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.
How to get three different looks with a single $5 gold background
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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.
Follow these five steps to instantly improve your location portraits
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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.
Check out this math-free visual explanation of light falloff
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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.
High Speed Sync vs Neutral Density – Does it really matter which you use?
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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.
Follow these seven tips and you’ll never shoot a blurry portrait again
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Sharpness is one of the things most of us want to get right when taking photos. But alas, there are so many things that can mess up our plans. In this video from Adorama, Gavin Hoey will share seven great tips that will help you overcome the obstacles and get tack sharp portraits every time.
How to turn your single light into a multi-light setup… sort of
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If you don’t own several strobes or simply don’t feel like making complicated lighting setups, you can use just one light and still get professional shots. In fact, you can turn this single light into two, three or even more lights. Well – kind of. It’s pretty simple, but you’ll need some Photoshop magic. In this video from Adorama, Gavin Hoey will show you how.
How to create spooky Halloween lighting in a small home studio
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Halloween is just around the corner and you may want to shoot some spooky portraits in your home studio. I know I do! In this video from Adorama, Gavin Hoey will show you how to make a lighting setup and get some spo-o-o-oky portraits even if you shoot in a tiny home studio.
How and why you might want to use High Speed Sync flash in the studio
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High speed sync flash is typically associated with shooting outdoors. You’re in the bright light, and you need to take your shutter past your camera’s sync speed in order to overcome the bright outdoors and bring it under control. High speed sync lets you keep using flash beyond these speeds. But there are times when you might want to use them indoors, too.
In this video, Gavin Hoey shows us why we might want to use high speed sync in the studio or other indoor settings and how to use it to get the shots we want.
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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