Studio

Since I started doing makeup on most of my projects, I discovered that some very basic makeup tools could have helped me in a big way on previous shoots. Before learning about makeup I had absolutely no clue whatsoever on where or even how to apply some very simple cosmetic products. Looking back now, I see how much time I have lost in Photoshop not knowing these simple things. My goal with this article is not to teach you makeup from A-to-Z but rather to give you a few easy tips you or your models can use to diminish your postproduction time. Less time in front of the computer means more time behind your camera, and who does not want that?

In my opinion, mastering negative dodge and burn is the key to any beauty retouch. There are many steps and many hours that go into a great retouch, but negative dodge and burn is as essential, if not more so, than any of them. The term "negative dodge and burn" is one that I first heard from fellow retoucher Pratik Naik. It was the concept of having a specific process of removing distractions and smoothing tonal transitions through dodge and burn that was responsible for one of the biggest jumps in my own personal retouching game.

From St. Louis’ Bruton Stroube Studios comes the impressively cinematic tale of food preperation as it battles the elements within the kitchen. At just over a minute in length, “Cooking Up A Storm” manages to breathe an extraordinary amount of drama and depth into the culinary practice. This short film is testament to what a skilled production team and sound designer can bring to seemingly oridinary situations.

In Part 3 of the Dramatic Beauty Portrait Tutorial, we will finally get into the first main step of the skin retouching process. Basic skin retouching involves addressing subtle skin and texture issues on our portrait images. We will not only look at techniques for skin retouching in Photoshop, but also discuss the theory behind our decision process during the retouching process. I will also show optional techniques for those looking for quicker or alternative options during their portrait or beauty retouching. In case you missed it, during Part 1 of the tutorial we went over the lighting and shooting of our image and in Part 2 we looked at the "pre-editing" process.

Anyone who likes to bring a light or two on-location knows the frustration of wanting soft, controllable light that won't weigh you down or break the bank. The Westcott Apollo Orb is, without a doubt, one of my favorite lighting modifiers. As you'll see below, the Apollo Orb has just about every feature you could ask for in its unique, somewhat-brolly-box-style design, all at a modest price point.

Zach Arias has a new educational site called DEDPXL where him and a group of his friends write on their experiences, struggles, and successes. Commercial Photographer Sid Ceasar is among those writers. A few months ago he produced a video appearing as Sid "The Muppet" Ceasar and talks about inspiration, getting out and making new work, and why surrounding yourself with creative people is so important.

A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to shoot with the Broncolor Siros Monolights for the first time. Until now, my light of choice has been the Profoto D1. I, like many of you, have seen reviews on Broncolor's new monolight, and like many of you as well, have been a bit skeptical about their delve into competing with Profoto's D1 and B1 Series for the high-end monolight market. The Siros is available in two models, a 400W/s monolight and an 800W/s monolight, and for this shoot I used five Siros 800s. In this article I will give you my complete lighting setup, gear list, a retouching preview, and complete review of my experience with the Siros Monolight and BronControl app.

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.

Recently I went to New York City to do a week of headshots. As many of you know, part of my cinematic style involves shooting outdoors, but flying from Los Angeles to New York City to put this on meant I couldn’t rely on the weather. Figuring out how to translate the look and feel of my style indoors was the only way to make it a success. As I’ve had many questions about how to make this look happen inside for those that can’t always be outside, I decided to share my own experience with you.

In Part 1 of our Dramatic Beauty Portrait Tutorial, we looked at the lighting setup, gear breakdown, and shooting of our dramatic beauty shoot. In Part 2 of the tutorial we will now look at two different ways of exporting and preparing your image for retouching. The first method involves creating versions in Lightroom and exporting directly to Photoshop. The other method utilizes Adobe Camera Raw and the ability to make variations within Photoshop. I will also discuss the overall goal of our pre-edit stage.

Coolors is a fantastic new app that I stumbled across the other day. It is an incredibly easy and intuitive way to generate a beautiful 5 color palette for any situation. Primarily developed for designers it has instant appeal to us photographers. We deal with colors in most of our work and knowing how to match and complement effectively can make or break the images we create.

