Articles written by Patrick Hall

If you are a professional photographer, you probably remember a time when you wasted a lot of time working with talent that never produced an image that made it to your portfolio. Well a good friend of mine Drexina Nelson based out of Atlanta, Georgia has come up with an interesting solution: Power The Photoshoot! Drexina and Derek Blanks have teamed up with local makeup artists and hair stylists to offer aspiring models the chance to ramp up their portfolios with high quality professional images. How does this does apply to us photographers? Well Drexina and gang want to take PTP on the road, and they need other professional photographers willing to shoot two full days of paying clients! Check out the PTP website and feel free to contact the team about future Power the Photoshoot events as they travel across the country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRH_hLLzLhM<

Today we have something special for everyone. Back in April, superstar photographer Russell James allowed live cameras onto his set at Pier 59 Studios as he shot supermodel Adriana Lima. The concept is outstanding: Russell gives you a full all access view into the creative process and exposes all his techniques while shooting on his project Nomad Two Worlds. While this full photoshoot requires 7 full length videos, the concept is brilliantly simple: 1 tree, 1 light, and 1 model. You can't get any easier than that....that is if you can secure a supermodel! It also helps that Russell is shooting on Canon's top of the line camera too. Hope this spices up your Monday a little. <

David Jackson is a commercial photographer based out of Appleton, Wisconsin and this week he has released a personal project entitled "Circus". Dave puts a lot of effort into not only every detail of this shoot but also in explaining why it is important to shoot for yourself and not just for clients. You only book the types of jobs you already have in your portfolio and if you want to book something new down the road you really have to go out and shoot similar images for yourself first...and for free. This first video is a bit long and has few BTS clips but there is also a second less informative BTS video just for the shoot itself. Both videos are in the full post and if you want to see the final images check them out here. David also has a second post outlining in complete detail every element of the photoshoot which is really worth checking out here. Lots of videos, lots of posts, but a pretty cool concept.

Shear Chaos Salon Circus Shoot :: Technical Banter from David Jackson on Vimeo.

Okay this is just a little bit of weekend fun. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I always loved classic music videos. I didn't know it at the time, but Wayne Isham was one of my favorite directors. He did all the Bon Jovi videos, Metallica's Enter Sandman, worked with Motley Crue, Michael Jackson, Ricky Martin, 'N Sync, and Keith Urban. You pretty much couldn't turn on MTv in the 90s and not see one of his videos. Wayne was recently featured on Carson Daly's Last Call a few months ago and it was the first time I really got to hear from the artist himself. He seems like a laid back dude who is extremely passionate about his work and about music in general. So just for fun, here's a short video of Wayne talking about making the video that broke Bon Jovi's career and set them into super stardom. <

Nikon just announced a bunch of new gear and one of the new cameras is the new D7000. While I'm personally a little disappointed in it's lack of 720 60fps the camera does finally put 1080 video into a moderate Nikon body. All my wishful thinking aside, Chase Jarvis was approached by Nikon to shoot a short video showcasing the new video feature. Here is a little short behind the scenes promo video of Chase playing with the new camera and putting it through the ringer. Let's hope we get our 60fps on the D300s/D700 replacement so we can stop having to borrow Canon gear to shoot our videos :) Click the full post to see Chase's short film Benevolent Mischief and get on the Pre Order List first at Amazon.com or here at BHvideo.com <

It has come to our attention that one of the servers that hosts fstoppersforum.com has crashed and part of our database as been temporarily corrupt. We are working hard to resolve this problem and I apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused. If you have signed up for an account or posted to the forum in the last 10 days or so, sit tight and hopefully we can restore the database so everyone shows up again. All registrations and posts since Sept 22nd may not be showing up. We will let you know when everything has been resolved.

Chase Jarvis has started a really cool idea called Creative Live in which he gives back helpful information to other creative individuals. In this video Chase sits down with Jasmine Star who is one of the top wedding photographers in the business. I first came across Jasmine through David Jay and instantly fell in love with her. I love how they express their frustrations with living a typical 9 to 5 lifestyle and how professional photography allowed them to live the life they wanted to live. Just like them, I too went to school for something compeletely opposite of photography, and it was conversations like this that eventually lead me to change my career path to become the photographer I am today. Chase says it really well when he says, "There is no prescription for how you get to become a photographer." This video is not about fstoppers and shutterspeeds but rather about how to take control of your life and your passions and turn them into a business. I know wedding photography often gets a bad wrap but through wedding photography, I have been able to support myself financially every weekend and still have time to pursue other fields of photography during the week. Jasmine Star's story is about as good as it gets, and it's inspiring to hear her share her success story with everyone so candidly. I hope you guys enjoy this video as much as I have and I'm only half way through it! <

As most of you know, Lee and I decided to close the voting of the BTS Video Contest because of some fishy voting patterns we saw the day before voting was to end. Collectively, we decided that the best thing to do was to pause the voting until we could investigate the suspicious votes. Unfortunately both Lee and I were out of the country and could not look into the issue until last week. What we found was no one was actually cheating. After talking to the creators of the top 4 most popular videos, we all came to a fair compromise: we would open the contest voting for an additional 4 days and change the poll so voting remained hidden. You can watch the top 10 videos and cast your vote HERE if you have not already done so. All previous votes are still valid and part of this contest. The whole idea behind this contest was to have the Fstoppers readers vote on what video they though was the most instructional and innovative. We clearly said that if we found users creating multiple accounts then their video would be disqualified. What we found was some of our readers are just better and campaigning for votes than others and having your friends vote for you was never against the rules. So again, we think the most fair solution is to allow a few more days for voting. To be eligible to vote, you still have to have 3 posts after being registered for 24 hours. I personally hate that this voting experience wasn't as smooth as we had planned, and we definitely want to get a camera in the hands of the winner. Good luck to everyone and feel free to use facebook, twitter, and even the good ol telephone if you want to drive votes to your video. Thanks again to everyone who participated in our first ever contest and be sure to check out the monthly contests over at www.fstoppersforum.com

With a bunch of hurricanes heading our way, I figured it might be fun to show everyone that rainy days do not mean you cannot still pick up your camera. Jim Reed has made a career out of extreme weather photography and has some pretty wild videos to document his craft. Some may call it a craft and others may just call it being out of your mind but either way it puts a smile on my face. Click the full post to watch Jim run straight up into a tornado. <