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How to balance your strobes with ambient light on location

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Many users of flash feel quite comfortable with it in the studio. The studio makes things fairly straightforward. You expose to eliminate all the ambient light and then you add it back where you want it with your strobes or speedlights. But when many newer flash users struggle when they get out on location, where you can’t or don’t want to completely kill the ambient light, but need to add flash.

In this video, Jay P Morgan at The Slanted Lens looks at how to mix strobes with the ambient light and how to balance them outdoors to achieve a good exposure.

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Understanding Light – Working with hard light

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Being able to look at an image and understand the lighting within it is not crucial to becoming a great photographer. But having the ability to look at another image you love and recognise the qualities that stand out to you will undoubtedly help you to become a better photographer far faster.

Last week we looked at how important being able to understand light can be and I also highlighted where many self-taught photographers struggle with this in today’s industry. If you missed last weeks article then I recommend you take a look to see some of the pitfalls self-taught photographers can struggle with as today’s article leads on from that.[Read More…]

How to make real beams of light stream through your shot with flash

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If there’s one thing in photography that never gets old, it’s light beams. Especially for interiors. You have the sun streaming through a window, lighting up the haze in the atmosphere and you get that nice beam of light that just seems to wrap everything in its warmth. But they’re difficult, if not impossible, to predict. In this video, Gavin Hoey shows us how we can make our own, any time we like, using flash.

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How to shoot high speed action photography with flash and a slow shutter

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With so many ways to be creative in photography, I get really excited with many ideas for a photograph. One area I find very interested is sports action photography, but with a twist. It’s great to capture that split-second moment and have that frame frozen, but I wanted to explore capturing the motion and freezing the action all in one go. Above you can watch the video of me using this technique with some karate students.

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Lights, shadow and highlight – How I lit this dramatic portrait

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Creating a dramatic portrait, moody ,emotional, edgy, dark, the subject/model, scene and clothing help portray all of those but one ingredient that remains constant to help achieve the drama is light, shadow and highlight, in this blog post I cover how I lit this image I will show you the position of the lights and what modifiers were used.

If you want to jump straight to the video explaining it all here you go.

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How to shoot those crazy dance floor light streak photos with flash

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I’ve lost track of the number of people who’ve asked me how to shoot this type of photo over the years. The basic concept is quite simple, although it can be difficult to wrap your head around if you’ve not used flash in such conditions before.

In this video, photographer Eric Floberg talks about how you can achieve this effect in-camera. While the principle is pretty straightforward, it’ll definitely take some practice.

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How to create a classic three-light beauty portrait lighting setup

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The three light setup has been a staple of portrait photographers for decades. There isn’t just one three light setup, though, there are several, with some slight variations, which can change the mood dramatically. In this photo, photographer Rob Hall used his three lights with various modifiers to create this portrait, and he’s shared with DIYP how he set them up in order to get it.

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Guide numbers explained – the maths behind the mystery

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When flashes first started to use Guide Numbers, they were a fairly reliable judgement of how one flashes power stacks up against another. But as flash technology has evolved, the humble Guide Number is often exploited as a marketing gimmick to make flashes sound a lot more powerful than they actually are.

In this video, Gerald Undone breaks down the maths behind the Guide Number. He explains exactly how it’s calculated, why it isn’t always an accurate measurement of power, and how you can make sense of it all.

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How to make & use a single DIY globe modifier for simple, stunning portraits

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It’s not often I get to shoot very simple, clean white light shots, but in a recent shoot the model asked if she could get some updated ‘Polaroids’. For those of you not familiar with the term when used in reference to a model shoot, it’s actually not the now obsolete and ludicrously expensive single-shot film, but a request for very basic portraits of the model for their agency. This ‘Polaroid’ term is a relic from the analogue film days and it essentially now means shots that are un-retouched and with the model wearing very little makeup.

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5 ways to use an umbrella for stunning portraits

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The umbrella is one of the most underrated modifiers in photography, I think. It’s one of the first that many of us usually encounter once we start working with speedlights or strobes, and Bowens even used to include umbrellas in their strobe kits.

But we often feel that we “outgrow” them, in favour of softboxes and beauty dishes. This video from photographer Miguel Quiles, however, demonstrates that we shouldn’t be so quick to discount umbrellas. He shows us five ways to use umbrellas to get some pretty amazing results.

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