This is Part 1 in what will be an 8 part series for a dramatic beauty portrait. In the series of tutorials, we will go through everything from the gear used, to the lighting setups, and all the way through the complete retouching process. In Part 1, I will breakdown my gear list used for the shoot and I will thoroughly go through my lighting setup. In this video tutorial not only will you see the gear and setup, but also a behind the scenes look as me and my team go through hair, makeup, and shooting. The complete series of videos will be available here on Fstoppers and on my YouTube Channel.

In Part 1 of the "Start to Finish Fashion Editorial Retouching" tutorial, we looked at how to clean up a white background, how to liquefy clothing to achieve a better fit, and how to clone and heal out distracting elements in our editorial image. In Part 2 we will look at how to go about the more common and essential retouching steps including: skin retouching using dodge and burn, color toning, sharpening, and value adjustments. In this video, I take you through each step and give you insight into the "why" as well as the "how" of editorial retouching.

When you are shooting for magazine publication (outside of the medium format realm), one thing you always have to consider is the aspect ratio of your images. Paper sizes, in most cases, do not match up to image size, so there are crop variables you have to constantly keep in mind -- especially for editorials where there will be titles, typography or article copy on the page as well.

"A Book of Beards" is exactly what it sounds like. Dudes and huge gnarly beards documented in black and white by photographer and art director Justin James Muir. What started out as a simple idea, evolved into something much much bigger.

For the "Preservation" project, widely acclaimed Los Angeles-based photographer Blake Little covered a variety of models in 4,500 pounds of honey. You read that right. The idea for this shoot was originally inspired by a previous session where he depicted a man as a bear eating honey. He was startled by the way that the honey gave the appearance that the man was "preserved in amber" and by how it can "distort and amplify forms."

Fstoppers.com owner Lee Morris recently decided to shave his 5 month beard while having a little fun. Lee created 8 different "characters" with different lengths of facial hair and then released his unretouched images to the Fstoppers.com. These photographers took these files and pushed them to the max, creating 8 hilarious final images.

I will soon be releasing a start-to-finish retouching tutorial video here at Fstoppers on my most recent fashion editorial photoshoot. But before I do, I wanted to start warming our readers up with a complete gear list. In this article, I share with you everything I used on my shoot, the breakdown of costs, and where to find all the gear and extras: from the Profoto Strobe all the way down to the gaffer tape.

If you're into macro photography, Adaptalux could be your new best friend. The new Kickstarter project is aimed to solve a lot of the lighting issues macro photographers face and offer new ways to light objects in creative ways. The Adaptalux is a small device with five ports and five adjustable LED lighting arms with different color outputs. The device can be mounted on the camera itself for on-the-go outdoors shooting, or can be placed off-camera in more controlled environments.

What happens when one of the world’s foremost portrait photographers decides to turn to photograph still life paintings instead of people? There are no two ways about it - Jill Greenberg is fascinating. Her new work is beautiful, but there is also a clear artistic statement behind it. In this exclusive, we get to understand her direction and motivations behind "Paintings", her latest body of work.

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.

Elinchrom has been the brand of choice for years many Europeans and Australians photographers alike. They are cheaper than Profoto or Broncolor, offer a good range of modifiers and – unlike Paul C. Buff – have service centers outside of the USA. To many photographers they also have been a great way to get into studio photography before moving up to Broncolor or Profoto. With the Elinchrom ELC Pro HD, it seems like the brand wants to change that and offer a higher-end light.

The ELC Pro HD were developed by Elinchrom to:

[...]combine everything a...

There are shooters who spend 100's if not 1000's of dollars on courses to learn what you can learn in these two videos from DEDPXL. In them commercial, editorial photographer Zack Arias goes into great detail on how to light your subjects with a seamless white background set up. Learn everything from studio dimensions, light and model positioning, camera and light settings, post production, equipment use, taking the background from black to white and more tips and tricks then you can retain in one viewing.

Shooting on a clean white backdrop can be one of the more complex in-studio lighting setups around. Properly exposing for full lengths while giving your models room to work can require four or more extra lights and considerable amount of setup time. While taking the time to take care of the details is important for getting the perfect image and saving yourself hours of retouching on the back end, sometimes you just want to get a nice clean background without the hours of prep.

