsensical DIY fabrication and even more time to unfold the enigma of this studio essential.
As your photography archive grows, so does the need to handle and protect that data. What happens if your computer doesn’t boot, or an image file won’t open? What if your home or studio gets robbed, or worse, catches fire? What if your backup drive fails, or your laptop gets stolen? These are all questions I ask myself when planning my backup strategy.
