Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Corporate headshots—they pay so well, and yet for many photographers, they represent the lowest form of photography. The work is repetitive, and yet involves some significant challenges in terms of managing quality and clients.
One of those challenges is managing light during office on-sites. You’ll rarely have the opportunity to scout locations beforehand, and yet you’ll have to bring the right equipment to be prepared for practically anything.
How would you like to have an infinite number of different backgrounds for your portraits? What if I told you that you can? In fact, it’s very likely that you already have this “infinite background machine” at home? Any ideas what it might be?
If you thought of a TV, you were right. In this video, Joe Edelman will tell you all the benefits of using a TV screen as your backdrop, and he’ll also teach you how to use it to make the most of it.
Your actor headshots, combined with your actor showreel, are the foundations of your actor profile. They are without shadow of a doubt a key marketing tool for your acting career. It’s important to prepare yourself in order to get the most out of your session.
If you are reading this it is because you have booked or you are thinking on booking a headshots session. In this article I’ll try to answer most of the common questions that we usually receive on how to prepare for your actor headshots session.
Photographers mainly use light tents for capturing product shots. But have you thought of fitting a human into a portable light tent? Konseen Photo Studio is a pop-up light tent that lets you photograph portraits. It’s foldable and comes with the built-in LED light, so you can set everything up without hassling with too much gear.
This has to be one of the silliest things I’ve seen for a while. Not the product itself, but how it’s being marketed. Iris claims to offer professional automated headshots in a booth for $20. Your $20 gets you a “photo session” including half a dozen shots, “helpful posing tips”, and one free high res digital file (the other 5 cost an extra $5 each).
When you watch the promo video, don’t worry, your speakers aren’t broken, there’s just no audio to go with it.
Sometimes even in the crappiest conditions you can make great photos. Although, I thought this was impossible in the part of the city where I live. However, this video from Jordan Matter helped me change my point of view. It shows you how to choose great locations for your headshots even when you’re limited to a very ugly neighborhood.
Jordan wanders around the neighborhood he says to be the ugliest in New York City (I don’t know which one it is, though). Only one block around his studio, he and his model Juliette Garrett managed to find five locations to make excellent portraits.
Working with minimal equipment can be a fun challenge. If you’re just starting out and have only limited gear, it can be your only choice. But what can you do to help make that one light produce more interesting results? Well, with the help of some flags and reflectors, you can do quite a bit.
This video from Morgan Cooper of Cooper Films shows us how it’s all set up and what task each component achieves. He is demonstrating the setup in relation to film, and he is using a rather expensive Arri SkyPanel LED light. But, the techniques can be used with much less expensive lights, such as the Aputure Amaran AL-HR672W. You can also apply the same principles to stills photography using a speedlight in a small softbox.
Really quick and dirty article for you this week on a handy little tip I found myself having to find for a solution to a problem.
I was doing a photoshoot with this subject when I noticed how awesome the decking looked, I decided that I wanted to get a shot of him led down on the decking but still wanted that jawline / chin to pop. He didn’t feel comfortable forcing his chin towards the camera while laying down due it being difficult as hell because your head is heavy!
One question that I see coming up daily in various photography groups on Facebook is “What’s the best portrait lens?”, and the simple truth is that there isn’t one. It depends on the camera system you’re using, the look you’re trying to achieve, and a bunch of other factors.
In this video, Joe Edelman shares his wisdom and offers some advice on choosing a lens that will give you the look you want in your portraits.
Originally from Ghana, photographer DextDee Livingstone had to travel all the way to China to discover his passion for shooting portraits, but we’re sure glad that he did.
Now back in Ghana, DIYP got in touch with DextDee to find out more about him, and to get some insight into how one particularly striking portrait of Doris was made.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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