Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
A few months ago, I gave a masterclass about how to create colorful portraits. One of the setups was a unique portrait with a model “trapped” inside a light-painted circle. I wanted to share how I created that portrait using a drill, a found garden hose, and a couple of KYU-6 LED lights.
You may hear me saying “don’t try this at home” a couple of times. If you do decide to defy me, please use soft materials like a garden hose and soft KYU-6 lights. (vs., say, a broomstick).
If there’s anything we can expect outside every day, all day, it’s the sunshine. I don’t know about you guys, but I haven’t seen a single cloud in over a month. When you want to take photos on hot summer days, early morning or late afternoon are certainly the best options. But sometimes you just can’t choose, and the harsh midday sun is the only lighting you’re left with.
The sweat stains you get from the scorching midday sun aren’t the only unflattering thing it gives you. It’s also the worst portrait lighting you can imagine. However, there are ways to work with it and still get some awesome portraits. And in this video from Adorama, Gavin Hoey will give you as many as five ways to do it.[Read More…]
There has been a lot written (and put onto video) over the years advocating the use of a single flash and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re often packed with wonderful advice that’s geared towards either educating those who’ve never used flash before or helping those with far too much gear to really limit themselves in order to master that most basic of techniques.
But once you’ve mastered lighting up your subject with a single flash, how do you go about adding another? Why would you even need to do so? Well, in this video, Gavin Hoey walks us through the potential problems of only using a single light that can only be overcome by adding another and offers up three different ways we can add a second flash to our setup in the studio.
I remember when I was studying photography that the most difficult assignment we were given was photographing shiny objects. I stupidly chose to photograph a pair of orchestral cymbals (ie. shiny all over with multiple angles). The next most difficult thing after that was probably the sunglasses. Those reflections are necessary, you don’t want to remove them altogether, but you do want them to enhance the product, not detract from it. And that’s just product photography! What happens when you’re using artificial light with a person wearing sunglasses? How do you avoid those cartoonish round white blobs?
In this video from Adorama, Gavin Hoey shows you exactly how to use reflections of light sources to your advantage when photographing sunglasses.
Shooting with a speedlight on camera is not something most of us would choose for portraits. But sometimes there’s no other choice, whether you don’t have the equipment to shoot off-camera or you don’t have enough room. So, Gavin Hoey comes to the rescue. In this video from Adorama, he’ll show you a few solutions for getting flattering light with your speedlight attached to your camera.
If you’re new to studio flash photography, you may be a little confused about how everything works. The types, sizes, and shapes of light modifiers, the light’s placement and distance from the subject… There’s a lot to learn, and in this article, we’ll focus on the distance of the flash from your subject. Does it really matter how far you place the light? Spoiler alert: it does. And in this great video from Adorama, Gavin Hoey will give you plenty of examples of how and why the flash distance affects your studio images.
There are plenty of cheap and easily available items that you can add to your shots and raise them to a whole new level. In this video from Adorama, photographer Gavin Hoey takes you to his studio to show you how to get three different portrait looks with a single gold background. He uses a $5 gold emergency blanket, so this is a pretty cheap, yet versatile trick to add some sparkle to your portraits.
Like every genre, portrait photography comes with a set of challenges. It gets even more challenging when you shoot on location. The background and the lighting may not be perfect, but you may also not be doing enough to make the best of them. In this video from Adorama, Gavin Hoey guides you through five steps that will take your portraits from “meh” to “wow!” He shows you what you can do and achieve amazing results with minimal equipment wherever you are.
Light has many properties that we need to learn if we want to control it and improve our photography. One of them is light falloff: the property of light to become less and less bright the further it travels from its source. Most of us know this feature as the Inverse Square Law, and it involves quite a lot of math. Well, at least too much for my taste.
If like me you also don’t really like math, you’ll love this video from Adorama. Photographer Gavin Hoey will show you what light fall off looks like in the real world, and his demonstration is visual rather than mathematical.
It’s the age-old question. If I’m shooting outdoors in bright conditions and I want a shallow depth of field with flash, should I go high speed sync or just stick an ND filter over my lens?
This time, it’s Gavin Hoey’s turn to try to answer the question. In this video, Gavin shoots a series of identical images using both 3 & 5-stop ND filters as well as the Godox AD400Pro strobe to see how the methods compare and what the advantages and disadvantage of each are.
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