Stories like this make me shake my head. A public school in Detroit had a couple professional video studios built, about 10 years ago, outfitted with high-end cameras, switchers, lighting grids, and more. However, it seems that they forgot to build a curriculum to teach students how to use it. In this local news report, reporters and commnity members are again asking questions as to why no students have been allowed to use it, ever.

I will start this article off by saying that I am not a pet photographer. I am a portrait photographer that typically captures humans for magazines and ads. However, a couple years ago I started a pit bull charity (Not A Bully) and it unexpectedly led me to some jobs photographing rescue animals. If you're reading this, you already know that capturing animal portraits is a unique challenge in itself. I've done some of the difficult leg work for you and put together a list of tips to hopefully make your next in-studio pet portrait session much easier.

As a photographer, my skill set is constantly put to the test. In most cases, I’m handed an idea on a slab of wood and the mission is to hand that idea translated to a tangible artifact back to my client on a silver platter. It’s never an easy process, but it’s a part of my job.

London-based product photographer Sean Tucker is releasing a three-part video series on photographing large objects, such as chairs and sofas, in a studio setting. Here in part one, Tucker demonstrates how to set up your lighting and camera in order to achieve a great, clean image that will be easy to cut out in post-production for online product catalogs.

U.K. commercial photographer Karl Taylor takes us behind the scenes on a rather exciting and unique photo shoot where the goal is to create an animal portrait of a hawk during flight. There are so many variables to this concept that even with a trained bird of prey, Taylor still ran into a little bit of trouble at the beginning of the shoot.

For many, the 7’ parabolic umbrella seems like a one-trick pony. The textbook move of sandwiching the camera between the subject and the light for an edgy, high-key look is quickly growing old. In this video, commercial photographer Joel Grimes shows a different way of using the 7’ parabolic to create soft, high-key images best suited for beauty photography.

Have you ever wished that you could simply walk into your studio space and immediately have perfect lighting? Japanese architecture firm FT Architects has created a gorgeous photography studio which uses diffused skylights and windows to harness ambient light and do just that. This beautiful studio located in Kanagawa, Japan seems to be the first of its kind.

I guess I’ve always been different; I’ve never really yearned for a big studio space. As a freelance photographer, the majority of my clients require that I come to their location and shoot on-site. I have a strict organizational-mobile system to transport all my equipment which includes over 8 strobes, 2 scrims and a plethora of staging props and modifiers. I’m asked quite often about my studio and where I shoot all these incredible portraits and dramatic fashion editorials. The answer is easy; my living room.

Artificial lighting can be overwhelming, there are thousands of options to modify one single light source and there are dozens of companies that claim they have the best product and best bang for your buck. Regardless, photography equipment is expensive and I know I'd rather not waste money on a gimmick product when the same result could be achieved with just the right strobe placement or accessory.

When I first met Anna Rowley while filming Peter Hurley's Illuminating the Face tutorial, it was obviously clear that she had discovered the psychological power behind Peter's headshot directing skills. That day she shared with me her belief that there might be a direct correlation between how a person reacts in front of an intimating camera and how they perform in their workplace. Everything she told me was extremely interesting, so I was pleasantly surprised when Peter texted me this TEDx talk yesterday. I'm curious to hear what you guys think.

There's no doubt that assisting is, hands down, the best way to really learn how to shoot professionally. Set etiquette is one thing that will come with time, but equally important are the little things that all add up and that will make you the best second pair of hands to have on set, second to none -- if you pay attention to these things. While everyone has their preferences, it's always a good idea to research different ways to do the same thing, and to then intelligently choose the best way you can find. DSLRVideoShooter's Caleb Pike took the time to share a few more general tips that are not just good suggestions, but that are absolutely essential to being a good assistant if you want to keep coming back.

I have to say, it's been a blast seeing where Carli Davidson's passion for dogs has taken her, starting way back in 2012 when I first featured her on Fstoppers, and again last year with the release of her book Shake. Today marks the official release of her new book, Shake Puppies, and she somehow managed to create a book of cute that surpasses that of her original printed piece.

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.

After 17 years in the video game industry, Bert McLendon decided to change things up and become a full time portrait photographer. For the past few years he shot many interesting people and families in the studio and had great local success in Austin Texas. Earlier this year Bert decided to try a fun experiment in his spare time, and the result went viral. Check out his great and unique Caricature portraits and learn how he's creating them.

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.

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).

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.