We all love getting our hands dirty with studio lighting equipment. Here is everything you'll need to get a studio going. All the modifiers are DIYed so mark the next few weekends as taken. Click each image to get to the relevant project page.

DIY Beauty Dish

A Beauty Dish is a flash modifier used commonly in fashion
photography. It has a great combination of soft light and fast light fall
off. When you look at it closely, however, you find out that it is
nothing more than a terracotta bowl and a plastic jar (or a small car
mirror). By Mr. Embrey.

So you hacked yourself a gadget infinity flash radio slave and you are happy. You are shooting off camera flash and things work splendid. Actually, you really wanted a pair of pocketwizards, but it was 26 big ones Vs. 360, so it's GI. Actually they work quite well. They worked quite well for a long while now. Then a crisis. Flash wont fire. 

Camera clicks, but flash won't fire. Darn! It was working just a second ago. What could have gone wrong? (Or in the words that the guys from the internet service hear 1000 times a day - I did not touch it.)

Here are three things to check before giving up on your cactus remotes. Click to continue ›

My gift to you readers for DIYP 3rd Year Aniversarry - 43 Photography Hacks, Mods And DIY Projects. (And some shameless self promotion)

Light Modifiers

1. Homemade Speedlite "Snoot"

2. The Best Softbox Ever

3. Using A Cooling Honeycomb As A DIY Gridspot

4. The DIY Speed Strap

5. The DIY Speed Strap - Accessories And Samples

6. Kimel’s Pop Up Flash Soft Box Diffuser

7. Drinking Beer - Out! Snooting - In!

8. Striplight and Softbox

9. Gel Holder for Flash

10. V Cards

Click to continue ›

As you probably noticed, there is a certain background setup I've grown to like in the last few weeks.

It is a setup that produces a nice circle in the background. You can see it in the gridspot article, My Ode to PSU and the shot I took to be the icon of the Babies series. You can also see it used on a large scale portrait here.

Click to continue ›

Welcome to this multi-part series of articles on Exploring Small Strobes by Yanik Chauvin from Yanik’s Photo School.

In part 1 on Exploring Small strobes, I looked at why using flash guns instead of the built-in flash and studio strobes. Today, I’ll be going through the importance of using your speedlight off camera.

So, we already know that direct flash from your built-in flash gives unflattering results, to say the least. Using your speedlight in the same way won’t change much. I did mention that you can redirect the light by rotating the head of your flash gun and bouncing the light off ceilings and walls but you’re still very limited in your creativity. So what’s a photographer to do? I’ll tell you. Get that speedlight off your camera to unleash its full potential!

Click to continue ›

What Is Short Light?

Short light is type of studio lighting setup, where the face side which is further from the camera gets the main light. see the diagram for details. In this type of lighting setup, the side of the face which is toward the camera gets less light then the side facing away form the camera. The effect you get when using this lighting setup is a thin face, this is why it is good to photograph fat (or chubby) people with a short light setup. Click to continue ›