DIYPhotography.net

If you go out on location alone you know that one of the more frustrating things are the walks back and from the car hauling gear. The other thing is that you have to reposition the lights yourself.

Photographer Joseph Philbert was inspired by Peter Nguyen with a clever way to solve one and ease on the other. He uses a golf cart both as a personal U-haul and a self contained mini studio with batteries, light stands, modifiers and wheels. Click to continue ›

Now, shooting underwater has a whole set of built-in challenges that we earth photographers don't really have to deal with on regular terms. The lack of breathable oxygen is one, mixing wet and electricity is another and the cream is that radio triggers don't really play nicely under water.

JP Danko from blurMEDIA Photography regularly shoots underwater so he had to come up with a solution that will both keep the strobes dry and just as important make them pop. Got to hand it to JP. He made a pretty smart rig (and I am not talking about the ducky float his assistant/wife uses to boom some light from above, which is simple yet genius). Click to continue ›

If you are using multiple strobes as a strobank (yes, strobank is a word) you may have stumbled on the issue of triggering. Triggering one strobe is one thing, but triggering a hole bank is a bit more challenging.

The naive way to do it is to try and use a trigger splitter, in a similar way to a headphone splitter. This will probably work with 2, maybe 3 strobes, but what if you have 6 strobes or more lined up? You should just split it into 6 right? wrong. Most triggers just not enough juice in them to close the circuit on more than two strobes. So for six strobes it would take 3 slaves. Click to continue ›

Kevin Good and the team at Weapons Of Mass Production put out an awesome primer on combining strobes and  continuous lighting.

Among the things they inspect is how DSLRs which use a mirror differ in sync speed from cameras that use electronic or leaf shutter like the Fuji X100. Hit the jump for the full video. Click to continue ›

Photographer Benjamin Von Wong recently shot a hair dressing competition. Unlike the usual portable beauty setup which is comprised of a softbox or octabox and a few cards to bounce lights into the models face.

Ben took an interesting approach and used a set of homemade florescent fixtures from office depot. Interestingly he placed them all vertically to create some interesting catch lights (yes, florescent tubes make interesting catch lights) . The light produces was good enough for shooting at F5.6 over 1/125 @ISO 400 quite shallow. Hit the jump for the BTS video. and click the bottom link for full info and lighting diagrams.

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If your baby has grown up and no longer needs a stroller, don't throw it away. Photographer Jim Davenport found a cool use for it replacing the conventional way to carry gear.

That may sound trivial, the stroller is capable of carrying a full small on the go studio. in one load.  As anyone who carried babies for long durations knows, It is way (WAY) easier to carry lots of gear in a stroller, rater then in on your back / hands.

Adn if that was not enough, the stroller (plust some velcro straps) doubles as quick on the go lightstand support, eliminating some of the need for sand bags.

Plus This is how Jim describes it:

"For the time being I am using velcro straps to connect the light stand to the stroller handle. The straps work pretty well but I do want to customize the stroller a little. My bag and tripod fit on the stroller, my softbox fits in the pocket on the back, and my box with remote releases, filters, etc., fits underneath so it work pretty well as it is'

If you have a photographer as significant other, this may be the card in your sleeve for convincing them to get that high-end stroller for your new born.

[Jogging Stroller 2 via Jim Davenport's photostream] Click to continue ›

Here is a neat idea. If you are shooting against the sun a lot you are probably have your favorite way of blocking the sun to avoid flare. Maybe a fancy lens hood, maybe a nasty flag or a Coroplast frame or maybe even your hand.

If you want to stay consistent and focus on creativity, the folks at Digital Camera World have a great idea for you - build your own super versatile flag.

Using a wire, a few clamps and some bolts you can build a tripod attachable flag that can move around and protect the lens from that killer flare.

[DIY Photography Hacks: build an anti-flare shield with wire and black card] Click to continue ›

Our How I Took I contest is quickly gaining critical mass with all the great tutorials being submitted by you guys. Got some great news on that, the folks at Rosco just chipped in with a LitePad Loop kit.

Raj Khepar submitted a cool tutorial about how he built a rain machine for one of his shoots.

While we have had a rain machine before, this one is quite different in the way it was built and in the final effect it creates.

Click to continue ›

One of the things with using traditional strobes and lightstands is the way that it limits you in space. This is why when I saw Christopher Park's photographs I was immediately intrigued by his lighting setup that uses raw florescent tubes.

Christopher uses an array of florescents connected together via a single wire that goes to the power source, so they can be be re-arranged to fit any lighting scheme. That also makes them very portable and moveable into any shape and configuration. Lastly, they only have one wire coming off one end rather than off each end of the light so they are easy to power. (And YES!, the catchlights are wicked!).

I am not going to show the lighting setups today. Instead, I am going to post a few more photographs at the end, see if you can reverse engineer the position of the lights.

Click to continue ›

Brian from Undefined Images made an interesting submission to our How I Took It contest. While we've had ringlights show stars catchlights before, we never did an alien look that incidentally also doubles as a huge ringlight. About the nuts and bolts for this one, you can see Tristan's post.